SLYDS – Towards Effective Business Conversations
The power of presentation or speech is a timeworn tradition. Great leaders like Gandhi, Kennedy, Mandela have won hearts, moved crowds and lifted them up to their perspectives. And the practice has been maintained by the likes of Obama, Malala, Modi, etc.
But today’s corporate presentations lack that mantra. They overload the audience and are visually boring. However, SlydS is a unique startup that empower leaders to present their stories in the most powerful way, driving action through visual decks.
SlydS was incepted in the year 2013 by Pankaj, who realised his passion and identified the scope of aesthetically appealing presentations. He joined hands with Deepak and Roshan, his childhood friends, to break the monotony of corporate content.
“When we started, we faced challenges in identifying the right people for the team, which is crucial to our business. It’s not an automated process but involves lot of personal insights, understanding and intuitiveness from each of our Slydmakers. Thus, we went through a lot of hiring and firing in our initial days. Those who survived the test of time are still with us,” says Pankaj. He further adds how SlydS faced challenges in identifying and explaining the right pricing structure to their clients that include big corporates for their internal communication decks and reports, startups looking to raise funds through investment decks, sales people and leaders trying to broadcast their ideas.
The ideology behind SlydS is to understand how presentation is not just a tool but a core business communication medium, similar to E-mail. PowerPoint is a platform which has the right mix of creative and functional tools and is not being used up to its full potential by users worldwide. “Interacting with 500+ brands and completing 1100+ presentations in the last 2 years, we can now make presentations that can be dubbed as animated videos and one can’t believe them been done totally on PowerPoint. This gives us an edge as every time our client comes back we have an updated design methodology adapted to latest trends. Hence, we have excellent customer retention amplifying our CLV (Customer Lifetime Value),” says Roshan, who drives the creative process in SlydS. The team follows lean approach in their process and is open to accommodate customized requirements and offer dynamic pricing structure to meet the needs of their myriad clients.
Talking about competition Roshan adds that it is limited to few design agencies who are offering presentations as a part of their design services whereas SlydS is completely focused to providing professional presentation strategy, training and design. Then there are a few companies trying to automate the presentation process by building online tools that have minimal user effort and involvement. “What these people fail to understand is the compatibility issues, the dependency to install an extra software or to download the extra app is a habit that would take years to build. Rather they should try to perfect their presentation services and leverage technology to enhance and make life easier and seamless for users through their existing presentation tools,” says Deepak who also hints about SlydS going mobile in the coming year to keep in tune with the mobile revolution that is taking over the world. An innovation to look out for indeed!