Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Who
Three businessmen with a professional background in consulting who launched their company Paragon Faction in 2013: Yannick Audet, President, Paul Bérard, Chief Financial Officer, and Yves Verrette, Chief Technology Officer. They built Decksign, a presentation tool that they want to be easy and quick to use.
Product
Their constant use of presentation tools has led them to various observations: Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides and Keynote “require significant effort for often average results”, they believe. Another observation: many presentations are made to meet the same needs, such as a marketing plan. “Why then start from a blank page each time?, launches Yannick Audet. We developed a model with recommendations of subjects to be treated, according to the field of activity. This allows you to think ahead about communication needs. We allow in a few minutes to have a presentation template. »
For the creators of Decksign, the effort must go into planning to save time. “We often build for nothing, notes Yannick Audet. American presentation expert Nancy Duarte says: if you have a presentation to make, the first thing is not to open the computer, but to take a notebook, a pencil and think about the message, the topics we want to deliver, to the audience, to the context. Currently, we build the first page, then the second, then we realize that we haven’t said everything on the first page… The final version will perhaps contain 20% of the pages created and the others will have been abandoned in progress of road. »
SCREENSHOT PROVIDED BY DECKSIGN
A view of the Decksign software interface
Innovation
Once launched, Decksign will be available through browsers, such as Google Chrome. “We built Decksign with a different approach: we start from the objectives, from the underlying communication needs to the presentation needs. We allow customers to make presentations that will avoid waste and effort. No one presents for fun, and people are generally not comfortable using presentation tools. We spend half our time doing low-end formatting, when we should be thinking about the strategic aspects, the problem. We fight with a box, spacing, formatting, fonts…”
The Decksign user is thus presented with a way to proceed in four steps (Plan, Build, Share, Manage – in English for the moment). “For each communication need, we have a model,” explains Yannick Audet. What topics do I need to cover? Afterwards, we propose an adequate presentation. It allows you to have a presentation template before having made the effort. Along the way, we can send what we have built to colleagues for comments. »
The more users there are, the more efficient Decksign will become, due to metadata analysis. “Their choices will become cues that tell us that a presentation theme is typically used in such a context, for example. That said, there are important distinctions between user data and user information in presentations. We will not fall into private and confidential information. »
To come up
Paragon plans to launch Decksign in the coming months. Its creators target both large companies and SMEs with the software which will be partly free. “The Share and Manage portions will be,” says Yannick Audet. It’s a way to make yourself known and gather intelligence to know people’s needs. The price range is not yet fixed. It won’t be $5 a month, but it won’t be $100 either. »
So far, “several million have been invested” in the adventure. Thirty investors supported the project. “We are not moving as fast as we would like, because to finance the project, we have to manage our consulting service business. Even if we are able to finance ourselves, there is a lack of funding. The pandemic has slowed down our activities. »
Yannick Audet relies on the success potential of his tool as a motivator. “About 1% of the global market represents revenues of more than 100 million,” he estimates. To win, you don’t need to dethrone PowerPoint. We just need to respond better to certain needs. »