It's totally possible, even likely, that my fast read of their investor presentation missed facts. Perhaps you'd be kind enough to point a couple of them out?
I agree the presentation is ineffective. On my read, anyway.
There is a logical sequence to the pitch but that is not reflected in the visual structure. The top horizontal menu keeps the "Problem" disjoint from the "Solution". The precursor to this pitch deck was the DressRush pitch (http://investors.dressrush.com/), which does a better job at showing the logical sequence of a pitch, from Intro to Team to Problem to Solution.
But even DressRush is missing a key mechanism: a simple Next arrow that cycles you through all the content. After all, we are only talking about 10 screens or so. There should be no need for fancy navigational mechanisms that get in the way.
Some of the screens get truncated at the bottom but show you an arrow on the right side. The user is torn between scrolling down or scrolling right. (Violating the UX mantra: "Don't make me think").
It almost seems like the Piccsy pitch is trying to get the user to meander aimlessly through the content. And in that respect it is successful. I went through the path I thought they wanted me to follow, but then when I skipped back I found I had missed some important charts and data.
The visual appearance is over-designed and over-fontified (a made-up word) at the expense of readability. Perhaps because it is at the end of a long day for me, but at this hour I don't want to puzzle out coy infographic-style design when looking for basic numbers. The journey is not the reward.
It's a beautiful presentation. I'm jealous. We have products we're in the process of slow-launching; I'd absolutely pay to get a site like that.
Maybe the best way to put it is, skepticism over prospects of new internet site is inversely proportional to the quotient of (quality of application / quality of investor pitch).
And piccsy.com doesn't look bad at all! It's just, the denominator is so big...
The founder (Daniel) has been involved in a number of businesses. If you had read his description, even just glanced it at for more than a second, you would have seen a fairly long list of businesses with which he has been involved. He is the co-founder of visualize.me, the founder of Everyguyed (a men's publishing network), and the co-founder of a design agency, amongst other things. I can't speak to his experience with M&A, but it would seem unlikely that he would have a hand in running so many separate businesses without at least being exposed to some M&A experience.
As someone else pointed out, the advisors of the company also have M&A experience.
Also, Piccsy was founded at around the same time Pinterest was, so it's untrue to say that they are simply following in their footsteps.
"visualize.me" is a spam site. "vizualize.me" (ow) looks interesting, but Eckler's name appears nowhere on the site I can find, nor in any news stories I could find about the company, which does have a web page listing its current staff and is clearly still operating (they have a Twitter account).
But this is getting nitpicky. You're right: I wrongly and thoughtlessly implied that they were a Pinterest derivative, and ignored the vizualize connection.
