IAM1412 – Founder Helps Professionals Make Effective Presentations

Noyan started his entrepreneurial journey during his university years. He has been interested in coding since childhood. He graduated in electronics engineering and is currently pursuing his MBA. He struggled with preparing too many presentations for student club meetings, school projects, and his prior startups. This led him to build Decktopus: the fastest presentation builder.

• CEO Story: Started his 2 start-ups during his college years but didn’t work out as planned. That didn’t stop Noyan from pursuing his entrepreneurial journey of building and making presentations and pitch deck proposals that led him to a better and more sustainable business which is creating the fastest presentation builder.
• Business Service: Presentation templates for a minimal subscription fee.
• Secret Sauce: Presentations that help you to become effective. Assistant tools and rehearse mode with notes and time.
• CEO Hack: Book mention: Outliers – if you put some effort into something you can increase your chances of success.
• CEO Nugget: If you want to build something, it takes time. You need to be patient and keep going. Troubles may come but everything can be solved.
• CEO Defined: Being the orchestra chief that has lots of team members. Managing the system.

Website: www.decktopus.com

LinkedIn: noyanidin

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEO's without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share precisely the information you're searching for. This is to I AM CEO podcast.

00:48 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, Hello Hello, this is Gresh from the Imco podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today, Avenoian Eden of Dectapus. Noyen, it's great to have you on the show.

00:58 – Noyan Idin

Thank you for having me.

00:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on. Before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Noyean so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's working on. And Noyan started his entrepreneurial journey during his university years. He's been interested in coding since childhood. He graduated in electronics engineering and is currently pursuing his MBA. He struggled with preparing too many presentations for student club meetings, school projects, and his prior startups. This led him to build Dectapus, the fastest presentation builder Noyen, excited again to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:34 – Noyan Idin

Yeah, I'm so excited to be here.

01:37 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:46 – Noyan Idin

Sure. Actually, as you said, my adventure actually started in my college years. I was interested in entrepreneurship so much when I was a student and I tried to build two startups and I failed. And I learned lots of things from building products, managing people, managing business. And after getting these experiences, I started to work as a product manager in a company. It was my last year of university. And then actually this is different than maybe other founder stories. The aim of that company was to find a business idea inside the company. After that, create a company for that business idea. So actually I was a product manager in that company and I was the chairman of the student society.

It was an entrepreneurship society and I was preparing lots of presentations every week. It was our meeting, presentations, events, presentations. Also, I was an engineering student, so we had to prepare lots of projects during our terms. I needed to prepare lots of presentations for our projects, and also especially for my boats for startups, I needed to prepare lots of startup pitch decks for investors other incubators, and other stakeholders. So I was preparing lots of presentations. So actually when I started to work as a product manager, I thought that what would be a great idea to start a business?

And I just realized that creating a presentation requires lots of time. So that's why I started to build Dectopus and we built this desktop idea inside that company. After building the MEP inside the company, we created a spinoff company. So I just turned into CEO of that company. And today we are still growing and running our business. Initially, we were in Turkey, but right now we have a United States office and also a Turkey office. In Turkey, we have R and D operations but our HQ is in the States.

04:32 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that and I appreciate you telling your story and your journey. I love that you use the word adventure and even include the things that didn't probably work out as well as you would have hoped and how it sounds like you took those learning lessons and kind of ran with them.

04:47- Noyan Idin

Yeah, yeah, it is. It is an adventure because I'm learning lots of things and it is fun, it is exciting. So that's why I'm calling it an adventure. And still, I'm learning lots of things.

04:59 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I know sometimes I've had some adventures and the word that sometimes comes to mind as well too, is scary. And I'm sure that sometimes when you're running a business and trying to figure out those things, it could sometimes be scary as well.

05:12 – Noyan Idin

No, actually it might be scary sometimes because you need to be prepared for lots of failures, right? Because you are in somewhere and you don't know the right direction. Because you need to try. First test it, then fail, then fail, then fail. Learn, learn, learn, then optimize it, and test it again. So you need to be prepared. So it might be seen as scary in this perspective, but on the other side, you are free. You can test anything you want. And if you can learn from your mistakes, actually you are improving yourself, also your business, okay.

But also yourself. So I think from this perspective it is not scary. I think it is exciting because you are experiencing new things every day. Every day you need to solve something. So actually I think maybe this would be different for each person. If you like to learn something every day or solve something every day, it is good for you. But if you are like nine to five, how can I say nine to five mindset, then it might be scary.

06:40 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes sense. And I appreciate you kind of clarifying that. And even that process that you even talked about as far as like you mentioned, the MVP, the minimum viable product, how you started everything and you start to test out those assumptions and seeing what works and what doesn't work. That definitely makes sense because you're doing everything based on the feedback and kind of even testing your assumptions. Probably going outside of your comfort zone and the comfort zone for the organization as well too, and starting to do that.

07:08 – Noyan Idin

Absolutely. Absolutely.

07:09 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, I wanted to drill down a little bit more. I know I touched on it when I read your bio. You did as well too. Could you take us through a little bit more about Octopus and what you're doing to kind of help support the clients you work with?

07:20 – Noyan Idin

Sure. Actually, Dectapus is a presentation tool, an online presentation tool. But you can think that there are lots of presentation tools.

07:30 – Gresham Harkless

Why?

07:30 – Noyan Idin

One more after starting this idea, yeah, I was preparing lots of presentations. It was taking lots of time. But I researched, of course, before starting this business idea, is there anyone struggling with the same problem, taking too much time? Bad presentations. So I researched about it and I found a report from Microsoft and it was saying that there are 30 million presentations given each day. 30 million presentations are given each day. I saw this and I thought, wow, it is huge. But then I just thought that, okay, presentations are in education courses, project presentations, etcetera. Presentations are in business like sales proposals and also startups, investor updates, etcetera.

So when I thought these areas, it became a reasonable number, 30 million, okay, because it is in every industry. But the following part of the report was shocking actually because it said that there are 30 million total every day, but 15 million of them are considered insufficient. Actually, this was shocking because I thought that, oh my God, PowerPoint has been here since the 1980s, et cetera. There are lots of different presentation tools like Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi and you name it. There are lots of presentation tools. I thought that. Why? Why still the half of total presentations insufficient? Insufficient means, by the way, for example, you prepare the presentation, you need to spend some time to prepare.

It won't help you to deliver your message. So there are some limitations. It is a kind of assistant to most presentation tools. You can see that, for example, there are listing categories. They are in the presentation tool category and also the design tool category because you need to design something with other tools. But Decktopus is not a design tool. You cannot design your slides in Decktopus because we have templates and all templates are prepared by our professional designers. And you actually spend very little time, spending very little money just on the subscription fees. You are preparing a good-looking presentation. Actually, this is what they possess.

11:08 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I appreciate you sharing that. Kind of like you touched on your secret sauce as well too. Kind of like that thing that sets you apart and makes you unique. But it's really, it sounds like to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's about understanding like the big issue that a lot of people are creating presentations, but they're not actually effective. And you're making that easier to make sure that people have, like you said, like an assistant, essentially to help you to set yourself up for success so that you can have an effective presentation. Do you feel like that's part of your secret sauce?

11:37 – Noyan Idin

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, absolutely. This is actually what we are doing and also not only content itself. For example, we have rehearsed parts of our presentation tool. And so in this way, you can practice your presentation with your notes and time. And also we offer body language tips in the presentation tool. So you can, you can listen to them and you can learn how to use your body language. And also we are working on this, we are improving our assistance so it will help you further in the future. Close future maybe. Yeah, absolutely. You are right.

12:17 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Love that. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. What's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

12:29 – Noyan Idin

Sure. Actually, I don't know what it is. This is a really popular book, but it affected my life deeply. It is called outliers. I guess it was saying that actually it is not a big book. I mean, it is a tiny book, but the main message was if you put some effort into something enough, you can increase your success chance. If you are not doing passionately something, then you are increasing the chance of losing. So Outliers is a really important book for me. It gives me the energy to, uh, look forward and take my best actions.

13:21 – Gresham Harkless

Love that, that hack. And so what would you consider to be what I like to call CEO Nugget? That's a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. I usually say you might tell your younger business self or potentially your favorite client if you were to happen to a time machine.

13:35 – Noyan Idin

Yeah, actually, there are some lessons, actually, I learned along the way, especially in my first and second startups. I was really passionate about my business ideas, but I did not have enough patience, you know, because actually I gave up, and then I failed. Today, I'm more patient. I understood that if you want to make something, do something, it takes time. And you need to know this. You need to be patient and also patient because otherwise, you are more likely to give up. So actually, this would be the number one nugget, maybe for me, if there might be lots of troubles in the business life or in the life, personal life, but everything, everything can be solved, and time is the cure for these problems. It is really important to be patient and keep going.

14:41 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love both of those nuggets. And it kind of segues me to my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. Our goal is to have different, quote-unquote, CEO's on this show. So, Noah, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:55 – Noyan Idin

Being a CEO is like being an orchestra chief. We have lots of team members. We have our business. We have some units in the business. I think CEO, being a CEO is managing everything properly without letting them recognize it. I mean, you are managing everything. You are building the system, and your system is running, but nobody thinks about this. Everything is going. So I think being a CEO is someone, being someone can manage this system.

15:41 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome, Awesome, Awesome. Well, Noyen, truly appreciate that definition, and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass to the mic, so to speak, to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best people can get a hold of you about all the awesome things you and team are working on?

15:59 – Noyan Idin

No, actually, thank you for having me. I think the most important thing is being passionate about the business idea because in this way we can inspire others. I think this is the only way we can inspire others. Our team members, stakeholders, and investors, are passionate. And also, I think it is really important to be open to feedback and willing to pivot. Because, okay, the business idea might be great, the product might be great, but if it is not going very well, I talked about being patient, but it is really important to be willing to pivot. Sometimes not failing, but pivoting. I mean, changing the way of doing work or solving the problem, etcetera. So I think this is really important. I hope it helps people. Thank you for having me.

16:56 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you again, you know, taking some time out and talking about all the awesome things that you're doing. Thank you so much for doing that, my friend. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

17:05 – Noyan Idin

Thank you.

17:05 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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