[dchuk]

So 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?

[jstummbillig]

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).

[gcatalfamo]

So, the differentiating value consists in simply not being made by Google?

[jstummbillig]

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.

[joering2]

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

[Karunamon]

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.

[IshKebab]

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.

[capableweb]

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.

[echelon]

Google is never going to close slides or docs. Gsuite makes them enterprise money.

[capableweb]

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.

[pgt]

Would you bet on Google never closing Slides? I wouldn’t.

[echelon]

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.

[kall]

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.

[CReber]

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

[thrower_2]

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?

[tinyT]

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

[li4ick]

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.

[andor]

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.

[klintcho]

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.

[agentdrtran]

This offers support for custom fonts which Google Slides doesn't, which is a big deal for a lot of people.

[marban]

Beautiful product is one thing, but this is also run by beautiful people. https://pitch.com/about