Pitch: Collaborative presentation software for teams
pitch.com
pitch.com
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?
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.
I know Google kills off stuff left and right, but Gsuite has huge penetration in business and academia. Slides are a part of that.
Other products are usually spin out into their own companies and/or under Alphabet rather than Google.
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.
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.
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
Do you sell user data, or analysis of that data, to VCs, investors, or other third parties?
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.
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 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...
But thx a lot! Will do that.
[1] https://graphicriver.net/popular_item/by_category?category=p...
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.
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.
We're full time. It just started as a side-project
For your own startup, are you targeting a specific niche? Do you have any advantages in distribution besides the excellent HN top comment hack :)
Excellent HN top comment hack lol.
Content marketing, open-sourcing (2 popular Python packages), and cold sales work so far.
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.
I have always thought that investors have a half-baked exit deal before putting their money into these start-ups.
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.
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-...
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.
There's also Exoscale using clojure(script) extensively. Funding Circle and CircleCI also use it but I think "only" on the backend.
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.
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 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.
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 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
- 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
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!
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?)
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..
That is, screen.so has all of these features, for any app you want, not just creating slides.
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:
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 ?
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.
Thought I'd mention we are hiring :)
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:
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Screenshots and screen recordings are helpful for us to understand an issue.Do you plan to build an integration API (for embedding into Pitch, not the other way round)?