Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Connect podcast where I speak with a Philadelphia-based entrepreneur every week. Episodes come out every Thursday, and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Rachel Winchester, a product designer and public speaker who is focusing on web page presentations and pitches. She’s also the founder of a new startup called Focus Assistance, which she’s going to tell us more about. But it has to do with helping to keep you accountable to your work in a friendly and professional way. She’s also a community organizer, runs a great WordPress Community, and is a live streamer. I was on a live stream, I believe last week, so plenty to talk about. Rachel, how you doing?
Rachel: I’m doing well, doing well. A lot going on but a lot of exciting projects.
Dave: I love it. I love people that are just doing a lot of different things. I mean, they’re related, but I like that you’ve kept it tight in that way. But you’re pushing yourself, I can tell. And I like that about you. So let’s talk about web page presentations because this is, I don’t know, say it’s like a new concept. I’m not sure, maybe it isn’t, but it’s something I feel like I’m not totally familiar with. I’m always thinking about things like PowerPoint or Google Slides or something like that. So what is a web page presentation?
Rachel: A webpage presentation is the content of your presentation. So what you would normally put in a slideshow or a slide deck, you instead put that in one single web page. So when you present the presentation, you’re just scrolling down a web page. It’s not just a visual format change, moving from slide to slide and moving to scrolling down, but it’s also the fact that you have dynamic content that’s published online. So instead of putting your content into a PowerPoint and then downloading a PDF or a PPT file, your content is published. It can rank for SEO, it can be shared on social media, you can treat it just like any other web page.
Dave: I like that, obviously I do SEO for a living so I see the benefits of that. Where did you think, “What I’m going to do, I’m going to do this”? Like where did this kind of come from?
Rachel: Yeah, it’s definitely something that came about during the first year of COVID. I don’t think I had one single light bulb moment, but it was definitely like in 2020, in COVID, we were all meeting virtually, everyone was hopping in a Zoom call. And in every Zoom call, whether it was professional or just for fun, someone ends up sharing their screen and they’re like, “Oh, I want to show you guys something.” And it’s usually like a Google search or a Google image search and they’re just scrolling down, just sharing some images. And even maybe that’s kind of a casual video call, but even some of the more professional ones, let’s say I’m on a team and we are introducing ourselves as a company to another team that we’re working with, and we start by telling them about our company by going to our website and sharing the about page in a Zoom call. So imagine that’s essentially like your company pitch but in your about page because it’s the same content. So I just put two and two together. If we’re going to share our screen and hop around a browser anyway, why not put all that content that you plan to talk about into one web page? And that’s how web page presentations came about. So towards the end of… I don’t know if I could say the end of COVID, maybe 2022, 2023, I built “Death to Slide Decks,” which is my like featured keynote presentation that goes through the history of visual presentations and why PowerPoints are archaic and why we should move towards web page presentations just as a concept. So that’s how that initially started. I just wanted to do a bunch of research into the history of this stuff and put the pieces together in my own head conceptually.
Dave: Very cool. I didn’t know about “Death to Slide Decks.” I do see behind you it’s “Killing PowerPoints.” There’s a lot of murder. Are you… is this sort of like a genre that you particularly relate to, or is it just sort of… I like the name?
Rachel: I came up with the name “Death to Slide Decks” and I stuck with it because it’s a catchy title, it stands out. If I’m in like a virtual conference and there’s 20 other speakers and they all have cool titles, like, “How can my title really stand out?” So that’s why I stuck with “Death to Slide Decks.” And then when I created this workshop “Killing PowerPoint,” I decided to stick with the same theme. So if it’s “Death to Slide Decks,” now it’s time for me to kill PowerPoint. But yeah, I have thought of some cool ideas in the same vein. I’m thinking maybe I’ll schedule a presentation for Halloween and I’ll dress up as the Grim Reaper and I’m like there to kill Powerpoints. And yeah, I think it could work.
Dave: Yeah, I’m thinking like how to do this with Google Slides, maybe how to send Google Slides to the grave, trying to do alliteration here but, you know, like maintain the motif. I’m going to steal that one. Thank you, it’s yours. I have no use for it, so it is all yours. You are a public speaker, you have given a workshop, you have done presentations, you’ve seen probably a number of them as well. What are some of the common mistakes that people usually do when they’re either creating or delivering a presentation?
Rachel: Yeah, so I think they make a lot of mistakes with the interface itself. So, you know, I’m a web designer, I’m an interface designer, really, I try and point out when the interface is either helping or hurting. So with a lot of PowerPoints, first of all, oftentimes people will share a PowerPoint without actually hitting the present button. So they’ll share the edit screen that they are looking at when they’re building the PowerPoint. And then we see that too, so we’re distracted with the extra interface going around the slide. And often when people are in a video call and they go to share their screen, they share the whole screen, including all the desktop taskbars, including the browser tabs, and the bookmarks bar. You should try and just share the inside content, really minimize what you’re looking at. And it’s all about, again, using that interface so that you can compose and curate and control what your audience is seeing. You don’t want your audience to be distracted by things that you don’t want them to look at. You want them to focus on your story, your argument, your content. So that’s number one, just being conscious of the interface. And something that I see people do incorrectly, both in web page presentations and PowerPoints, is click around or interact with the interface without informing the audience. Let’s say you have two tabs open in your presentation and you want to click over to a tab, you should say when you’re clicking over to the tab. There are too many occasions when someone will hover their cursor over a button or over an interactable element and you just don’t know if they’ve clicked on it yet. But it’s good to say, “Now it’s time to go to this tab, now I’m going to click on this button.” All of those things really help keep your audience focused on what you want them to focus on. So again, not letting the interface get in the way, but work with it.
Dave: Those are some good points of advice. And you mentioned focus a number of times right at the end there, which is a great segue into Focus Assistance, which is a startup that you’re working on. I’d love to hear a little bit about this concept, where you came up with it, and then specifically, I know you’ve been pitching it, which is an interesting way of putting yourself in the seat of your clients, your users, so to speak, and learning about that experience. Tell us more.
Rachel: Yeah, Focus Assistance is an idea I came up with maybe actually three years ago, and I would talk about that idea and develop the idea with my best friend Ian. We’ve been best friends since the beginning of college. So I’m the chronic procrastinator, Ian himself has ADHD, so we struggle with a lot of the same issues, especially during COVID, just calling each other virtually, we’d end up helping each other prevent our own procrastination. So let’s say he is working on something creative like he’s a poet. So let’s say he was working on his epic poem, next thing you know we’re in a video call and I’m like helping him finish some stanza or chapter or however it works for him. And then similarly, I always procrastinate on emails. So often during COVID, we would hop on a call and then we would just find ourselves like writing one of my emails. So that’s how the focus assistance came about, just two people, horrible procrastinators, just helping each other to stop procrastinating. It’s a virtual productivity service for procrastinators, and we really target people with a lot of remote work, people who have to use their computers all the time and are always distracted with social media, video games, etc.
Dave: I love it. I think it’s a cool idea. It’s accountability partners in a sense, and there’s plenty of research that kind of shows why this works, is that we are okay letting ourselves down sometimes, but when there’s somebody else actually looking at us or that we’ve made a commitment to, we’re better about getting things done. And so I think that’s some of the principles that you’ve packed into with Focus Assistance. What are some of the next steps for Focus Assistance? It sounds like you’ve been pitching it at a couple of competitions, right?
Rachel: So we definitely wanted Focus Assistance to be a startup project. Both Ian and I, we’ve been freelancers, contractors since college. Actually, he’s been a freelance kind of ESL teacher. He’s got clients and students all over the globe, and I’ve just been a freelance web developer. So we’ve both had projects that we looked to grow in the past. However, when we went out to do Focus Assistance, we specifically wanted it to be a startup. We wanted to find external sources of funding, incubators, accelerators, investors, and we wanted to try that path of growth partially because like we already have our own things going and we can have this experimental project that could be fun. But also because we didn’t want to put our own money into it, of course. And then the third reason is because I am a product designer and a public speaker, and having a startup is a great portfolio project. It’s a great company in and of itself, but it’s also a great portfolio project. So as a product designer, I need to be aware of how my design works in the whole ecosystem, in the whole relationships to other products that are out there or that could be offered by the same company. So I wanted to build a product and be able to steer the ship, call myself the CEO, be aware of all the different things around the product, and the different things that CEOs have to be aware of, but still, I’m just calling myself a product designer. And now we’re at that phase starting this year, we’re really at the phase where we want to raise capital. So we’re done with the conceptualizing and the planning, we’re done with the strategizing, although that’s something that will always be going on. But now we are at the phase where we are fundraising, which is my favorite part. That’s when I get to do the pitch, where I get to give presentations, web page presentations or traditional presentations to see how my product design is working and to see how these web page presentations are working. So the Focus Assistance does have a couple web page presentations to help with that fundraising, but we also have traditional presentations for… We still need to have the traditional slide deck. Like for example, some incubator applications ask specifically for a slide deck. Yeah, we haven’t been able to kill it completely yet, but it’s on its way out.
Dave: Speaking of different pitches, you won a pitch competition recently, if I’m not mistaken. But tell us a little bit about that competition and just a general feeling of having that validation.
Rachel: Maybe back in December, Ian and I came up with three different versions of our pitch and we tried them out with different family members. And by pitch, I just mean a paragraph of text, but not meaning a full pitch deck. We were just trying to figure out like what story is the best to sell what we’re doing. So the pitch design started months ago. I don’t think I actually built a visual deck until maybe February for an application. And that I actually have not transformed that into a web page pitch just yet. But we had a web page presentation for a focus group we did last year. But anyway, the event that I won was at Rec Philly. Rec Philly is a creative co-working community, I guess I could call them, in the Fashion District as their location. And yeah, that was the first pitch event. I was so excited. One weird caveat, the Focus Assistance has a different email than the rest of the emails that I manage because of all the different projects. So I forgot, I never actually checked to see the email where someone was like, “Hey, send me your presentation, send me your pitch deck.” I literally just went to the event day of, and the organizer was like, “Oh hey, did you get my email? I’m so happy that you decided to come.” So I won the event without having a visual presentation, and the other four people did have visuals.
Dave: Wow, which I thought was really… that is cool. If I was one of the other four people I’d probably be feeling kind of not so high on myself. But yeah, you got to set up autoforwarding for that email to send it to the one that you check off, but Cas, now that I’m actively pitching, actively applying for more pitching, I’m keeping an eye on that inbox, giving some tabs on it. That’s good. That’s cool though. I like how you talk about the process of let me first just think about what story resonates with people. I’m just going to shop it around like friends and family. I’ve seen a lot of pitches, we’ve done pitch events with PTC like multiple times. So I’ve seen like already that feels like dozens of pitches. And a lot of times it doesn’t necessarily strike me that the idea or something is bad, it’s just difficult to follow. It’s difficult to follow like what the narrative is and what the story is. Giving a pitch is really about telling a story. And so before you invest in the visual, before you invest in all that, just what’s that elevator pitch? Okay, now what’s that three-minute kind of feel? And then go from that and then build around that once you have something where people go, “Okay, I get that. I get why that makes sense.” So it’s cool that you had this… it feels like you had this iterative process of coming up with, you know, the final result, which eventually was able to win you a pitch competition without a visual, which is crazy. It almost seems like you should have been disqualified, but you are. So that’s cool.
Rachel: Awesome. Thanks.
Dave: Rachel, you’re doing so many things. We didn’t even really talk so much about the WordPress community and other public speaking engagements. People want to know more about all the different things that you’re working on. How can they get in touch? What emails are… would you consider checking?
Rachel: So my website is visualwebmaster.com and I’m updating it all the time. All my projects are there. My main social media is linked there. So if you just search Rachel Winchester LinkedIn or maybe if you just search Rachel Win, I’ll probably pop up. But I’m the one with the “Killing PowerPoint” background photo.
Dave: Awesome. Okay. Yeah, if there’s not gonna be two of those, I’m pretty sure about that. Yeah, cool. Awesome. And are there any upcoming events that we should be aware of?
Rachel: As you mentioned, I do organize the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and we finally have a new in-person organizer. We have a person who’s Philly local who wants to start organizing in-person events for the Meetup. So join our Meetup Group, the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup, just look for that on meetup.com and you’ll find us. And join the Meetup group and we will be hopefully planning an in-person meet up very soon. Very soon. I don’t know exactly when yet, but soon.
Dave: Thanks, Rachel. Thanks.
Rachel: Thank you.