Penxy: How the “Talking Slides” Team Entered the Market

Young entrepreneurs came up with a new way to record presentations automatically together with voice-over narration – something you might call “talking slides” or “talkie slides.” Vladimir Platov, the founder and CEO of the Penxy project, has told us how his company grew, how his team benefited from participation in GenerationS, and about his project’s first profit.

At one point, we realized that anyone wishing to make a professional recording of his or her own “performance,” had to pass through nine circles of post-production hell. That person would have to record sound separately, meticulously edit it to match the video exactly, recode everything into the desired release format, while taking into consideration a whole range of challenges and nuances. Every stage of this highly involved process requires the efforts of trained specialists and specialized professional-grade equipment. And if the author decides to update or modify the recording, he or she would have to go through nearly all of these stages over again.

So we decided to develop an easy-to-use mobile app that would address all these issues. We designed it to combine a one-step forward control, a mike for voice recording, a timer, fast-forward and rewind functions, as well as cloud storage for completed presentations. The concept of making a recording as a slide presentation with voice over was a side product originally, but it has become the core of our project. This is how “talkie slides” came about.

Our app automatically “memorizes” the narrator’s voice and slides, making a recording in the slide presentation with voice over format. The presentation author simply uploads his or her presentation to the system, would switch fro one slide to the next on a projector screen using the standard remote or a free mobile app, commenting on the slides.

Creating “talkie slides” is much cheaper than recording conventional video, as it does not require using expensive equipment and the premium-priced labor of video production professionals. In addition, the author has the capability to post the recordings online immediately after completing the delivery of a presentation. Our platform also makes it possible to go back to completed recordings and edit them instead of making them from scratch every time.

“Talkie slides” are also convenient for the end users – the viewers. A one-hour recording is 30 Megabytes on average, so even users on slow wireless connections and mobile devices can watch these presentations. Users can also move to the next slide with a single click to find their way through the presentation quickly and focus on the parts that matter.

We changed our target audience several times while working on the project. Our original focus was on independent experts, consultants, etc., then we focused on conference organizers, and now we are focusing on educational institutions providing professional and advanced training.

We became a Skolkovo resident in 2012, which enable us to make some useful connections in the market. In early 2013, we raised US$ 500,000 in seed investments from Prostor Capital. After that, we entered the GenerationS accelerator contest, which enabled us to remind investors of our presence, communicate with business partners, and hear fresh opinions on what we were doing.

We started making money only a few months ago. For example, in May 2014, we made a profit of RUB 50,000 (the equivalent of US$1,500). We are now starting the search for the next round of product optimization fro our target audience and scaling the business model we have identified. Our customers are private, non-governmental institutions, mostly for-profit business schools, universities, educational centers, professional associations and conferences, as well as independent consultants in experts based both in Russia and in the US. All of them realize that online training is a huge promising market. And they need an easy but efficient way to access this market without having to train educators or make substantial investments. “Talking slides” are a perfect solution for this. We are building a platform that would offer everyone a concise and convenient answer from key market experts to any professional question.

This article was originally published in a modified form online on Rusbase.vs