Hi IH! I've been working…
https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pitchlift
Hi IH! I've been working on a project (www.pitchlift.co & https://www.indiehackers.com/product/pitchlift) for nearly two years and it's finally ready to open for business (hooray!) This is my first project launch and so would love to hear what you have found to be the best ways to do a launch. We're doing some Google Ads, and I thought that I would also launch on Product Hunt, though unsure the best way to do it. Any help would be appreciated!
I think the service is something that may be of interest to some of you as we provide pitch deck design and content improvement for startups looking to raise investment capital. So I would also love to hear the feedback on whether you would use this service.
Thanks in advance!
That sounds like a useful service and a reasonable price point. Nice work and good luck!
I’m curious as to what went into building this that made it take 2 years to launch. As what looks like a service business with no crazy underlying software, 2 years seems like a long time, but I’m sure I’m also being a bit naive. Genuinely curious. Otherwise, website looks solid and I’m sure there is a strong need for such a service.
It's a fair question :-) There have been a couple of main factors at play that meant we have taken longer to get to this point than is strictly necessary. While it's certainly a reasonably simple service business, we spent some time on thinking about services that we felt would be useful to startups with smaller budgets (that also complement the deck design service, which is obviously an important part of pitch deck success).
The result of that is the two review services we offer that enable a startup to improve their deck's content or financials (based on the result of the review) for a much smaller fee than traditional deck creation services. To help us refine the details, we worked with some investors to make sure that the final results that we provided were accurate and useful. After that we tested the review service with a few beta clients, and further improved the end results. Working with investors was a slow process as their turnaround times for feedback and advice were understandably longer than ours were to iterate!
The second factor was more on the admin side of setting up a new company, making sure we have good people ready in place to meet demand, getting the website and all the payment processes in place, etc. (as well as testing a bunch of those things).
July 2019 will mark the two-year anniversary of us deciding to start the company, and we were more or less ready to launch the services in September 2018, yet we spent the extra time until now revising and polishing to try and make sure that when we launched we would be be as ready as possible!
TL;DR, we spent a long time figuring out and testing a new type of pitch deck review service that we hope will be really useful to a lot of startups to complement the more traditional deck design service :-)
Thanks for the reply. That makes sense. With a niche like this, it seems taking the time to really dial down the focus is absolutely essential. Wish you the best!
@danielwebb4 congrats! we have a client who's been hounding us to help them with deck design, we just don't have the time. maybe you guys can help out there?
I see the $40/slide pricing -- I'm assuming that's for a human to actually make the slide at your end? how does that work with the 'self-service' side of the software?
excited for you!
Thanks, and sure, we would love to help out! Yes, the $40 per slide price is for a human (at this point, one of out two founders!) to design each slide. Not sure what you mean by 'self-service' software - there's no software involved except for the order process where we gather all the info about the deck and the needs of the startup and a few automated processes to sync everything together behind the scenes.
The main idea is simply to provide accessible starting prices and an easy order process so that there's a good option for startups who need a quality deck but don't have a massive budget.
Hope this helps!