TC50: ClientShow Allows For Real-Time Collaboration During Creative Pitches

When pitching a creative idea to a company, often the mechanism by which you pitch the idea to clients is as important as the pitch itself. TechCrunch50 startup ClientShow, which is presenting during the Business Applications session, is hoping to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. It’s sort of like a Web-Ex for creative professionals.

The application, which is built off of Adobe Air, is broken down into four parts. The first part is a dashboard which lets the agency view clients, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can views the projects.

The third, and most significant part of ClientShow’s application, is the actual “pitch,” where clients are given a link that lets them view the session in their browser. It’s important to note that while the users who are pitching the idea are using an Adobe Air application, the client will see the actual pitch within their browser. Here’s where the beauty of ClientShow’s software comes in; as you are pitching an idea, decision makers on a client team can approve (or dismiss) different ideas and files and give feedback automatically by adding notes and comments to the pitch.

Of course, after a pitch has ended, users will want to look back on clients’ comments and feedback, which is where the fourth part of ClientShow’s software comes in. The “vault” captures and stores all interactive feedback from sessions. You can also see “session reports” in the vault, that shows you every file that was documented in the presentation in the order they were presented.

ClientShow’s software will be rolled out to the public in November. The application is compelling at provides a easy way for creative professionals to create a threaded discussion of sorts around a pitch. The combination of visual tools and collaborative conversation around a pitch is sure to attract fans on both the agency and client side in the advertising and marketing fields.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Satish Dharmaraj, Don Dodge, Bradley Horowitz, Tim O’Reilly, Kevin Rose

TO: What is the business model?

A: there is nothing like this that exists that is well branded, so the distribution model is simple. This product answers a direct need

TO: So the business model is build it and they will come

A: we’re providing an end to end solution

BH: its a little bit web-ex, can you explain how its built

A: taking a cloud based approach using amazon web services for the back end. A lot of interaction for product is locally adding files, which allows u to minimize traffic on users’ computers. Cloud based computing allows us to scale as we need/

BH: Air apps are hard to interact with

A- server technology is written in java, purposely built to can connect to other technologies

KR: is this something that you will always host, agencies might want presentation to be behind the firewall….

LZ: Its a slick presentation and the product looks nice. How do you get this more widely used beyond just the creative professional space?

A: There is opportunity in any Technology based disciplines-anything that’s visual

SD: I worry this is an island. There’s not enough integration between other applications. I worry about the direct selling model.

A: Photoshop got word of mouth distribution within the industry.

Images:
clientshowstage

Video:
http://www.ustream.tv/flash/video/2166839

Outside Coverage:
TC50: ClientShow manages collaboration for graphic designers VentureBeat.
ClientShow Wants To Be the Way Creative Shares Files #tc50 techgeist.