ppt.ir, fresh blood in the body of a business with a history
PPT It is a website for sharing PowerPoint files. this Startup , has started its activity since 2010 and during this time, many people of the society, especially those who have dealt with “presentation”, especially students, have come to this site and benefited from its services. What aroused Ecomotive’s curiosity about it were the developments we have witnessed in its structure and services.
Developments that indicate the change in the audience of this website and show that its main audience has changed from students to business people. Follow the interview of Ecomotive team with Mohammad Reza Mir, director of PPT.IR website:
How was PPT.IR created? Why was it forgotten for a long time?
PPT.IR started working in 1990 and a team was working on it until 1992. The company that created .PPT.IR allowed people to Ideas to work on their own and provided support for the development of these ideas. Easier to say, a function close to accelerator had today’s The atmosphere of the company was created in such a way that other interesting ideas were proposed in the company and some members of the PPT.IR team preferred to join these new ideas.
The reason that facilitated this separation was the lack of formation of the presentation space in those years; It means that what PPT.IR offered was not yet raised as a need or that few people felt this need.
Due to the separation of the team members, from 1993 to October 1996, the PPT.IR website remained as it was and there was no one to take it forward. Many of the site’s facilities, such as registration and uploading, had also encountered problems, which left a bad experience for users. Nevertheless, PPT.IR was superior to its Iranian competitors in terms of various indicators such as Alexa rank.
What made you decide to start this business?
I was also active in the same group. Of course, I was mostly engaged in research and content work. After some time, I felt that its research and content works do not have the necessary impact in society. This is why I decided to advance my activities in the form of a Business I continued and selected PPT.IR from among the available options.
What services did PPT.IR provide in its initial version?
Its purpose was that people could share their PowerPoints on this site. The website was designed to convert PowerPoints into images so that audiences could more easily view, compare, rate, and comment on them. It can be said that it did not have complex features and was mostly used as a reference. Despite the large expenses it incurred in the first three years of its operation, no specific income plan had been prepared for it.
How successful was this initial version in attracting audiences?
With all its weaknesses, a database of more than 8,000 PowerPoints was created on the site. In the meantime, people were uploading other things such as photos and videos, which the system considered as PowerPoint. With this account, we can say that we had 5500 PowerPoints in practice. Currently, we have about 30,000 PowerPoints, of which more than 8,000 have been placed on the site, and this number is increasing day by day. About 6,000 templates have been collected, of which about 3,000 have been selected and can be used to create a professional PowerPoint.
What changes have you made since you came in?
We wrote the site from scratch. I think the audience of the site has also changed. The audience of the site in the previous version was mostly students; But in the new version, we have tried to design it in such a way that the audience is more than businesses Startup be The reason was that we felt that the second strata are more suitable for implementing our income plan.
Of course, our services are still provided to students and other groups, and in fact, this wide range of contacts allows us to have more flexibility in designing and implementing our business and generating income through it.
What is your current revenue model?
Currently, we have defined several different ways to generate income. For example, one of our income models is to prepare presentation files for organizations and businesses. Of course, we also do this with other software besides PowerPoint, such as Prezi. Another plan of our income is the discussion of advertisements, which can be placed at the beginning of each PowerPoint before displaying that PowerPoint, in the panel, main page, sidebar or other parts of the site.
People can choose a specific category according to their advertising goals, so that their ads will be displayed in PowerPoint related to the same category. Of course, there are other ways of income that will be added over time.
Do people who decide to share their files earn money?
Anyone can upload their PowerPoint to PPT.IR and sell it. It can even act in such a way that it publishes a number of slides of its choice for free and restricts access to the rest to payment. Currently, everything that is obtained from the sale of these files will be allocated to its owner, that is, the person who uploaded it, and PPT.IR does not take any fees under the title of fees, etc.
Now you don’t see a PowerPoint that covers a general topic like sales in 400 slides, but topics are detailed to a level like sales strategy that is summarized in 20 slides. For any topic you search in PPT, you will find different PowerPoints that complement each other thematically. Mohammad Reza Mir
What startups are your competitors?
If we want to consider Iranian sites, I must say that we have no competitors. There are sites that offer almost the same service; But if you check, you will see that they have not been active for a long time. For example, there was a site that could be our competitor; But according to the 5-month observation we made, we noticed that not a single file was added to their site during this period.
The rest are the same and have no activity. If we want to define a competitor for ourselves, definitely SlideShare We consider it as a competitor. We do not claim to be its global competitor; But we have the capacity to compete with it in attracting Persian speaking audiences.
People – both those who are fluent in English and those who are not – don’t have the patience and time to translate; Therefore, providing a Persian service creates a good advantage for these people.
We have another fundamental difference that creates a good advantage; as all slide are converted to HTML instead of images. This feature makes all the slides placed on our site easily indexed by search engines such as Google and facilitates access to them.
Another advantage of us is the sale of PowerPoint, which due to the restrictions that Iranians face, the sale of slides through SlideShare They face problems.
Slides usually have a supporting content that is not present in the presentation itself. Don’t you think it creates a problem for the audience to understand?
Some time ago, I was reading an analytical article about SlideShare users, in which it was mentioned that among these slides, users showed more interest in shorter slides, i.e. those that have 7 or 8 pages of content. This shows that PowerPoints should be relatively short in order not to bore people. Of course, it cannot be said that the content of a long PowerPoint is not necessarily useful, but not all of it is useful for the audience.
Now you don’t see a PowerPoint that covers a general topic like sales in 400 slides, but topics are detailed to a level like sales strategy that is summarized in 20 slides. For any topic you search in PPT, you will find different PowerPoints that complement each other thematically.
We are planning to add a section to the site to discuss supporting documents so that the content of each PowerPoint is available to the audience along with the original PowerPoint. In addition, we have foreseen the possibility of adding sound to the slide to create a kind of presentation experience for it.
What is your strategy to attract the audience?
One of our ideas is to create a content chain; It means that we can cover other content presentation formats. Another solution, which I think is attractive, is to maneuver on the topic of PowerPoint sales, which can attract a wide audience due to the economic benefits that exist in it.
Are you active in social networks?
The most important networks in which we want to operate are LinkedIn and Twitter. Telegram was one of our options, of course, considering the situation that happened to him, we may choose another messenger. We believe that PPT.IR should not only be provided through the site and this can be done through other platforms such as IPTV or mobile applications. By no means, our ultimate goal is that the audience communicates with us only through the site, and for this, we explore every option that exists.
Have you attracted capital?
No, according to the consultations we took, it was decided that “Bootstrap» Let’s move the work forward; Because the site model is mostly B2C and it is possible to provide the required capital through end users.
How is your new team?
2 people are technical staff, 1 person is responsible for communication with customers and 4 people are also working on content production SEO do; But depending on the amount of work we have at each stage, this number may change. Currently, we are following up some of the work in Tehran and part of the team is also based in Hamedan. So far, good cooperation has been formed in the team and we have had a growing trend. One of the most important things we experienced at PPT.IR was the cooperation with people in the city.
The human resources in the cities may not have enough skills at the beginning of the work; But they have the necessary talent for value creation and it is enough to trust them. I feel that if this happens and the resources that are concentrated in Tehran go towards these talents, the situation of work and entrepreneurship in the cities will completely change.
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