Feasibility Analysis. StoryStraight. StoryStraight Presentation Planning Software GET YOUR STORYSTRAIGHT. December 7, 2011

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1 StoryStraight 162 E 33 Street New York, NY Phone: andrew.dailey@stern.nyu.edu Feasibility Analysis StoryStraight Presentation Planning Software December 7, 2011 GET YOUR STORYSTRAIGHT

2 1 The StoryStraight Vision The goal of StoryStraight is to vastly improve the efficiency of consultants and other service professionals who waste countless hours repeatedly editing PowerPoint slides while slowly developing the message of their presentations. We are building software that harnesses innovations from the film production industry and insights from presentation experts to provide a new experience for quickly crafting compelling business presentations. StoryStraight software will be a PC application and server platform tailored to fit into a consultant s workflow and the IT infrastructure of a large consulting firm. The software will be built using the user interface conventions developed for video production storyboarding as well as conventions from modern collaboration platforms like Google Docs. Storyboards are traditionally used as a way of laying out pieces of information as a pre-visualization of a final product. StoryStraight software will combine 3 major features: 1. Story templates: Thematic frameworks for presentations that serve as guideposts for storyboard development 2. Super simple slides: No custom formatting. No position adjustments. Just the information in the order and layout it will be in. The computer will help with automatic layout suggestions based on the information provided. 3. Collaboration with Revision Control: each user will be able to contribute slides and comment on the slides of others. Value Proposition: Time is Money Based on surveys of consultants at several major firms, we have determined that a major time sink for consultants involves deliverable work. Almost all of this work involves implementing the ideas of a boss or other group member that have not been completely articulated. What this means is that consultants spend time carefully editing detailed slides in PowerPoint only to discover later that the slides are unneeded or have missed the point. A typical feedback loop for a consultant working on a deliverable looks like this: Recieve input during group meeting Present slides to Boss Build deck with many slides Edit visual detail of slides Perform extra research to fill out details of slides This feedback loop is essential for consultants to build effective presentations. However, consultants in our survey report that they will often create, edit, and ultimately discard 50 slides for every 10 that make it into the final presentation. Slide creation and editing is very time consuming, even for an expert user of PowerPoint. Additionally, consultants estimate that 10% of the time they spend in PowerPoint is spent adding real content, while 90% of time is spent formatting: adjusting size and position, changing colors, modifying backgrounds, and redoing whole sections to make room for one more bullet point.

3 2 Our vision is to remove the time intensive and tedious formatting process from the consultant s workflow, instead requiring this process only once at the end of the cycle. Our software will make the iterative review process much quicker by removing the formatting step, and focusing instead on the information being communicated to the client. With StoryStraight, the new consultant workflow looks like this: Receive input during group meeting Collaborate with StoryStraight Finalize visual details in PowerPoint Consultants are paid high rates, and they are paid by the hour. So every hour of time a consultancy can save directly impacts their bottom line. Consider a typical management consultant who bills at $150/hour. From our survey, we found that consultants spend approximately 30% of their working hours on deliverable creation, and we estimate that our StoryStraight software will make consulting teams 40% more efficient at this task. This leads to an overall efficiency gain of 12%. Over the course of a year with roughly 2000 working hours, this efficiency gain will account for 240 hours for this consultant. That translates to $36,000 per consultant, which we believe is a compelling value proposition for our product. Even if the perceived efficiency gains or amount of time spent on delivery creation is smaller than our estimates, the value proposition for our software is compelling. Target Market The primary target market for StoryStraight is consultants working at medium to large consulting firms based in the United States. The target market will eventually expand to include other service professionals and international companies. The size of the consulting market is currently 1M consultants in the United States [Plunkett Research] This market is further subdivided amongst Management consulting, Marketing consulting, Technology consulting, and other categories. We will primarily be targeting the three largest groups: Management Consulting, Marketing Consulting, and Technical Consulting. Percent distribution of employment and establishments in management, scientific, and technical consulting services by detailed industry sector, 2008: Industry segment Employment Establishments Total Administrative management and general management consulting Marketing consulting Other scientific and technical consulting Other management consulting Process, physical distribution, and logistics consulting Human resources and executive search consulting Environmental consulting SOURCE: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, 2008.

4 3 Competitive Analysis While we believe our product will be unique, it will come into direct competition with other software used by consultants. This competition falls into three major categories: Presentation Software Meeting Software Collaboration Software Presentation Software Consulting presentations today are made almost exclusively in Microsoft PowerPoint. We have no desire to replace PowerPoint as the tool for building final client deliverables. StoryStraight software will output directly to PowerPoint format, and will integrate with PowerPoint in whatever ways possible for a more seamless workflow. There is a potential threat that Microsoft will try to replicate our platform and go after the same niche we are targeting. Microsoft is historically known for attempting to acquire new technology, rather than replicate it, which we view as an exciting exit opportunity. Meeting Software Consulting firms use a variety of software platforms to facilitate meetings, many of which include the ability to share a screen, or take control of another person s screen. StoryStraight will be designed with this software in mind, so that users can work effectively with StoryStraight in a screen-sharing session. Some of these products have integrated hooks into PowerPoint to allow collaboration, but this experience is not tailored to the consulting workflow and is really not targeting the same problem as StoryStraight. Examples in this space include: Cisco WebEx, MeetingSense, FuzeMeeting. Collaboration Software We view StoryStraight as falling squarely into this category of software. The major player in this space is Google, with Google Docs Presentations. Most of the other players in this space are flavors of Google Docs presentations with various differentiating features: Zoho Show, Sliderocket, Crocodoc, etc. We differentiate ourselves from these companies in 2 important ways. 1. We are facilitating presentation-planning process work with collaboration on the overall presentation structure, not trying to replicate or replace the PowerPoint experience for delivering or formatting presentations 2. We are designing our software specifically to support the consultant s existing workflow, and for use within the consulting firm IT environment Marketing to the Buyer: Consulting Firm IT Departments Although consulting work is inherently very collaborative, consultants are shackled by technology limitations of slow moving IT departments. We view this fact as a challenge to overcome, but also as a barrier to entry to competition. We spoke with the managers of IT at several consulting firms, and the message was consistent across the interviews. The IT departments within consulting firms are focused on 2 major issues: 1. Security 2. Accountability The information in consulting presentations is generally highly sensitive, which makes security the single most important issue for consulting software. These firms also need to know exactly who edited each piece of data within the IT system so mistakes and changes can be tracked appropriately. StoryStraight software is being built with security and accountability as the primary architectural features of the software.

5 4 Our marketing plan will have two prongs. The first will be to arrange meetings with the managers of consulting firm IT departments, and also with their direct superiors. Our management team has relationships with consultants at each major firm in Manhattan, which we will use to arrange meetings with additional IT department managers. Selling the concept to these managers won t be easy however. In response to the question of how new software purchase are made, one such manager responded: We try not to add any new software unless it comes down from above. Then we perform a security audit, and most software doesn t pass. If it gets through the audit, we add it to our optional software menu, but no one really knows its there and it usually remains unused. This answer leads to the second prong of our marketing approach, which is to seek a champion in one of the major consulting firms to raise awareness and then focus advertising efforts on that firm. From our interviews, we also found that new software adopted by one of the major firms is almost always adopted by all of the other firms in the industry. If we can pass a critical mass at one major firm, spreading to others will be much easier. A good feature of consulting firms that helps to spread software adoption is that consultants are constantly changing teams and working with new people. We will be designing viral features into the software to take advantage of the dynamic nature of these ad-hoc teams to aid in the spread of the StoryStraight system within each firm. Operations StoryStraight is currently in the planning and product design phase. The company will operate as a business-to-business software company, borrowing best practices from the industry wherever possible. Our management team has a mixed background including consulting experience and extensive experience in technology project management using an agile development framework, which we will be utilizing for StoryStraight. The primary activity of the first year of operation will be pure product development activities. Our product team has been assembled with backgrounds in the following areas that will aid in product development: Security Revision Control System Design Collaborative User Interface Design Real-time Client-Server architecture Video Production Storyboarding Because this product will be new and innovative, we do not view outsourcing development as a viable option for StoryStraight. As we move into a second and third year, the management team will focus on building relationships within consulting firms to facilitate the marketing strategy outlined above. At this time, an additional sales resource may be brought on board to help with this process. The development team will also bring on an additional member to continue to improve on the product, while the management team focuses on demonstrating the product to consulting firm contacts. The business model of the company is straightforward for a software company. We will have high fixed costs related to development that cause the company to run at a loss for the first few years, but low marginal costs of production that will lead to high margins as we scale to a larger market. Success will depend on the levels of market penetration we can achieve. Financial projections with moderate levels of market penetration can be found on the next page. These projections will improve as we develop a more sophisticated pricing strategy and a more accurate product development schedule. The current management team on the final page is larger than what we plan to have actively involved in the company during the development phase, but all are participating in the planning process.

6 Financial Projections: 5

7 6 Our Management Team Andrew Dailey CEO Andrew studied Computer Science and Systems Engineering at Cornell University, and proceeded to work in customer facing video solutions for Cisco Systems. He left Cisco to work in a startup environment where he led project management for the technology team. He is eager to apply the lessons learned from that experience and his management education at NYU Stern to lead StoryStraight. Andrew will also be actively involved in product design and technology development. Emil Lee CFO Emil was formerly an analyst at Telegraph Hill Partners, a private equity firm based in San Francisco that manages $300 million in assets. He graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa from the University of California at Irvine with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics. He is currently pursuing an MBA at the NYU Stern. Emil will be handling financial planning and accounting for StoryStraight. Joseph Shipley COO Before pursuing his MBA at NYU Stern, Joe graduated from Georgetown with a degree in International Economics in 2005 before heading to work at Deloitte Tax LLP. At Deloitte he worked as an economic consultant in the transfer pricing group, performing various financial and economic modeling and consulting tasks, including intangible valuation, internal rate of return calculations, and global profitability and strategic tax planning studies for a wide variety of multinational clients in a diverse set of industries. Joe will be leading StoryStraight s relationship development with marketing consulting firms. Andrew Jennings CTO After Andrew graduated from Princeton, he worked for Microsoft for 4 years, before leaving to pursue his MBA at NYU Stern. Andrew will help StoryStraight software interface with PowerPoint and other elements of the Microsoft office suite. He will also be leading relationship development with technology consulting firms.