[tptacek]

Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A success.

"Technical" team member isn't a "founder".

They're in photo sharing and clearly following in Pinterest's footsteps.

Yet, took the time to build an extremely well-designed, intricate, graphical investment pitch in HTML.

Not sure if that's an antipattern or not.

Certainly, an equivalently beautiful presentation aimed at prospective users of the site would be unquestionably valuable.

[_b8r0]

> Team has no apparent prior company operations experience, let alone M&A success.

The advisors do have M&A experience, and that may well be why they have them. Two of the team founded a company called Moxy, so they'll have some operations experience. Not everyone needs it to start up and an investor should look at the details, not the flashy site.

> "Technical" team member isn't a "founder".

I'm not aware that this is a requirement for a successful business. Indeed, there are plenty of businesses where the technical people aren't founders that do just fine.

I'd worry less about the design than the numbers. For me, I wouldn't say it was well designed because of it's intricacy. It's not intuitive, things were inconsistent (do I scroll or click, or both?) and some areas just seemed to be blank (at least for me).

[tptacek]

I promise: no snark intended with this question, but I don't know a better way to ask it: does starting a design shop count as company operations experience in startupland?

Totally prepared for the answer to be "yes". And clearly there are design shops that have become serious companies, with growth trajectories, quarterly and yearly revenue forecasts, employee turnover, the whole nine yards. Is Moxy one?

[_b8r0]

I totally see where you're coming from on this, but I think you're placing an awful lot of importance on things that might not be that important.

I'd say starting a design shop could count as company ops experience, but not everyone who starts a startup has experience. Indeed, people start up without experience all the time. From the looks of the presentation they have an MVP, have users and have burned through less money than they're asking for (although the details we don't know).

I don't know enough about Moxy to tell whether or not that's yes, but I would say it might not be wholly necessary and would be down to the investor to decide.

[joshu]

Actual angel here.

Ops is not that hard for a startup.

M&A? Build something people want and it will happen.

[drumdance]

At scale, I think running a creative servies business is much harder than a typical tech startup. Mapping billable hours to bodies, some of who you haven't even hired yet, is a difficult process that's hard to scale.

[_b8r0]

Actually what you're describing applies to any service company, including companies separately founded by Thomas and myself on different sides of the globe. Creative service businesses and tech startups are a bit like chalk and cheese, which perhaps is part of Thomas' argument (not wanting to put chalk or cheese in his mouth though). However, one thing is certain, the guys that are pushing out this company and looking for investment are at least doing something about it, and I think that's good enough for me.

[kuahyeow]

I'm hope this is just a pretty slide deck for public consumption, not really for "investors". e.g. that slide with visitors and uniques screams vanity metrics to me...

[tabbyjabby]

Firstly, I'm not sure how much of the pitch deck you actually absorbed. Much of what you said is not "factually" true.

Secondly, why would creating a well-designed pitch deck be an antipattern? They have 3 million plus uniques a month with a very healthy average time on site. It's not like they are ignoring their users and the growth of their company so that they can instead just waste their time crafting elaborate pitchdecks...

[tptacek]

It's totally possible, even likely, that my fast read of their investor presentation missed facts. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to point a couple of them out?

[tabbyjabby]

Sure.

The founder (Daniel) has been involved in a number of businesses. If you had read his description, even just glanced it at for more than a second, you would have seen a fairly long list of businesses with which he has been involved. He is the co-founder of visualize.me, the founder of Everyguyed (a men's publishing network), and the co-founder of a design agency, amongst other things. I can't speak to his experience with M&A, but it would seem unlikely that he would have a hand in running so many separate businesses without at least being exposed to some M&A experience.

As someone else pointed out, the advisors of the company also have M&A experience.

Also, Piccsy was founded at around the same time Pinterest was, so it's untrue to say that they are simply following in their footsteps.

[tptacek]

"visualize.me" is a spam site. "vizualize.me" (ow) looks interesting, but Eckler's name appears nowhere on the site I can find, nor in any news stories I could find about the company, which does have a web page listing its current staff and is clearly still operating (they have a Twitter account).

But this is getting nitpicky. You're right: I wrongly and thoughtlessly implied that they were a Pinterest derivative, and ignored the vizualize connection.

Thanks for catching that.

[lmkg]

If your first read of their presentation missed important facts, does that imply it's an ineffective presentation?

[rayval]

I agree the presentation is ineffective. On my read, anyway.

There is a logical sequence to the pitch but that is not reflected in the visual structure. The top horizontal menu keeps the "Problem" disjoint from the "Solution". The precursor to this pitch deck was the DressRush pitch (http://investors.dressrush.com/), which does a better job at showing the logical sequence of a pitch, from Intro to Team to Problem to Solution.

But even DressRush is missing a key mechanism: a simple Next arrow that cycles you through all the content. After all, we are only talking about 10 screens or so. There should be no need for fancy navigational mechanisms that get in the way.

Some of the screens get truncated at the bottom but show you an arrow on the right side. The user is torn between scrolling down or scrolling right. (Violating the UX mantra: "Don't make me think").

It almost seems like the Piccsy pitch is trying to get the user to meander aimlessly through the content. And in that respect it is successful. I went through the path I thought they wanted me to follow, but then when I skipped back I found I had missed some important charts and data.

The visual appearance is over-designed and over-fontified (a made-up word) at the expense of readability. Perhaps because it is at the end of a long day for me, but at this hour I don't want to puzzle out coy infographic-style design when looking for basic numbers. The journey is not the reward.

[tptacek]

It's a beautiful presentation. I'm jealous. We have products we're in the process of slow-launching; I'd absolutely pay to get a site like that.

Maybe the best way to put it is, skepticism over prospects of new internet site is inversely proportional to the quotient of (quality of application / quality of investor pitch).

And piccsy.com doesn't look bad at all! It's just, the denominator is so big...

[skyhook_mockups]

A pitch deck is all about gaining (and maintaining) attention right? Seems that if they don't have any of the prerequisites you mention then a Ridiculously Good Looking presentation like this is a good thing.

[tptacek]

Right, that's what I'm thinking, but then one wonders: does "Ridiculously Good Looking presentation" start serving as a negative signal?

[wheelerwj]

this is my concern. As a developer and a manager I am immediately put on guard by companies with flashy propaganda. My first thought is, "Do they go out of their way to make it look nice in order to cover up a mediocre product?"

But that's just my initial reactions. Sometimes it is true, sometimes it isn't.

[reason]

Off-topic, but you've been awfully critical and quick to judge as of late, Thomas. You've already shot this company down without seeing the product.

[tptacek]

Huh? The product is right there.

Honestly: I'm not qualified to judge the prospects of a photo sharing site. I mean that sincerely: I have no f'ing clue of whether a photo site is worth $1 or $1Bn.

I'm in the exact same place as 'tferris: as a company operator and likely future again-founder, I have a somewhat visceral reaction to overly intricate investor courting rituals.

It might be a totally reasonable response to say "You're crazy, this is going to be super effective, they did exactly the right thing here." Awesome! I'll have learned something new. Fire away!

[christofd]

alarms were going off when I read "pitch deck"...

[teyc]

I get the same visceral reaction. If anything, they are too broad and in a space where zipfs law rule supreme.