Connect Interviews: Mitch Grasso, SlideRocket

Posted by John Pastor • January 19, 2009 • Printer-friendly • Feed • Share

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sliderocket lrg Connect Interviews: Mitch Grasso, SlideRocket

We came across SlideRocket, an online presentation tool after they won a Crunchie award two weeks ago in San Francisco after Macworld Expo. I thought it would be a great idea to interview Mitch Grasso, the CEO of the company, and here's what he had to say. Read the entire interview and enter our contest to win a 12-month Individual plan.

sliderocket sshot Connect Interviews: Mitch Grasso, SlideRocket

1. What influenced you to start SlideRocket and create a web-based presentation application?
Mike Lingle, my co-founder, had a previous company called Tonic Studios which made a desktop presentation application written in Macromedia Director that provided way better support for multimedia than PowerPoint and he had some success selling that to media companies so a big part of making presentation software for us was creating software that would give you a set of really professional tools and let you build stunning presentations the way that Adobe Photoshop lets you do pretty much anything you want to do with images. The other influence was Adobe Flex which had just come out and really enabled the kind of web application development that would make a professional web based product possible, without the usual less is more kind of compromises that seem to be inherent in a lot of web applications. I guess that's where the "rich" in RIA really comes from. For us it means that SlideRocket is tactile, very responsive, looks beautiful and performs superbly, as good as, if not better than a desktop app.

2. How long did it take to develop?
We released the private beta in March of 2008 and I'd been working on it for about 14 months at that point. Our public beta came out in September 2008, we launched our GA release to the public in November 2008 and we're getting some great buzz, got nominated for a Best Design award and have paid users signing up every day.

3. How many users of the service are there today? How many are signing up daily?
As a private company we don't disclose total users but we have an average of 300+ signups a day from all over the world. The nice thing about a web application is that you're instantly global and it's amazing how fast word of mouth can carry a good product experience / reputation.

4. Some customers may be worried about using web-based presentation applications in an offline environment, what makes SlideRocket different?
Most people we talk to seem to be very happy to have the option of accessing their SlideRocket presentation from any browser on Windows, Mac or Linux or from the SlideRocket Player on their desktop. We really want to let you access your presentations and assets in the way that's most convenient for you.

5. How can you assure potential customers that their slideshows are safe and securely hosted?
Presentation security has historically been a very serious problem and it seems like every other week we hear about a company's top secret PowerPoint deck being leaked to the public. The unfortunate reality is most people keep their presentations on their laptops which are stolen at an alarming rate (10,278 / week according to PC World), and suffer from hard drive failure or corruption more than manufacturers would have you believe (as much as 13% of all hard drives according to a Carnegie Mellon University study). Viruses attack regularly and without warning and employees leave or get headhunted away to competitors with your intellectual property on a thumb drive in their pocket or personal email account. User error (31% of all data loss according to IDC) and natural disasters also play a part.

SlideRocket solves for these issues. Your presentation files and assets are stored and backed up in the cloud. We let you control who has access to assets in your SlideRocket library as an individual or as a group and you can remove access at any time or disable a user account altogether. You can set a presentation password and decide who can fwd, print or even view your presentation in full screen mode. At the application level we require an authenticated username and password and at the file and database level we work with partners like Amazon Web Services and ThePlanet respectively to ensure your private data is kept private. All of these combine to ensure best of breed security for your presentations.

6. Where do you see SlideRocket in a year? In what ways can your product improve?
This time next year we'll have launched some pretty big new features. An offline editor that will let you create and edit presentations in disconnected mode then sync back to the cloud when you're next online. We'll have done some integrations with other SaaS applications for example a Salesforce.com app that will let you use SlideRocket as a custom lead generation / maturation and measurement tool. We'll have opened up our API and plug-in architecture to let the community develop functionality like new effects and transitions. We'll also have a much more robust marketplace of content and services where you can browse, buy and rapidly integrate elements like cartoons, fonts, audio files etc. as well as services from graphic designers or copy writers or speech coaches, really anything you need to help you make a great presentation. There are a few other things too but we're not talking about them publicly just yet. If you love SlideRocket today you're going to be blown away as we roll out some of our ideas in 2009.

7. What kind of limitations are there with web-based applications? Do you think these will be eliminated over time?
Web applications today are limited by bandwidth and reputation, the former because not everyone has a high speed Internet connection which is preferable and the latter because many early web applications created very basic versions of their desktop counterparts which made people feel like they were making a sacrifice. SlideRocket will have an offline version in 2009 that will let you work without any bandwidth at all and we have a very detailed product that gives you the best of both desktop performance and internet integration to provide real innovation in presentation software.

8. Are there any features in SlideRocket that set it apart from similar products like 280 Slides from 280 North?
You know we'd love Gartner to do a magic quadrant of online presentation providers because we think we'd be far to the top right of their curve and well beyond the offerings of our compteitors. SlideRocket takes a very holistic and integrated approach to presentations and enables you to quickly create amazing looking slides with professional authoring tools, manage them along with images, video, flash animations and audio in a library of shared assets, collaborate with your peers, conduct HD quality web meetings, share your presentations securely and measure usage statistics. We also have a marketplace of content and services that let you browse and buy a variety of different services to help you make great presentations. It's already integrated and available to you in the web browser of your choice and because we're new we have introductory pricing. Of course the best thing to do is just sign up for a free 30-day trial and see for yourself at SlideRocket.com.

SlideRocket Giveaway

We want you to experience the service for yourself for an entire year, so we're giving away a 12-month Individual Plan for SlideRocket. The process of entering the giveaway is simple, leave a comment below and we'll pick one of you at random on Friday, January 23rd at 4:00p Pacific Time. The best way to figure out if you've won is to subscribe to our RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.