New startup could automate reoccurring presentations
Slide Form Founder, James Horey is stepping into his second startup venture, after Reviewbox was acquired in 2021.
“I love spending hours copying and pasting data into my presentations every month,” says no one.
Despite James Horey becoming adept at creating presentations, the inevitable copy-and-paste of data, graphs, and slides hindered his efficiency. And he’s not alone.
“I’m not overly passionate about presentations. My enthusiasm is more tied toward asking the question, ‘Is this something that technology can be doing?'” Horey explained.
This question sparked his initial idea for Slide Form, as he experienced the pain point and observed the challenges faced by professional services teams in crafting repetitive presentations.
Horey aimed to address this pain point by automating the presentation creation process. He unveiled Slide Form and its technologies on the public stage of the 2023 KTech Pulse Technology Summit, organized by the Knoxville Technology Council (read teknovation.biz article).
Slide Form streamlines the process by extracting data from Excel (or a similar program) and automatically transferring it into a polished PowerPoint or slideshow presentation. Horey said the software caters to a specific job position.
“My initial approach was to appeal to professional service teams and customer success teams that send out monthly quarterly reports,” he shared.
However, through deeper customer discovery, Horey discovered new potential customers and markets worth exploring.
“One of the first customers that contacted us was a digital and social media marketing agency sending monthly analytics reports to their clients,” he shared. “And that’s one of the great lessons of entrepreneurship—no matter how smart you are or how long you’ve been around, there are always surprises.”
Horey, a two-time founder, established Reviewbox in 2016—a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to assist companies in monitoring product reviews on major eCommerce sites like Amazon and Walmart. In 2021, consumer intelligence company Talkwalker acquired Reviewbox (read teknovation.biz article).
Drawing on his experience with Reviewbox, Horey navigates his second venture with a new set of eyes.
“The first time I had anxiety about whether I was doing enough, was I doing too little, was I doing too much, or wasting too much time in one area,” Horey said.
Now, he approaches his second startup with a more assured perspective.
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