SlideMagic Blog

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).

I ran into this slide (fragment) presented on an online course site the other day (I now digest tons of these to refresh my coding skills):

It shows a common problem in PowerPoint: you picked a nice theme colour (deep purple in this case) and you need variants of it. (This presenter figured out that too many colours makes your slide deck cluttered, hence SlideMagic only allows one :-) ).

The default model to make colour changes is to modify its brightness. It almost always work to make things darker, the other way around though can create a problem for very saturated colours. You don’t notice the saturation level at dark levels, but on brighter variants, that elegant purple becomes cute/bright pink.

The solution: change colour saturation as well as brightness. This post on my blog from 10 years ago (what?) describes it:

PowerPoint 2010 gives you the option of a spectrum of different shades of the same color. This is great to design charts with a consistent color scheme.

However, if your template contains colors that are highly saturated, the suggested lighter shades of your color will be too bright to use as neutral color nuances. Here is how you can fix it. (Click on the image for a larger picture.).

Create a new base color by reducing the saturation (in laymen’s speak: make it more grey). Open the color in your color template (format shape/fill/solid fill/color/more colors)Switch the color model from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, luminance).Reduce the (S)aturation value, while keeping all other variables the same.Use a lighter shade of this new base color insteadand save this as a new color in your color template.

Now and then I get people considering a career change asking me about life as a freelance consultant. “Isn’t that a very uncertain profession, when compared to someone in a permanent position?”

My answer: not really. Yes, you need to get your first clients/projects, but if you do good work, clients will refer you to other clients, and clients will come back. A person in a permanent position has one employer (who can go through reorganisations and other fun things you do not control), whereas you can hedge and spread the risk among multiple “employers”.

There are a number of things to consider though:

• The biggest one: do great work. As small independent business, you depend on word of mouth advertising. A beautiful website, massive SEO efforts, might get you the first inquiry, but then people want recommendations. You simply write off an unfortunate purchase of a $5 book that was not great, a 1-month consulting project is different. Most internet marketing has very low funnel rates, freelancers rely on 95% conversion.
• While the downside for a good freelancer is limited, the upside is probably limited as well. It is hard to scale a bespoke service business. You want to add a second person and not dilute your offering, that person probably needs to be as good as you, and as a result will need to be paid as well as you. Two times the revenue, two times the cost, the same profit. For my own presentation design business, I realised 1 employee (myself) was a great business model, and 50 probably is. But the role of making sure that 49 people have enough work and do it well, is a very different one from helping clients yourself. In short, as a freelancer, you are likely to pretty much the same thing in a few years from now as yo do today, albeit better and a bit faster. In a big corporation, you can go up the ladder and do different things every couple of years.
• There are things that freelancers often overlook in their pricing: pensions, disability insurance, etc. etc. All this protection that a regular employment position usually offers.

Some of the world’s major artists got popular because they documented their life and motivations for their work in letters (Van Gogh etc.). Maybe the same will happen with this blog, and my journey from helping 1 client at a time to get better presentations, to hopefully thousands/millions eventually.

So finally, finally, I got a tool in my hands that I wish I had 5 years ago already:

• Create slide layouts and variations super quickly
• All in a consistent format
• Some way to store and organise all the original files, PowerPoint conversions and slide image thumbs (in different formats)
• A way to tag, describe, and search slides, and also organise, slide, and dice this “meta data”

This was the “easy” part, but a required step to get on to the next phase. How do you actually best describe slides, what slides are related, what suggestions for other slides should you give a user.

My current setup is one big playground. The number of templates is now double that of the current paid Shopify store. I am changing things and experimenting with instant feedback (whether searches are relevant, how much time it takes to complete them.

For most content on the web, and documents in corporate databases, you can use a Google approach to slides: you get a dozen links or video thumbs, and a human eye can quickly go through the clutter and find that document she is looking for. For slide layouts, this is not good enough.

In the early 1990s at McKinsey, presentation design was actually document production. Hand-written sheets of paper would be entered into a computer by full time graphics designers. Each word, each line, each graph. Then the whole thing would be printed and bound in books.

I remember the final quality check of the Amsterdam office manager: holding the pages against a strong light to see whether the titles, footers, page numbers, and margins of the slides lined up. You were in trouble if they didn’t.

Getting these basics right is very hard in today’s PowerPoint, If you copy and paste slides between masters, the alignment of objects will be off. If you change screen sizes (from narrow to wide screen and back), things go all over the place. Or, if you use/buy other people’s templates, they won’t fit well in your company’s slide layout. This is not PowerPoint’s fault, any software that needs to give total design freedom to its users will have this side effect.

I went through this the hard way myself, as I am making the slides of my “old” template store compatible with the new format of SlideMagic 2.0. Hundreds of slides that require small corrections to get things to line up properly.

With SlideMagic, professional designers might complain about the lack of flexibility in layouts, the rest of us will be extremely happy with how easy it is to tweak templates, screen sizes, and copy slides between presentations.

Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash