Pitch: Collaborative presentation software for teams
pitch.comSo I REALLY don’t mean this to be cynical, but: other than this clearly being a beautiful product, and I guess the simple fact that it’s just not a Google product, what exactly does this bring to the table that Google slides doesn’t already do?
I say this as a guy who spends a lot of time in Google slides, both on my own presentations as well as collaborating on group ones, and it works pretty much perfectly. If I were to switch from it, I need something that absolutely crushes it in some way, but looking at the landing page for this product, nothing is particularly popping out to show it being all that different than what I already use in Slides, which is also included in my company email along with sheets and docs.
What am I missing?
Why would you miss anything? I think you are merely skipping over the part you have not missed: It's well designed and not a Google product. In a world with space for a thousand todo and project management apps, I am sure there is space for a slides competitor, even if that was all it has going for it (although I am assuming there is more).
So, the differentiating value consists in simply not being made by Google?
That depends on you. Again: There is a whole slew of very much overlapping productivity apps out there. People are getting hyper specific about minute features and how they want the UX to feel, exactly. (EDIT: To illustrate this point, a friends choice of note taking app recently boiled down to the availability of (A) text background colors in (B) sufficient amounts and color variety with (C) good enough black-on-text-bg-color-contrast.)
As with every moderately sized app, there is bound to be a number of things that Pitch has its own spin on. Different enough for you to matter? Maybe not. Different enough for someone else to matter? Probably yes.
Knowing Google history in shutting down anything other than search, mail and maps, yes its a huge advantage. I was approach to use “Authenticator” app in new project and upon finding out its Google, I declined
Google authenticator is just TOTP. The whole "scan a QR code, type the number" thing will work with any client, not just Google's app.
I'd say a VC-funded presentation startup is a fair bit more likely to shut down than one of Google's core products is.
One of Google core product? AFAIK, Google itself has _one_ core product, and only one, which is Ads. The rest are services meant to sell more ads, or get more user data so the ads are more effective.
Other products are usually spin out into their own companies and/or under Alphabet rather than Google.
Google is never going to close slides or docs. Gsuite makes them enterprise money.
Don't be so sure. Yeah, G Suite makes them money, free Google Slides or Docs doesn't.
After seeing them close down a couple of services I never thought they would close down, I don't think anything "free" is off-limit right now. Especially depending on how the US/world economy goes.
Would you bet on Google never closing Slides? I wouldn’t.
I'll bet it's still here in ten years. Fifteen if there are no dramatic technological shake ups.
I know Google kills off stuff left and right, but Gsuite has huge penetration in business and academia. Slides are a part of that.
Keynote is also a well designed product not made by google. It is available on the web and supports real time collaboration.
But it seems like no one cares about web/collaboration in iWork apps and apple isn‘t really pushing it as a gsuite competitor. The sharing model is maybe not exactly work friendly.
So since gsuite is absolutely dominating iWork already, I think they have a shot by just making it more well designed than Slides.
Hi there, founder of Pitch here.
That’s a perfectly valid question, and I don’t think you’ll be the last to ask it. Throughout our beta, we learned that people creating presentations for work end up using more than one tool to get the result they want. Slides for collaboration, Keynote for design, PowerPoint for charts, etc. Sure, Google Slides can be good enough — but it’s rare that people tell us it’s great.
We want to be great.
We’re obviously still early in our journey, but there are a few areas where we already provide a lot of value compared to the status quo:
* Pitch promotes speed and consistency. Honestly, you should be able to build a deck 10x faster than before. Part of this is due to our template gallery — we already have 40 beautiful, business-ready templates and are shipping more each month. We also have presentation styles, which effectively serve as CSS for slides. That means you can set up your brand style and reskin our templates to look like yours.
* There’s no learning curve. Anyone can get up to speed quite quickly without having to wrestle with a complicated ribbon or series of menus. We’ve worked to make our editor intuitive enough for non-designers, but powerful enough for pros.
* Pitch connects to other popular services. Today we support Unsplash, Giphy, Loom, Google Analytics, and more. And next year we want to start opening up Pitch to other developers so that you can bring live data directly into Pitch.
It's still early days for Pitch. Our broader vision is much bigger than what you see on our site (more emphasis on video, AI-driven design, and data — I go into it a bit more here: https://www.protocol.com/pitch-app-slide-decks.) PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides have decades on us, so we don’t expect to surpass them overnight.
I hope you’ll still take the time to give Pitch a try and let us know your thoughts — and hopefully in a few months what sets us apart will be even clearer.
It sounds like you might have some idea of what a killer feature for presentation software might be. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can find my email address in my profile.
Thanks, Christian
Is the idea here that you can front-run all other VCs by collecting data about prospective investments as it's being formulated?
Do you sell user data, or analysis of that data, to VCs, investors, or other third parties?
Usually with these new software products I'm more excited about what the future will bring than what the product looks like at launch. When is the last time Google Slides has made a significant update? Now compare that to the speed of Pitch has built their product - pretty impressive what they have built in a relatively short time - let's see what the future holds! Also still skeptical but so far I am enjoying using their product
Yeah, I guess you're right. You can sense much faster progress when the product is made by a single company, rather than by a team within a major company.
I also use Slides a lot. Slides is great for collaboration, but lacks a lot compared to other graphics applications.
Mainly, I find it difficult to make text look good in Slides.
* For instance, the line-height can only be set in multiples of the font size ("1.5x"). That makes it difficult to impossible to lay out text of different font sizes in a baseline grid. The multiplier can be adjusted for each line and font size but it's not precise enough, so the results look off.
* A large share of decks use bullet points and again the formatting options are very limited.
* No custom font support
* There is also limited support for importing vector graphics, e.g. SVG needs to be converted to a Windows Metafile/EMF (!) before importing. I assume that's done to simplify MS Office compatibility.
I love pitch, going into Google slides, my default is always ugly slides (I'm far far from any designer). Default going into Pitch are beautiful slides, which are fun to work on because it makes it easy to make them beautiful.
Easy to use and collaborate on as well.
From the outside I tend to be almost as cynical: is it that much of a difference to become a killer enterprise tool taking marketshare from Google slides ? I never saw a big difference between Zoom and Google meet, even worse, for Zoom you had to download something, but as it happens, Zoom became a behemoth, so now my mind is open to even minuscule improvements over incumbents can sort lead to a run off growth and usage cycle.
This offers support for custom fonts which Google Slides doesn't, which is a big deal for a lot of people.
Beautiful product is one thing, but this is also run by beautiful people. https://pitch.com/about
Many people here asking for an example. Here's a real example of a pre-seed pitch deck that I'm using for my meetings with investors [1]. I'll explain why I like Pitch.
I am a first time founder. I am a technical guy who have to be a jack-of-all-trades for the past 6 months. I am a type of guy who's really bad at designing slides. Leave me with PowerPoint or Google Presentation and you'll see the ugliest presentation in your life.
I had to do a pitch deck and I saw Pitch app. I applied for a beta access and got it about 4 months ago.
Pitch was exactly what I needed: a set of pre-defined slides, graphs, tables which don't allow someone like me to make bad decisions doing presentation.
I am more than happy with my presentation. It looks OK without me doing any extra work.
If you're 0 at making presentations then Pitch is for you. For other, can't really say.
Pitch team, good job, thx. I'm not paying you so hope that at least this comment will do some good for you.
P.S. I've read that Pitch raised $50M pre-launch. Did they pivot or what?
[1] https://app.pitch.com/app/presentation/61deced0-886c-4c28-a6...
As someone who makes startups and invests sometimes, I recommend you remove "Wrote 90% of code being a part-time cofounder." That would be a red flag.
Could you explain why that would be a red flag?
No one wants to invest in part-time entrepreneurs. This is a pitch deck, it should only show reasons to invest.
I assume you put in the statement to show that he _thinks_ going full time would make him more productive. But the flipside of that argument is what we _know_ which is he currently has another job.
So here you're showing that there's risk involved with your team. This risk would have to be balanced with an equally high or higher reward if you wanted to highlight it. Don't show an investor the door (in your deck) unless you want them to open it.
All it does is make me think that they aren't full time, and may not be committed. I also have questions about IP concerns.
These may not be serious issues, and they can be easily answered, but this statement is a distraction. You want your pitch deck to answer questions, not raise new ones.
Thx a lot for this explanation.
We're full time. It just started as a side-project
not sure either, maybe a lack of balance in the delegation or organizational structure ?
Full-time today. But I get what you mean. I had a lot of doubt wether I should put it there or not.
What makes Pitch better than purchasing templates? For instance, you can find professionally designed templates here [1].
[1] https://graphicriver.net/popular_item/by_category?category=p...
For me it's simply the fact that I do not have to pay a dime.
Which to me means that these templates/themes are at risk of starting to look stale sooner rather than later.
What makes Spotify better than early iTunes? Quite obvious, no?
No, I don't think it is. Early itunes was a media player and music store I could use to catalog my own music as well as license theirs. Spotify is a streaming music service with a free ads based model or paid monthly subscription to get access to most commercially released music. How is that anything like Pitch vs PowerPoint templates?
I was just referring to the 'Subscription service vs One-time purchase' model. If you want to make a single presentation in a year, perhaps, not considering any differences, you are better of buying templates on Themeforest. But the convenience, cost-effectiveness of such a service, i can certainly see value
Fyi on slide 6 you've a typo "Opportunity". Congrats on the product btw!
Thx! Just fixed. Gosh, I knew posting it here will have some benefits.
thx so much for showing an example, very helpful. btw, if I may, it might be nicer to stick to just serif or sans-serif fonts in your deck, the mix is making my eyes a little sad.
Oh wow. Didn't see that. I told you I'm bad at it lol.
But thx a lot! Will do that.
Thanks for sharing the business logic for Pitch.
For your own startup, are you targeting a specific niche? Do you have any advantages in distribution besides the excellent HN top comment hack :)
DaaS is a bit more horizontal. It has to be. We sell an ingredient for others' solution.
Excellent HN top comment hack lol.
Content marketing, open-sourcing (2 popular Python packages), and cold sales work so far.
Honestly for this kinda hype I expected something more beautiful. This is way behind beautiful.ai
Damn good idea btw. I can immediately grasp how you could make money.
Thx. Probably, you know some company that could benefit from our solution?
Probably because there are numerous incumbents and an aggregated news feed isn't nearly as unique as their grid chart makes it out to be.
I use Google Slides _a ton_ and having a web based alternative is definitely interesting. Since I'm not a Mac user I've definitely yearned for Keynote-like animations etc. so this could be really useful.
That said, something here doesn't seem to add up to me. Pitch is launching now, two years after being founded by seven founders, raised 50M(!) in funding and has 89 employees?
I can't figure out why 1. they didn't launch sooner 2. why they need so many people 3. why it's a freemium model 4. How they _already_ raised $50M.
It looks like a cool product and I might sign up to play around but something doesn't add up.
This.
I have always thought that investors have a half-baked exit deal before putting their money into these start-ups.
I remember their raise announcement - I also remember not exactly understanding why you'd need $50M to build a web-based presentation software (plenty of those exist and I'm almost certain none of them raised anything even close). And now that I read they have close to 100 employees before launching I'm even more confused.
I find it interesting that real time collaboration is now a headline feature appearing in all sorts of products.
I feel like everyone likes to think that their job is more creative than it really is - little work really happens in "the kind of spontaneous collaboration and free flow of ideas that many of us took advantage of when working in a shared space with our team.".
I've been involved in many presentations remotely with multiple people on Google Slides and it always ends up a bit of a mess. There's alway someone ignoring the style guide, no one is really sure when a slide is finished, orphaned comments left ignored, etc.
I know this is blaming the tool for the way it is used, but I can't help but feel that the tool is contributing to the problem. In my experience, 9 times out of 10 delegating sections of content with a final edit and sign off by a designated individual would work very well - no real time collaboration needed.
> In my experience, 9 times out of 10 delegating sections of content with a final edit and sign off by a designated individual would work very well - no real time collaboration needed.
So that's actually how we do our internal weekly presentation. Each team has a section, and we all work on it. (Albeit in realtime)
> no one is really sure when a slide is finished
You can assign slides in pitch and update their status. So everyone knows who is responsible for something and what state it is in.
https://help.pitch.com/en/articles/4318642-set-a-status-and-...
As someone who regularly uses Powerpoint but isn't completely in love with it I don't see anything compelling on your home screen that makes me care about Pitch.
If there is some killer feature I don't know about it should be made more prominent. What I'm seeing is real time collaboration - which is already possible with Office 365 and some supposedly great templates. Switching software is a pain, so you better give me a good reason to.
It seems like you're squandering an opportunity to use Pitch to pitch me Pitch.
Many of these products use https://webrtc.org/
Must be amongst the largest public facing products that's all clojure/script..?
Nubank is also pretty big (clj/cljs/datomic).
There's also Exoscale using clojure(script) extensively. Funding Circle and CircleCI also use it but I think "only" on the backend.
How did you know it was Clojurescript? Pretty awesome to see Clojure getting more use. It feels like a leap forward every time I even play with it.
Not too hard to guess from the jobs page https://pitch.com/about#hiring
Roam Research is also written in Clojure/Script.
Roam is rather niche though, and insanely overpriced.
Might be niche but they raise $200 million, four times what Pitch raised.
They raised $9m at a $200m valuation
Reify Health's StudyTeam is ~100% Clojure + ClojureScript
It's funny how Microsoft has an absolute beast on their hand with Powerpoint, which has so many obscure and powerful features that their employees must be fuming at how it's all just there, and nobody uses them. Fractals, high-res fish models, it's Turing complete for Pete's sake. They could easily destroy their competition if only they got somebody in charge to do it.
For instance, the PowerPoint integration with Teams is slick, where you can independently navigate and then join the presenter again (at presenter's option). Or teams actually co-edit remotely while lead is presenting, team members are editing on the fly, and others/guests are viewing the presenter's choice of a native presentation or a window or a screen... not to mention any/all of this working on Surface Hub conference room touch screens.
I used to be a Keynote person, then Deckset, then a couple different markdown slide tools ... but for team based work these integrations have pulled me back into PowerPoint "at the office".
I still hate most of these tools though, slide-ware is where knowledge goes to die.
I’ve been on the Pitch beta for the last couple weeks. Previously I spent a couple years making presentations using Keynote, and then recently dabbled in Google Slides. In my experience the #1 advantage Pitch has over Slides is that it is easy to make beautiful decks, and easy to work with non-designers collaboratively because I can pre-define all the document styles and just tell them not to customise any font or colour settings. The ability to upload custom fonts is also super useful.
There are a couple of things I wish Pitch supported, like vector image uploads and better looking diagrams and charts.
Overall I’m a big fan, and can’t see myself ever opening Google Slides again.
If you’d like to see an example of a presentation created in Pitch, check out these two. The first is the Supercast deck, and the second one of many delightful “What’s new“ presentations from Pitch themselves:
https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/e6b7e457-430f-...
https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/9787c433-3dc0-...
For anyone that's expecting all those fancy animations that you see in this post and on the landing pages: They are not really in the product.
I think this is a deeper point than it appears at first, there’s been a trend towards the democratization of software, e.g., Figma is easier to use than Photoshop, mobile software is simpler than desktop, Google Docs is simpler than Excel. But the high-end just continues to be moving in the other direction, in the case of the example here, bleeding-edge design is moving into the 3D space (my guess is Cinema 4D for the 3D elements on Pitch's homepage), and 3D packages are an order of magnitude more complex than either Photoshop or Excel. I.e., instead of taking successful simpler software's lead, the high-end is actually getting more complicated.
For awhile now I’ve been predicting a moat forming in creative professions between people using high-end (usually desktop) software, and the low-end (either mobile or mobile compatible). Historically, this was never the case, e.g., all designers used Photoshop, all music producers used Logic or similar. Now with truly viable low-end alternatives like the Affinity Suite, and Final Cut deliberately moving down market, or the absolutely rich audio ecosystem on iOS, it’s almost like two “classes” of creator are being formed.
Presumably choice is a good thing, but I think more and more the work of people focusing on the high-end is going to stand out from the rest, and career-wise be more in demand.
There are many usability improvements that can be made to this for speed of slide creation.
Feedback
1. For me, it's not a good user experience if I have to click a button on toolbar, that opens a popup, to click through categories, and select a shape. That is too many clicks. Why aren't they just open on the left side or somewhere, especially making it easier to select in widescreens. Keyboard shortcuts fix this, but there's a learning curve.
2. If I have to create 5 different box shapes with different colors, I have to go through that process 5 times. Yes, I can create it once and duplicate it multiple times, but there should be a recently used shapes or something that makes it easier to pick. Google slides has the same issue. Keyboard shortcuts fix this, but there's a learning curve.
3. When creating a shape, I like to drag it vs. click it and have it show up on the canvas. There is no drag option in Pitch.
4. Connecting two shapes using an arrow/line should be possible from the shape on the canvas, and not by creating a new line/arrow and dragging their endpoints to connect the shapes.
Edit: fixed typo
I don't mean to be too negative, and yes these comments are not about the product itself, but I really dislike the excessive animation, scroll feeling heavy, and the fact that the video is playing and not playing at the same time really annoys me.
I'm super excited for Pitch. Since it's a web application I assume there will eventually be a public API, and ways to embed interactive media.
I think this will be really powerful for events. Imagine if you had ONE master slide deck that had:
- A slide for audience polling
- A slide for a zoom call with one of your speakers
- A slide that managed an icebreaker activity (like Kahoot)
- A slide that tracked merch sales in real time
- A slide with general analytics about your event (ie. how many registered attendees are actually in the room)
All you have to do is hit NEXT SLIDE
Curious, what exactly would you be expecting from a presentation software API? Like a webplayer style player.next() and player.back(), or a way to make embedded media inside?
Two functions come to mind:
- Being able to programmatically control the contents of an INDIVIDUAL slide
- Being able to programmatically control the order of slides
With a robust API there are two uses cases I can think of off the top of my head:
- You're leading an all-hands meeting and talking about revenue. The slide is connected to your Stripe account via a webhook, so the revenue figure on screen is dynamic and updates in real time
- You're pitching an investor with the goal of convincing the investor to give you money, and you're recording the conversation in real time. The recording gets processed through some language processing system, and the system recognizes the context of the conversation. You're about to talk about your team, but the system thinks that perhaps a better strategy would be to talk about the market size. So, it automatically reorders to slides and makes the NEXT slide about the market size. You hit next, see the market size slide and then talk about it
I'm sure there's a million different creative use cases that we'll see in the future. I'm fairly optimistic that Pitch has a ton of potential to change the general presentation status quo from static presentations, to dynamic presentations
Whoa nice, never heard of Quip before. Thanks for sharing
So, it's like https://slides.com but collaborative.
slides.com is a products that targets developers. This targets everyone. So it's more like Google slides.
Anyone know how they're implementing the multiplayer video/voice chat? Is it over WebRTC or something else?
For the video+voice, it's WebRTC using Daily (YC W16)
Ah, this was what I was looking for. How did you find out?
Opening up the console, it looks like they are using pusher.com
The footer has more links for "Legal" than for "Product"... a sign of the times.
Haaaaaaaave you been to Germany?
As someone who does a lot of slides, mainly on Keynote and sometimes on PowerPoint, Pitch seems to be a similar kind of large, incremental upgrade when we moved from Sketch to Figma.
For example something as rudimentary as collaboration just barely works on Keynote (and requires files to be saved to iCloud to boot, which doesn't work for us at all). With Pitch you can just share a link and off you go. IIRC this also applies to Powerpoint: to collaborate you need to upload the documents to SharePoint/OneDrive. Google Slides can do this, but for weird some reason (like many of Google's online products) it just doesn't feel good to use.
That said, I have only worked on Pitch for hours so YMMV. Congrats on the launch!
I don't like how every slide bloats the browser history. Google Slides doesn't do that.
This looks great to be honest to build collaborative slide decks.
But the one thing I’m seeing in recent times is that every product is building their own communication layer especially for video/audio instead of letting users default to a catch-all solutions like Slack or Teams or any other similar software. Saw a similar app for collaborative coding with their own audio/video recently.
Interesting development. Not sure if everyone is building this from ground up or there is a communication as a service product/api which they leverage on. (Chime? Twilio?)
How does this compare to Paste by FiftyThree, the team that made Paper? Pricing is the same.
Is there an example of a nice Pitch presentation for a technical topic?
Angels Singing - Writing for Programmers https://app.pitch.com/app/presentation/1407d073-f457-4867-a0...
Figma is better for pure design and has great built in collaboration too.
But I can see how Pitch can provide value to a whole lot of founders who might prefer not to reach for their design tools..
Seems like screen.so is a layer of abstraction above this?
That is, screen.so has all of these features, for any app you want, not just creating slides.
Nice work pitch! The product is pretty awesome.
You need balls to get in a crowded area with players like Google and Microsoft.
But what I see is really some neat features like real time video while editing, following the cursor. Seems like a really well made collaborative software.
Good luck with the next steps! I'll give it a try for my next pitch :finger-crossed:
This landing page is something else. Wow!
Genuinely curious. What did you find most appealing? For me, the landing page looks.. average.
We all just use Google Slides or PowerPoint (with files shared on OneDrive), rough market to get in to.
I really like Pitch’s emphasis on Keyboard shortcuts. IMO all UIs should have a keyboard-centric mode. See Kitemaker and Superhuman.
It doesn’t yet have basics like dotted lines and curves lines etc but I assume those and more will come soon.
What is the differentiation compared to SlideBean? And Canva ?
So is anyone using this ? How is this better than google slides apart from the video collaboration ?
I'm using it. Enjoy it so far. Unfortunately, that's my first tool for building the pitch deck. Not sure how it's better than Google's
Congrats to the Pitch Team. Looks like a beautiful product.
I wonder if it’s really 10 times better than Google Slides, because that’s what it’s competing against. 2x or 3x better is not enough.
I'm not convinced, but wish you good luck nonetheless.
Landing page is not loading (CSS missing) on iOS with AdBlocker (Firefox Focus) enabled, perhaps something you could look into.
Thanks for letting me know. I've passed that on.
I have a crude and jumbled layout on the homepage of Pitch, with many styles missing, using Firefox Focus on iOS with content blocker enabled.
Thanks for the info. We are looking into that at the moment.
Congrats on the public release today!
Do you plan to build an integration API (for embedding into Pitch, not the other way round)?
Ditto on the disclaimer but wanted to emphasize that all jobs are remote-friendly!
Since you're Berlin-based, is internal communication done in German? Asking because I don't speak it, so that might be a factor for me!
No need to worry, all internal communications are in English.
Even outside of the IT sector, I think the majority of the communication in Berlin is done in English. But in IT, English is definitely the lingua franca worldwide.
How're you finding React Native?
I have a bug report, where should I send it?
Hey, from https://help.pitch.com/en/articles/3695706-how-to-report-a-b...
If you’re experiencing an issue please get in touch with us through the messenger or via email to support@pitch.com and let us know about that bug. Helpful information to include:
What steps did you take before you experienced the issue? What happened, and what did you expect to happen instead? If there is an error message, what does it say? If you’re using our web app, which browser and which version are you using? If you’re using our desktop app, what is your operating system? Screenshots and screen recordings are helpful for us to understand an issue.
"Accept All" is the only option on your cookies? Not only is this a potential GDPR violation — additionally it told me enough about the way this project feels on my privacy to just close the page and move on without even checking what it is.
looks goooood