5 ms·

Show HN: Browser-based PowerPoint alternative

57 points by jeremysizle 7y ago

bkm 7y ago
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.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  Yes, still very experimental at the moment but working on a way to get a demo presentation into the landing page nicely :)
eyeball 7y ago
Someone should make a draw.io for presentations.
alexchamberlain 7y ago
I don’t really get the analytics proposition: I don’t design presentations to be read - I design them to be presented?
- xenospn 7y ago
  Investors usually ask for presentation decks to be sent.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  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.
  - ksaj 7y ago
    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.
- phillc73 7y ago
  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.
resill 7y ago
I simply use Asciidoctor [0] to generate reveal.js [1] presentations. [0] https://revealjs.com/#/ https://revealjs.com/#/ [1] https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-revealjs/ https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-revealjs/
- arkitaip 7y ago
  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.
  - jeremysizle 7y ago
    Thanks for the feedback, we’re looking at how we can change up the page a bit to make it a more digestible.
stanislavb 7y ago
I can’t see why people would be criticizing this. It’s always best for everyone if the are more alternatives.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  Thanks!
- mhd 7y ago
  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.
jeremysizle 7y ago
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/ 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 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sizle-3
- osrec 7y ago
  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!
  - poniko 7y ago
    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.
jeremysizle 7y ago
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 :)
- sadfklsjlkjwt 7y ago
  This is creepy. Do the customers know that they are being spied on?
  - jeremysizle 7y ago
    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.
    - tobr 7y ago
      Instead of whatabouting it, maybe you can answer sadfklsjlkjwt’s question: do they know this is happening?
      - jeremysizle 7y ago
        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.
threatripper 7y ago
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.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  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
  - threatripper 7y ago
    Is the local presentation mode a single file that can be transferred via USB stick to another PC that has no internet connection?
    - jeremysizle 7y ago
      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.
      - threatripper 7y ago
        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.
- est31 7y ago
  > 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 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1200
bgdkbtv 7y ago
You have one of the best landing pages for a product I've ever seen
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  Made my night! Thank you
new_here 7y ago
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 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!
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  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.
dojosensei 7y ago
Looks like it could be useful. However, the homepage design looks like a replica of https://www.figma.com https://www.figma.com. Did you use them for inspiration?
- kresten 7y ago
  Copying look and feel is fine. Stealing the code isn’t ok. Presumably this is s look and feel copy?
kristianc 7y ago
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.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  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.

57 points by jeremysizle 7y ago

bkm 7y ago

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.

jeremysizle 7y ago
Yes, still very experimental at the moment but working on a way to get a demo presentation into the landing page nicely :)

eyeball 7y ago

Someone should make a draw.io for presentations.

alexchamberlain 7y ago

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

xenospn 7y ago
Investors usually ask for presentation decks to be sent.
jeremysizle 7y ago
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.
- ksaj 7y ago
  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.
phillc73 7y ago
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.

resill 7y ago

I simply use Asciidoctor [0] to generate reveal.js [1] presentations. [0] https://revealjs.com/#/ https://revealjs.com/#/ [1] https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-revealjs/ https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoctor-revealjs/

arkitaip 7y ago
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.
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  Thanks for the feedback, we’re looking at how we can change up the page a bit to make it a more digestible.

stanislavb 7y ago

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

jeremysizle 7y ago
Thanks!
mhd 7y ago
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.

jeremysizle 7y ago

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/ 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 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sizle-3

osrec 7y ago
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!
- poniko 7y ago
  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.

jeremysizle 7y ago

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 :)

sadfklsjlkjwt 7y ago
This is creepy. Do the customers know that they are being spied on?
- jeremysizle 7y ago
  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.
  - tobr 7y ago
    Instead of whatabouting it, maybe you can answer sadfklsjlkjwt’s question: do they know this is happening?
    - jeremysizle 7y ago
      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.

threatripper 7y ago

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.

jeremysizle 7y ago
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
- threatripper 7y ago
  Is the local presentation mode a single file that can be transferred via USB stick to another PC that has no internet connection?
  - jeremysizle 7y ago
    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.
    - threatripper 7y ago
      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.
est31 7y ago
> 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 https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/issues/1200

bgdkbtv 7y ago

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

jeremysizle 7y ago
Made my night! Thank you

new_here 7y ago

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 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!

jeremysizle 7y ago
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.

dojosensei 7y ago

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

kresten 7y ago
Copying look and feel is fine. Stealing the code isn’t ok. Presumably this is s look and feel copy?

kristianc 7y ago

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.

jeremysizle 7y ago
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.