SlideMagic Blog

Building a product is slow, but steady going. I jotted down this list of the various hurdles and went through to get a useable product today:

• Design the UI: most of this was done for version 1.0 five years ago
• Understand the basics of Javascript (with 1990s Pascal to start from)
• Understand post 1990s programming concepts: objects, methods
• Get an environment up and running so that I actually could run a simple piece of code
• Find a way to get access to the data (presentations) version 1.0 was producing.
• Setup an environment that turns a program that says “Hello world” and turns it into a desktop app
• Figure out a way to scale text in a browser environment, preserving the exact proportions of design elements (resize your web page, this is not what most web pages need).
• Get github and multiple versions to work
• Build the first rendering engine that actually displays a chart: text boxes are easy, scaling images a bit trickier, data charts get nastier even
• Find a way to register clicks and make things editable: shapes, menus, in different context.
• Copy the rendering engine to a generic format (for thumb nails in story mode for example)
• Duplicate the app engine to enable multi-screen presenter mode (running 2 processes and a master process that talk to each other)
• Enabling on-screen editing of text, graphs, image dragging, image cropping, flipping
• Building the grid editing system (implementing my patent)
• Build the PowerPoint conversion
• Build the PDF conversion
• Build the image export
• Build the printing functionality
• Add automatic 16:9 to 4:3 and back conversion
• Add automatic dark/white background conversion (beyond simply changing the background color)
• Enable multiple windows (each window is a full copy of the render process) and coordinate settings between them
• Build user authentication: pro users get features others don’t have access to via a web server, involving password hashing and building a user database
• Build the first version of the online template database: search slide layouts inside the app, but pull data from the central server
• Hook up unsplash image search
• Hook up noun project icon search
• Create an auto-update mechanism that updates the desktop app in the background when new versions are released
• Get the mac app to run on windows as well
• Get certified with Microsoft and Apple so that people don’t receive scary warnings when installing the software
• Build the full-scale slide template server, integrating the PowerPoint-only content from the old one
• Get payments working
• Build the front end of the marketing web site and the template store
• Get PowerPoint conversion to work on the server as well
• Build the management console to manage slides, users, and the search algorithms

I just took the password wall off the SlideMagic 2.0 app, so everyone can have a look (www.slidemagic.com., you just need to create an account. Payment plans are working on the template store, which should also be reflected in the app. I am sure there are hidden bugs lurking, but I keep on pushing. Remember that I do not have a 24/7 support organisation up and running yet… Valentine’s Day 2020 is a memorable day already :-)

Photo by Cesira Alvarado on Unsplash

A quick update (things are a bit quiet on the blog this week).

While the SlideMagic app is my project that I can afford to take some time for to go through multiple beta iterations to get it right, the template bank is a much more straightforward business, I want to get it running on the new platform as soon as possible.

The key functions work: search a slide (search algorithm is still being improved), and you can download it in multiple formats. The “only” thing left to do is the payment infrastructure. I got the account management and download book keeping working which leaves me with one nice challenge: EU VAT accounting for digital downloads.

The EU put all kind of laws in place to get a cut of the profits that the internet giants are making over their head. That is all great, but in the process they created complicated accounting rules that also apply to me. I as a tiny startup need to have the same tracking in place as Spotify.

This is a technical challenge that will not move humanity forward (unlike the UI of my app, or the new slide search algorithms). But, I have to crack it. Hopefully in a week or so, my system accurately adds taxes (or not) depending on your country, as an individual, as a company, with valid (or invalid) EU VAT numbers, and generate reports for my own book keeping and refunding EU tax authorities at the press of a button. My accountant (a big international firm suggested I do this manually, I think there must be a smarter way to do this. Pfff.

I did not realise PowerPoint could do this: put captions or subtitles on your slide live, while you speak into a microphone. Instructions how to get this work can be found here.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

After putting the new site on my own server in the root of slidemagic.com, replacing squarespace, I got to see the amount of traffic my 10-year-plus blog is actually getting. First, I thought that I was under attack, but they all seem legitimate Google searches that keep on coming and coming.

Over the years, I have moved my blog across various platforms, and now I could see that the link conversion did not work very well, a huge amount of 404 / page not found errors. I let the server log run for 24 hours and by now have probably caught most errors with smart redirects. Let me know if you still encounter problems.

The logs also shows the ridiculous amount of automated hacking attempts. My site is not very high-profile (yet), but various IP addresses from the usual countries are constantly trying to find the Wordpress log in page (I am not using Wordpress) and other security leaks. Let’s I hope I did not leave a door open anywhere.

I am putting more protection in place at the moment, which might in turn result in short hick ups in the web site’s availability. Apologies for that, but hopefully it will prevent bigger problems in the future.

I put up my first thoughts of the pricing and business model for SlideMagic on the beta web site. The basic logic:

• A free tier that allows for a basic desktop app install and access to the free templates
• A pro tier with a yearly subscription to the desktop app including pro features (PowerPoint/PDF conversion, in-app template search), and access to the full template bank
• A day pass with 10 pro slide template layouts (online only, not from within the app)
• The beta tier (to which some of you have registered), 30 day access to the fully fledge app, without access to the pro template bank

The table below summarises things:

I am pondering how to treat independent consultants that sell decks with SlideMagic templates in them to their clients. I think I will follow the model that most paying stock photo sites use: a new paying client mains a new payed license. So a consultant can use her license to make slides for her own firm (pitching projects), but as soon as she uses SlideMagic on a paying project, she needs to expense a new SlideMagic license to the client.

What do you think? Fair, practical?

Back at McKinsey I had a grueling lifestyle: long hours and always feeling tired. Many years later, i think I put in the same amount of hours getting SlideMagic 2.0 up and running, but…. I am not feeling exhausted all the time.

The secret? Focus. No commute, no travel to (unnecessary) meetings, I can pretty much get 10-13 hours of productive time each day (6 on weekends).

Also it helps to focus on what you liking doing next: crack that difficult algorithm, make the site look better, do the accounting, it is all a different mindset that is not available on command. Being able to choose what to work on is great.

Work in progress.

Photo by Vladislav Muslakov on Unsplash

The migration of the site to the root url slidemagic.com worked. I took the opportunity to clean out a lot of old links and analytics scripts that were still hiding in the squarespace template. The only thing that is still running on squarespace is this blog and the HTML version of my book from a few years ago. Everything is now my own server.

I am thinking very hard about moving the last bits over from squarespace, the site has become slow and buggy over the past year. Maybe it is better to host it myself, with a more minimal format, without the big banner images and glitter that we do not need. The challenge is to migrate 10 years worth of posts across… We will see.

I am throwing around URLs over the weekend as I slowly position the new sever into place. Things might break, formatting might be strange. Work in progress…

Photo by sol on Unsplash

The diagram below is in typical SlideMagic style. While a professional designer can do better, the slide looks professional, everything lines up, has a clearly recognisable branding, and takes very little time to make.

I scribbled down this slide for myself, to see how to position the online template bank and the desktop app. This diagram is probably not the best way to start marketing SlideMagic, but it shows what I try to achieve for an “internal audience”. (And frequent blog readers probably fall in that category :-))

It took exactly 5 seconds to make the slide available in the template store and the app itself (you can find it here. I put it in the free tier for now, it is a good test case for the PowerPoint conversion quality, and the slides that the algorithm thinks that are related (still work in progress).