Show HN: Browser-based PowerPoint alternative | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Browser-based PowerPoint alternative

sizle.io

57 pointsjeremysizle54 comments

Given that many larger businesses are already going to have well established workflows around PowerPoint presentations that are going to be hard to shift, you may be better trying to control the ‘analytics’ portion of the value chain rather than the presentation creation segment.

Have you considered building a tool where people could upload their existing PPTX presentations into Sizle and access analytics on them? I can see that adding real value. At the moment you are probably limiting yourself to SMBs and freelancers.

Hey Kristianc, Sizle currently supports PDF upload for this exact purpose and are working on PPT currently. We’re not trying to shift any sales workflows, the goal is to mainly give power users access to insights in a platform agnostic approach.

I don’t really get the analytics proposition: I don’t design presentations to be read - I design them to be presented?

Hey Alex, it doesn't mention in the title, but Sizle is a tool geared towards sales/marketing teams to help them make sales actions (follow ups with customers, leads, etc) based on when their presentation is opened, what slides were watched the most, etc.

I used to train at IBM, which of course meant a whole lot of PPT. Analytics of the sort described here would be helpful for discovering what slides provide the most mileage for a given presentation.

If you spend 1/2 hour on one slide, and then 2 minutes on a string of 5 consecutive slides, it says a lot about how the content impacts the presentation flow. And it would lay bare if there is any rushing towards the end of each segment.

I often present on a conference call and then distribute the deck to all attendees afterwards. It'd be useful to know who subsequently opened the presentation and what they looked at.

Investors usually ask for presentation decks to be sent.

Hey all, Sizle is an alternative to PowerPoint for sales teams that need to see when their document was opened by a client, what slides they saw, time spent, and it can also automatically schedule a follow up with the viewer. Currently testing it with a bunch of companies here in Australia, but if anyone here is in sales and marketing I'd love to have you try out the (experimental) beta :)

Not sure how I feel about this level of tracking TBH. I can see how the data might benefit some sales teams, but mostly I think it'll be hoovered up, stored and nothing done with it.

Have you put consent mechanisms in place to allow readers to opt out of tracking, while still letting them read the document/slides?

It provides more visibility into the funnel. Seems valuable. Whether it's ethical or not is something different.

Examples of the value it could bring:

Did the prospect drop off because they never even opened the presentation, or did they at least consider it?

After it's been opened, was it opened a bunch more times? Shows that it wasn't ruled out or glazed over.

How recent was it last opened? If it was today then we know it's still under consideration. If it was a month ago, seems like the lead has gone cold.

To me, it seems like there's a mismatch. If the sales channel justifies slide deck type presentations, reliance on analytics smells way too hands off. Slide decks are at the phone call layer not the $10/month SaaS layer. A slide deck doesn't have a "call to action" button that starts the process of charging a credit card.

I don't think it's either or. You can use the analytics to check on the level of interest following a call. You can see the dwell time on particular slides to know when something is of interest or concern.

I'm probably biased. But using slide decks as a stand-alone marketing artifact seems like a poor choice of alternative. Better analytics probably makes it better, but still leaves stand-alone slide decks as a poor form of marketing. A web page, video, email, phone-call, brochure, etc. all seem like a better focus of attention.

It's not that I don't appreciate the product. I just think it is likely to leave the big problem intact in the cases where it is used.

What makes slide decks stand out as bad among web pages, videos, email, calls and brochures?

Inherent low information density. Inherent lack of interactivity. Incidental lack of call to action buttons.

Hey Gordon, I’m pushing a patch in early Jan to address this exact issue.

So, if you intend to sell in the EU, don’t forget the reader will need to give consent to be tracked. And thus is an option you should build in globally too if you believe in people’s privacy.

Thanks, I responded to a similar post earlier but we are pushing a feature soon with a minimalistic consent notification dialog that gives a recipient opt-out ability.

This is creepy.

Do the customers know that they are being spied on?

I think these guys are being a bit precious and don't realise how much is tracked these days. All the email marketing campaign platforms do it, all the specialist quoting tools and line stores do it.

Good work mate, keep going.

In this case the tracking is the only USP. If someone sent me a link to one of these I’d decline.

There is a myriad of document tracking, analytics and crm software out there in enterprise that captures a scary amount of data, Sizle does't do that.

Like any email campaign manager, Sizle tells you when your document is opened, and tells you how much time the user spent looking at it.

Instead of whatabouting it, maybe you can answer sadfklsjlkjwt’s question: do they know this is happening?

Recipients of Mailchimp campaigns have the same experience as recipients of Sizle presentations. They’re not told the sender will be notified when the document is opened however this type of tracking is fairly commonplace.

For comparison, you might allow cookies from a website you visit regularly, even though they’ve notified you do you really know the extent to which you’re being tracked by a cookie like GA? A large part of the online community assume at least some part of their activity is being stored somewhere, Sizle doesn’t even come close to the tracking that’s being applied to almost everyone that visits any news media site for example.

We made our own analytics tool from scratch that only gathers a few metrics to support sales teams. If that’s creepy to you I would recommend looking into some of the bigger data giants.

Email recipients are generally notified by their mail client, despite the intention of the sender to keep it hidden. Email clients do not load remote images by default for this reason, requiring additional user action. Email clients warn users when the text of a link is one URL, but the target is another, for this reason.

Being so uncomfortable to just explain one of the core value propositions of your product in plain language is not a good look. If you’re not confident in what your product does or able to explain why it’s a good thing, you might want to redesign it.

So, no.

I don’t think this is necessarily untrue - but I do think you need to think carefully about what your talk track is on this.

Hey. I'm in Australia and have a back burner project that's about to become medium burner. I'm serious. Going to write an expression of interest for a grant over Christmas. Nearly at MVP stage. Will need customers soon.

You in Sydney?

The homepage looks really professional and slick. A link to a dummy presentation would be a valuable addition though, as not every person is confident signing up to try it.

Yes, still very experimental at the moment but working on a way to get a demo presentation into the landing page nicely :)

I simply use Asciidoctor [0] to generate reveal.js [1] presentations.

[0] https://revealjs.com/#/ [1] https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-revealjs/

I think it's funny that using the format of a presentation is a bad choice for this site. Takes forever to go through.

But really useful as a tool, so thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the feedback, we’re looking at how we can change up the page a bit to make it a more digestible.

Nice, this is an ambitious project and your fresh execution does a good job of cutting through the staleness of typical PowerPoints. I played around, here's some feedback:

- Really like the templates. Lots more would be very helpful so that I can build out a presentation quickly without having to fiddle with detail.

- Top toolbar appears crammed when editing text on a laptop. Tried in both Firefox and Chrome. https://imgur.com/a/fZW7oUI

- You could probably cap the number of presentations in the free tier at about 5 before charging (perhaps a cheaper tier without analytics). Presume you're just trying to get the word out for now.

- Once you've got a good foundation it would be nice to start differentiating with more interactive elements.

Great job, though. All the best!

Agree on all points, a template library is currently in the works, as are some responsiveness fixes :)

We’re really in alpha, and many of the features are experimental so we’re seeing what works and taking what our alpha users are saying seriously.

Does it provide the following?

* Presentations can be exported as PDF.

* Presentations can be downloaded as a single stand-alone HTML file for offline presentation.

* Presentations can be imported/exported from/to Powerpoint.

* Collaborative editing.

> single stand-alone HTML file for offline presentation.

TBH HTML isn't a really good format for stuff like this, as HTML is text-only. Same goes for HAR. The moment you want to embed large images/video you run into size problems.

It would be really nice if browsers supported some kind of archive that contains multiple resources like images, wasm files, etc, that would all be accessible by the browser if you open it. file protocol is basically being deprecated by chrome for stupid security reasons: https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1200

> TBH HTML isn't a really good format for stuff like this, as HTML is text-only. Same goes for HAR. The moment you want to embed large images/video you run into size problems.

Is this really a problem for up to 100 MB? In my experience that would already be a huge Powerpoint presentation including a lot of detailed images or some smaller videos. Most presentations I handle are below 100 slides and below 10 MB.

If it goes beyond that, there will also be other problems. Nobody likes to handle a 5 GB presentation.

Encoding the binary files as BASE64 would add some overhead, indeed, but having a presentation as a single file that can be played by any modern browser on any modern device would provide tremendous usability benefits.

Yep, I have just disabled export to PDF earlier as there was a rendering bug that will be fixed soon.

There is a patch coming in the new year with real time colab, export to PPT, local presentation modes and quite a few more features

Is the local presentation mode a single file that can be transferred via USB stick to another PC that has no internet connection?

The local presentation mode will be a joint release with a Desktop app that can be used without internet access, it won’t include portable files at this stage but it’s on our roadmap.

Dependence on an App is not good for long term viability. Before joining any new ecosystem I check if there is a clear route to transition out of it in the long term. People like me are allergic to lock-in-effects and provider/service-dependencies that could lock oneself out of ones own data if the provider shuts down. Given that export to a common format like pptx works great I will consider this software.

The paradox here is that the better the export functionality works the less people will actually need it.

Sorry to anyone trying to visit the website, the traffic from HN has killed it :(

Here's the direct login link http://dashboard.sizle.io/

And here's the PH post if you want some more info until it's stable again https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sizle-3

I've always wondered how much traffic a site receives when on the front page of HN. Would you mind sharing some stats, and your server size? And perhaps what was the breaking point was for your server in terms of traffic? Thanks!

We where on top 10 earlier this week and it generated somewhere around 100-125 concurrent visitors. Seems like OP needs to beef up the servers a bit. If one of those presentations go viral it will be a shit show.

Looks like it could be useful. However, the homepage design looks like a replica of https://www.figma.com. Did you use them for inspiration?

Copying look and feel is fine. Stealing the code isn’t ok.

Presumably this is s look and feel copy?

I can’t see why people would be criticizing this. It’s always best for everyone if the are more alternatives.

The interesting thing is that alternatives to PowerPoint are actually easier than before.

Does anyone know where the trend towards simpler presentations started? In the '90s, everyone went crazy with transitions, but even beyond that you had a more verbose format, with your usual headline + three bullet points format.

These days it's often one phrase or even word per slide.

Keynote and its more minimalistic design (or arguably feature set) was one contributor, but I think it started even before that.

Thanks!

You have one of the best landing pages for a product I've ever seen

Made my night! Thank you

Someone should make a draw.io for presentations.

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