EWC Presenter is a web content creation and management platform that simplifies the way users develop and maintain content for web and mobile.
We had a very insightful and interesting interview with Mr. ‘Payman Taei‘; Founder and President of the US (Frederick)-based start-up “EWC Presenter”.
“EWC Presenter” is a web based platform to create, edit and enhance thousands of users web presence.
Below is the full interview that we have conducted with Mr. ‘Taei’ regarding his internet start-up company “EWC Presenter”;
1. What is it exactly that you do and what “EWC Presenter” is all about?
I am the Founder and President of EWC Presenter (www.ewcPresenter.com), a web content creation and management platform that simplifies the way users develop and maintain content for web and mobile. We’re all about creating efficiency and simplifying the way users interact and manage their web presence. Our service is geared towards anyone with little to no technical knowledge who wants to take charge of their website be it creating, editing or adding engaging features to their websites.
2. When has “EWC Presenter” been founded? And what stage is “EWC Presenter” currently at?
EWC Presenter is an extension of Easy WebContent which was founded in late 2008 as a simple website editor geared towards anyone who wanted to easily manage the content of their websites without coding knowledge or changes to their existing website. In 2010 we extended our system to allow site owners to add various interactive features to their site and today we have leaped into creating an easy to use yet powerful site builder that gives non technical users the ability to develop and maintain their web presence.
And today with EWC Presenter we are changing the way engaging content is created.
3. What is “EWC Presenter”‘s business model and how does it work?
EWC Presenter is currently free to everyone; We aim to continue supporting our freemium model long-term and offer an extended version of the service under a premium subscription plan as we have already done for our HTML Editor and Site Builder.
EWC Presenter is a cloud based system; giving us the ability to scale and serve our users growing needs deploying regular upgrades and features to users without the need to manually update or pay upgrade fees for new version releases.
4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?
Our team comes from different walks of life. I would say that we are extremely diverse both in culture and skill. It’s a great cohesion with each member and whenever we conduct meetings it’s always a creative mission. Our team met at our Web Development company HindSite Interactive, an award winning web consulting company which incubated and supported Easy WebContent from the start. Without HindSite Interactive we likely wouldn’t be here today.
We have members that work in the Easy WebContent office and some that work from the comforts of their home, so communication is key to our functionality and success.
We use a few different modes of communication depending on the task at hand. Design oriented tasks are often done in person between our design team; while development oriented tasks are handled through our CRM system, email and sometimes skype or chat. We’re quite open and flexible and open to all communication means; whichever best serves the purpose.
5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?
Our goal is not to give users every possible feature you can imagine. It’s about giving them features and capabilities that most users need in a easy to use and user friendly manner.
Additionally although some users want out of the box solutions, we find that many also want to have a certain level of control and flexibility. For example you may like a certain theme we offer but you want to make it your own by changing colors, graphics and even minute adjustment such as border, spacing and margins.
Our offering give you these abilities while eliminating the headache of any coding and design experience.
6. What is your growth like? And what milestones has “EWC Presenter” achieved so far?
Easy WebContent has grown slow but steady and organically over the years. In fact we have at time prevented growth for sake of investing to our service quality, research and development and tapping into new offerings that further strengthen our brand. Our goal has never been to have the largest user base; Our goal is to provide quality tool and services to our loyal user base and a steady stable growth rate that sustains our passion to further improve our services to our customers.
With our EWC Presenter launch in just a few weekls since our initial Beta launch we have seen an exponential growth in our user base which leads us to believe the stikiness of our tool.
7. Who are your competitors? And what is “EWC Presenter”‘s competitive advantage over them?
We have a number of competitors but each in their own niche, while EWC Presenter works across a few content categories and thus in one way or another competes with tools such as Prezi, Weebly, Slide Rocket, and wix to name a few. Presenter was developed to solve more than one problem. You see most applications are made to do one thing and one thing only. That is not how we see or treat Presenter. Presenter was developed to tackle a few issues faced by users and professionals alike.
What we are offering through Presenter is one App, one location to create awesome interactive content that will set you apart from others.
8. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
We don’t have any direct competitors for our HTML Editor service; There are Downloadable software such as CoffeeCup’s HTML editor but most of our direct competitors (offering easy to use online based HTML Editors without any set-up are no longer operating).
In terms of Site Builder, there are many other Site Builders; Many have been around for a while and a few new products have recently popped up.
Our advantage is that our tools are created with the sole aim of allowing users to more easily manage and edit web content and have more flexibility and freedom in design over other tools.
9. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
Software an technology are ever evolving. If you sit back for a moment and become static, it will pass you by.
Just because we make it easy for you, doesn’t mean it was easy to develop. Any company be it hardware, software or any industry that involves user behavior and experience can tell you that to make things simple and easy to use comes at a cost of extra time, resources and effort to achieve that for your users.
10. Why are you going to succeed?
We are extremely ambitious about where we are taking Presenter. Our passion for the art of interactive design and graphics combined with our extensive knowledge in HTML5 is allowing us to make Presenter the go to App for creating not just animations, or presentations but a whole spectrum of content types that are in the works.
We have a great team behind Presenter and we listen to what our users want. This is allowing us to quench our users’s thirst for better features and improved functionality so they can have the best experience possible.
11. If “EWC Presenter” succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
We have plans for a number of areas we will be expanding to. Some you’ll have to wait and see in the coming months, but we already have 5 categories we are rolling out features under.
User can use Presenter as a one stop shop to create variety of web and mobile friendly content. We currently have the ability to create animations, presentations, infographics, product demos and banners. All in HTML5, all web and mobile friendly on publish and last but not least the ability to make each interactive.
12. Why did you choose this idea and concept to build “EWC Presenter” based on?
The idea came to us actually. At my web development company HindSite Interactive, a core part of our business back in mid 2000′s was interactive design and motion graphics and based virtually on Adobe Flash. And with the onset of iPhone came the demise of Flash followed by a negative impact on our interactive/animation work. Virtually overnight we got less and less requests for flash work since it’s not supported on Apple’s Mobile devices.
We waited a couple years and didn’t see a tool that we ourselves would want to use to create the type of work we would be proud of.
So I decided for us to take a leap of faith and create an App that is cloud based, easy to use by pros and the average Joe, and fully based on HTML5 which unlike flash is not going anywhere but up given it is accepted by all big players and now accepted by W3C as a standard as is HTML.
13. What have you learned so far from launching your idea?
It’s been a great learning experience. we learn new things everyday. Creating EWC Presenter to do everything that it does has been a big technical challenge to say the least. No one has taken on HTML5 interactivity the way we’re approaching it.
So we had a clean slate and coming up with new ideas and features where many are based on our own research and development. What did we learn? The farther we go, the deeper the rabbit whole gets!
14. Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
As with any start-up you always wonder how long it will take to gain the traction you desire. We have no doubt we will gain traction; we already actually have met our goals since our Beta launch in terms of users and feedback we were hoping for. The question is how far can we take Presenter.
We have technical challenges ahead of us not about the App itself, but about some of the really cool ideas we have in mind which require a lot of technical research to bring to reality. I’m confident we will achieve them.
15. What’s the benefit for the customer/user?
There are a number of benefits to using Presenter. We listened to what our users wanted from the onset of our closed beta launch. In fact in closed beta we backed up our launch because we realized we had to make some drastic changes in our interface to better accommodate the user and we continue to collect feedback and adjust system regularly.
Users can take advantage of Presenter for a number of benefits. One App to provide you the ability to create awesome content for web or mobile from Presentations and animations to banners, infographics and even product demos. All in HTML5 and the ability to make each one fully interactive and engaging.
16. How did customers / users find out about you?
We launched a closed beta and contacted a few venues and began to get a series of registrations for our tool.
We also attended number of local tech events to get the buzz going and when time came notified everyone in our list about the product beta launch. The rest is been word of mouth and buzz from users who enjoy the tool enough to share and refer others to it.
17. Who are your current customers / users? Who are your target customers / users?
Often you are told to have a niche target audience in mind when launching a product. We’re going against a grain a bit. The fact is Presenter applies to anyone. Students and teachers use it to create graphs/charts for your school project or an interactive Presume when applying for a job. Designers and bloggers use it to create professional animations, banners and motion graphics for landing pages, websites and blogs.
E-commerce site owners can use it to better market their products through product demos and graphics and the list goes on…
18. Where do new customers / users come from and what makes new customers/users try you?
Many are referrals from prior users, some find us through organic traffic on search engines and mentions on various blogs and sites, and some see references to Presenter from other projects users publish and want to see what they can do with it.
Last but not least we have a user base from our other product lines HTML Editor and Site Builder who are also using Presenter.
19. What do your customers / users say about your product and/or service?
“You guys are great. Many thanks Amazing product – fantastic service. You deserve your success. And I will spread the good word about your products.”
Although Presenter has only recently opened to public, we have been getting positive feedback from our users. We appreciate all feedback about our tools, positive or negative helps us to refine and improve our products and based on the feedback we will continue to evolve Presenter to be the best product it can be.
20. How are you going to scale?
Technically our system is built to scale. We are growing our user base exponentially and to achieve the scale we built the system on the Cloud so we can increase capabilities to meet demand.
Based on our growth rate we will then assess our next steps to grow our operation which may include additional technical improvements and strategic adjustments.
21. What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers/users keep asking for?
We have been getting requests for more assets and widgets. The fact is we have plenty of them but I think the users have seen the capability of our widgets and realized it truly simplifies the content creation process so the want more. Good news is we can roll out widgets quickly because we always knew it will be an integral part of our system.
The one feature we have been getting more requests for is the ability to import and integrate to other verticals such as integration with a CMS system or Blogging platform. Guess what, users asked and we’re working on delivering in the near future)
22. Are you going to internationalize? And if yes how are you planning to expand your start-up’s operations accordingly?
We didn’t intend to. We thought our core audience would be North America or english speaking countries, but surprisingly we’ve been getting a lot of traction out of Europe such as Spain, and France.
Even though the system is in English, they seem to have no problems using it as it supports virtually all latin characters.
23. How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?
The potential is huge. Our system has the ability to scale across many content verticals not just presentations and infographics and it is being used by both pros and the average person so we see a big market that we’re going to tap into.
We are going to first and foremost concentrate on continually improving our product and take are of our user needs. With that we know the users will continue to follow.
To support our growth we are entertaining opportunities from a financial and technical level to meet the growth.
24. Are you looking to hire a new workforce? And if yes, what job vacancies do you currently offer and where can potential applicants contact you at?
We are always on lookout for great talent. User interface, animators and HTML5 savvy developers can contact us.
The first thing we look at is not your academic achievements but your portfolio and real life experience. If you got the talent, and the motivation contact me directly payman at easywebcontent dot com.
25. Are you looking for partnership opportunities or funding from Venture Capitals (VC) or other funding sources? Or your business is self-sustainable? And if the first option applies where can potential partners / investors contact you at?
We are open to any opportunity that makes sense for both sides. We’re not at a stage where we have to have funding to move ahead.
EWC Presenter runs under Easy WebContent which already generates revenue from its other services and is fueling Presenter’s growth.
But we are entertaining Angel or VC investment in the near future to help us with our 3-5 year plan that I have in mind.
We are also very interested in partnership opportunities as I believe there is a number of verticals the application can serve.
Investors / Partners can contact me directly at payman @ easywebcontent dot com.
26. What advice do you have for fresh entrepreneurs?
Be consistent. If you look at the founders of established companies you will find one common denominator between all of them.
Aside from being there at the right time, and having a great idea and strategy, they were consistent in their approach and did not give up in the face of big challenges and obstacles.
27. Finally, do you have any other comments that you would like to add?
Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it.We want everyone to give EWC Presenter at try. It’s free and anyone can sign-up to use it and see what you can do with it.
Your feedback is important to us and will help us further refine the system. Go to www.ewcPresenter.com and Create Awesome.
