He shared a little news, shedding light on the business opportunity he sees, whether Slideshare is seeking VC funding, and the team’s plans to develop social networking features and stoke participation among Slideshare’s motley community of users. Below is an edited IM transcript:
Fortt: You’re co-founder and CTO? How long have you been working on Slideshare?
Boutelle: We’ve been working on it for about a year. It’s our second product. Our first was MindCanvas, which was a rich survey software – sort of a cross between web games and surveys. So in total we’ve been going three years. The other two principals are Rashmi Sinha and Amit Ranjan.
Fortt: What made you decide that PowerPoint on the Web was an important opportunity, and what do you think the opportunity is? Some might argue it’s cool, but that there’s little added value in posting these presentations and allowing people to comment.
Boutelle: So we think the presentations are a hugely important category of user generated content. People work really hard on their presentations, and then give a talk and show it to 50 people and it’s over. After the talk, people always ask for the PowerPoint, and you always say you’ll give it. But it ends up being too much of a hassle. So our initial use case for this stuff was conferences. What we’re seeing, though, is that PowerPoint and other presentation formats provide the ability to create narratives and do user-generated multimedia that goes beyond traditional PowerPoint for a talk or business meeting. For example, lots of people are uploading photosets or stories or video game screen shots.
Fortt: I can definitely see that point. So it sounds like you see some benefits for business. How do you make people feel comfortable putting their business details on a service that lives on your servers? It even seems that some of the language in the user agreement suggests that the information can’t be protected once it’s on Slideshare.
Boutelle: That’s absolutely correct. We intend Slideshare for PUBLIC content.
Businesses have private documents, but they also have messages that they want to get out there. For example, describing the value proposition of a new product: companies pay tech evangelists to go around the country showing those slides to anyone who will listen. So we’re not interested in private meetings so much as in public influencing.
Fortt: But even those public messages often include details or ideas that they don’t feel comfortable completely losing control of. I think some people are spooked by the idea that once this PowerPoint slide is up there, people can do anything they want with it. Have you heard any of that feedback?
Boutelle: Well, we have noticed that some of the PowerPoints people upload are redacted: they have removed sales figures or projections or specific list prices for exactly the reason that you suggest. But one thing that we’ve also heard is that it’s valuable to speakers to be able to share their slides without sharing the source files.
Fortt: So maybe there’s a business opportunity for you or someone else to figure out how to build in permission levels, on top of a service that’s valuable for being completely open?
Boutelle: We’re absolutely looking at that right now. If you look at the site you can see their are the beginnings of a social network forming there already. So supporting more private sharing of documents is an obvious next step. The key is: we’re about asynchronous sharing of documents. We’re not about meetings. We’re about sharing files so other people can look at them on their own schedule.
Fortt: That makes a lot of sense. So tell me about growth: How are your user numbers looking, and how have they ramped? And what other metrics do you look at to measure progress?
Boutelle: So I can’t talk specific numbers, but I can tell you that we already have thousands and thousands of presentations and users.
Fortt: What can you tell me about the growth rates since you flipped the switch on the service?
Boutelle: Obviously, as a consumer site, we watch the traffic numbers very carefully. We’ve seen a doubling in traffic in the last two weeks.
Fortt: Any other numbers you pay particular attention to, like the number of people viewing any one presentation, other other data points that might suggest how viral the service is?
Boutelle: We are focused on improving the number of tags in the system, since it makes the content easier to find. And we’re also interested in growing the number of comments, making it a more social space. One thing we watch is the nationality of the users. It’s a really international site! We have a lot of Latin American users, Canadians, French and Germans. It’s definitely beyond the Bay Area!
Fortt: Those sound like things that demand an active user community. It seems like one of the big challenges of Web 2.0: Once you get users to a site or service, how do you get them to feel invested enough in it to connect their lives and contacts to it.
Boutelle: So one thing we see is that a lot of consultants, speakers, or other people who make living by having influence are using the site to market themselves. The people using our site fall into a couple of different categories:
1)People trying to market themselves or to have influence in a professional way with their peers
2)People who forward a lot of PowerPoints that they receive in email
So this second group is really young, very much the YouTube type of people. And they’ve been forwarding jokey PowerPoints to each other for years. Finally there’s a place on the Web where they can upload it and just forward links to their friends. So they are going a little nuts. I think that one side-effect of Slideshare will be that the e-mail providers like Google, MSN and Yahoo will save a lot of money and bandwidth!
Fortt: I’m sure they’re hoping that’s the case. So let’s talk business strategy: How do you make a business out of this? Advertising? Premium services? Or do you see this as a promising technology that will have the most value if it’s purchased and grouped with complementary apps?
Boutelle: Right now we’re in the “grow a big consumer site” mode. The site should be an attractive business proposition because the advertising on it is very targeted. There’s not much metadata associated with a video or a photo. But we have the entire text of the PowerPoint presentation, so we can deliver very targeted ads.
Fortt: You really see this as a consumer play, rather than a pro-sumer or professional play?
Boutelle: Since PowerPoint is such a standard business document format, we’re sure that there are business applications for our technology. But we want to build out the consumer site first and become known as the way that you share PowerPoint on the Web before we approach the business space.
Frankly I’m really surprised by the amount of amateur PowerPoint content that is out there, and I think that stuff, the sermons and the wedding speeches, are just as exciting as the sales proposals!
Fortt: How do you think you can differentiate yourself from the Zohoshows and Thumstacks of the world? What will determine who wins big?
Boutelle: OK, so we consider those companies complementary to us. They provide document authoring ability, something we don’t do at all. What we do is let people share the documents that they have authored. But one thing that we have as an advantage is that people’s habits change very slowly. Most of us have decades of experience at authoring documents with PowerPoint, and have already paid for a license for it. So it might take a while before we see mass migration to Web-based authoring, especially for presentations, which people are really particular about the aesthetic qualities.
Fortt: How do you feel about Google’s presence in the Web-based app space. Are you afraid they’ll eat your lunch, hoping they’ll buy you, or ignoring them completely?
Boutelle: We don’t think that much about Google and what it’s up to. … But they seem more interested in the document authoring part with Writely, Google Spreadsheets, et al.
Fortt: I guess another thing I wanted to ask about is your financial backing. How are you funded, and do you anticipate raising more capital?
Boutelle: We are our own angels so far. Our first product provides enough revenue to sustain our current development pace. So we don’t anticipate having to raise funding in the near future. But if we do, we don’t think it will be a problem.
Fortt: That’s sort of exciting. It seems like there’s a lot of venture capital on the table these days, but also a higher level of wariness about giving away too much equity and control.
Boutelle: That’s absolutely correct. I think it can be very dangerous to take too much money.
Fortt: Is that a perspective you gained through experience?
Boutelle: No, it’s just what I’ve observed. ;->
Fortt: One last request: Got some quirky data tidbit to share, like the city where you’re most popular or the most intriguing trend you’re seeing in your community?
Boutelle: OK, yeah. A couple. First, it’s interesting how big we are in Latin America. I have no idea why; no one on the team is Spanish-speaking, but the site is really popular there. The second is the large number of educators that are using the system. Teachers really love Slideshare. They upload their conference speeches but also their lessons, and we’ve had lots of questions about how to use Slideshare with course management systems like Moodle. So we think that Slideshare is an e-learning play as much as anything else, which was a surprise to us.
There’s also the Christian stuff, which surprised me. I didn’t know preachers use PowerPoint! But they do.
