We're recording. so I'm going to get your webpage, here.
Hi, everybody! David Dilling for Markzware. And today, on the line, on the
Skype, and we have Andrew Slipher. And this is his webpage. His company is
Slipher Marketing, and he's a Markzware customer and he's going to tell us about
his use of Markzware's PDF2DTP, the PDF to InDesign conversion filter or plugin. But
before we jump into that, I'll throw it over to Andy, and maybe, Andy, you can
tell us, or Andrew, a bit more about Slipher Marketing and what you do. Sure, David.
Andy's fine. I am a strategic marketing advisor for clients. I work with clients
big and small. I've got a million dollar startup client. I have a billion dollar
company I work with. So, generally, they seek me out to build their strategic
marketing plans from the ground up and, after that, I often stay on as a
fractional CMO and handle that sort of thing. I also do some professional
speaking and I've written a book, as well, on strategic marketing. So, I've been
doing this about 20 years. Wow. Wow. You look so young. Good. Next question.
How do you do that? Now, anyway, and, okay, well, very interesting. Great, great
background. Excellent background. Thank You. Markzware. How did you find out
about Markzware? You heard about Markzware before? Yeah? No, I hadn't. I
did a web search. I had a particular need. They say necessity is the mother of
invention and that was my situation. I had to convert some InDesign files over to
PDF because I have clients who just aren't sophisticated, when it comes to using
Creative Suite, or they don't have access to it. I do use Creative Suite. I've done
some design, in the past. It's not really what I do today, but I do find that I do
build a lot of documents in InDesign, because it's so easy. In fact, I've built
my own. I wrote a lot of my book in InDesign, of all things, but... So, I think
plugins like at Markzware, and especially Markzware itself, and in using it, I found
it online and plug... installed it, and it worked, right off the bat, which is always
a plus. You know, when you're trying to get something to work,
you just want it to work. You don't want to have to think about it.
And the fact that you can pull it up, and it's actually a menu item within
InDesign, in one click, it did everything it promised it would do. And, so, I've had no
problems with it, and my clients don't. They aren't the wiser that I've actually
built something in InDesign. So, it all works as planned.
Wow, yeah. It's just one click, "Convert PDF" and your PDF is right there, in
InDesign. Multi-page PDFs, I should add, you know. That's right. That's right. Yeah,
and you get what you pay for, you know. There's so many free things on the web,
these days, but, half the time, you go out, you find them. There's always something
that doesn't quite work with them, or it always seems that way. And, of course,
there's no support or anything like that, whereas, if you pay for a good quality
product, like at Markzware, you're gonna get what you pay for, and that's exactly
what happened, with this. So, no problems with it, whatsoever. Love it.
Excellent, excellent. And are you using it primarily on PDFs from customers, to
help you get a head-start on something they've had in the past that you want to
redevelop, or how are you...? Where are these PDFs coming from?
Are these internal PDFs or...? They'll feed me something, and it was built in some
other software that they've... Right. You know, that they've had in the past. And
they don't have any access to it. Somebody else has built it, and, so, I need
to convert it back. They don't care, at the end of the day. It has to be a seamless
process and it has to be time-saving and, so, that's the great thing about it. Right.
Click and go. Right, exactly, yeah, that's what a lot of our users say.
It's for those PDFs, where they have nothing else but that PDF and, then, you
can, with one click, get the, you know, conversion. There are a host of
preferences. And you can dig into a deeper, but, like you said, it's pretty
much, yeah, excellent. So, do you have any, you know, how do I say it, you know,
stories from the trenches, from things, when you've used it, you've noticed some
particular things you liked or disliked about the product or the program?
No. You know, it's... I don't have a lot. It's really a seamless product, and that's what
you want. You want good, good software. Good products tend to just work and get
out of your way and let you do what you need to do. And then, you know, there's
always these situations where you run across documents, that sort of thing, and
you don't have access to the parent file. And that's just common in my industry.
You know, somebody, a designer's built it, they're no longer working with the
designer, and you need to do some sophisticated work to it,
very quickly. And, so, I guess those are my trench stories, you know.
I'm constantly getting PDFs, and that sort of thing, that don't actually have the
parent file. So, it, you know, a tool like this is really valuable. Right, and, on that note,
you say our software just... It's so simple and it works,
and that's kind of like your webpage. It's... Clicking back to that, now. It's a nice,
clean, which it should be, for what you do, right? You know? Yeah, exactly. I mean,
more and more people don't have time to read. And that's the thing with marketing,
too. People don't have time to read. They don't have time. They want instant
gratification. And that's the way it works on the web. And, so, you want
something to just work and, not really take up a lot of your time, and make you
happy, have a benefit, so... Right, and I'm going to, just to show people, here,
here's Andrew's LinkedIn. I'm showing your LinkedIn, now. And, there, you can
see Strategist, Speaker, Author, CMO, Founder, and Dallas Society of Visual
Communications, which sounds really cool. That was a group. One of the largest
trade groups in the country that's independent for creatives. And they
were gracious enough to let me serve on their board and, then, eventually, as
President. Even though I'm a strategist - I don't really do design, day to day - I have a
great appreciation for that kind of work and working with creatives. And, so, it's
imperative that I spread the word for what I do. And, of course, I appreciate
what they do. And, so, we tend to feed work back and forth to one another, when
I do work with designers, themselves, so, yeah. A lot of the Creative Suite,
Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. I'm pretty self-taught on that. I even taught
myself to program in HTML and CSS, early in my career. That's because I
started out on my own as a consultant and I really didn't have any budget, to lean
on that sort of thing with other people. And, so, back to necessity being the
mother of invention, I taught myself a lot of that. On my earlier iterations and
early work, I did some of the design on my own, but, since then, having branched out
and tried, you know, and this is a piece of advice I could give anybody. Focus on
what you want. Don't try to be everything to everybody, and
focus in on what you want to do, and let other people do their work, and
rely on them to do what they do well. And, you know, when you need to and when
you can, spend the money on tools like Markzware's that actually get things
done, so you can actually spend time doing what you do, and not be spending
time outside of what your specialty is. Excellent, well,
Andrew, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, David. Thank you for
using our products, and good luck and success in all your business endeavors.
Alright. Thank you very much. Take care.