How and Why I Started Visme

My journey as an entrepreneur started a little over 14 years ago. As a means to pay my way through college, I taught myself how to design websites for local businesses in the DC metro area. Over the next few years, this slowly transformed from a one-man shop into the award-winning web design agency, HindSite Interactive, which has worked with hundreds of companies of all sizes to help them improve their online presence.

Visme, one of the exhibitors at TechDay DC on October 6th, was incubated out of HindSite Interactive and, like many other startups, was created to solve a problem. In this case, I envisioned it was going to solve quite a few of them.

One of the advantages of running a web agency is that you get to work with clients from all walks of life at different phases of their business. And, if you listen carefully, you recognize patterns that serve as seeds from which cool ideas can sprout, such as Visme.

One of the trends I noticed was that most professionals prefer to do things on their own, but they often don’t have the know-how, the time, or the right tools to do so. I always knew that someday I would empower people to communicate better visually on their own, without having to always hire a pro to do it for them.  

Visme: an experiment that transformed into a business

It all started with the demise of Adobe’s Flash, which was heavily used in the web Stone Age by designers, like myself, to create animations, presentations, and interactive content. We began to experiment with a Flash replacement that professional designers could use to design interactive content viewable on any browser or mobile device.

We worked on this side project over the next nine months and in mid-2012, we released a soft beta version to test the waters for about 900 users. Although the initial version was quite buggy, it helped us define a new approach before going too far down a rabbit hole.

Things never turn out the way you expect

Although Visme was initially geared toward designers, we noticed that people with no design experience were adopting the platform to create presentations. That’s when we realized how important these capabilities were to all types of people, not just designers. And that’s what gave us the impetus to create a one-size-fits-all web based tool that would be powerful enough for design-savvy users and, yet, simple enough for non-designers to use.

The light bulb moment

We decided to refine our tool so that it could be used by anyone, not just creative professionals. While at it, I decided to up the challenge: Create a tool with a simple learning curve that would allow users to design not only presentations, but also infographics and other forms of visual content more efficiently than any other tool out there.

We spent the next year revamping Visme and relaunched as a presentation and infographic tool, rolling out great templates, along with thousands of graphics.

How does Visme work?

Visme is cloud-based, so you can use it from anywhere with any recent browser to communicate ideas and products in a visually engaging format.  The content you create is HTML5-based, which means it is mobile-friendly too.

In essence, Visme serves as a canvas where you can drag and drop any form of content.

You can insert your own text, images, audio or video; or use our large library of images and icons and even embed third-party content.

What can you create with Visme?

Presentations

If you’re tired of PowerPoint or feel you can’t create quality presentations, Visme offers some beautiful presentation templates, each with its own collection of slide layouts.

Infographics

These popular images present information in bite-sized chunks that people love to share. Visme offers a wide variety of templates, including designs for product comparisons, data visualization, and resumes.

Create custom anything

The custom-design area of Visme is one of its strengths, enabling you to use tools to easily create any type of digital graphic, including those shareworthy memes that pepper your social media streams.

At Visme we use Visme!

We use Visme for our own marketing and communication needs. For example, to help raise awareness about the TechDay DC event, we created this infographic using icons and graphics from Visme’s extensive library.

 http://my.visme.co/projects/techday-infographic-17c7e1 

Create once, publish anywhere

You can publish your content online, share it on social networks, make it private, or embed it into your own website or blog.     

You can also download your work as images, PDF documents, or as HTML to present offline via any local browser.

Where we are today

It’s so rewarding to see this little tool, which I bootstrapped with limited resources, grow into a business with tremendous potential ahead.

Fast forward to today. We have over 250,000 users, including individuals and businesses from more than 50 countries. These are premium and enterprise users from Fortune 500 companies, such as Capital One and Disney, and notable organizations such as National Institutes of Health and Howard University.

Visme is free to use for everyone. Paid plans start at just $7/month, which enable the user to unlock premium templates, manage privacy, download content, and access analytics and collaboration tools.

We have also recently deployed our team plans (www.visme.co/teams), so organizations can collaborate on projects and use Visme as a repository to communicate their ideas within and outside of their organizations.