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?<p>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.<p>What am I missing?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I am more than happy with my presentation. It looks OK without me doing any extra work.<p>If you're 0 at making presentations then Pitch is for you. For other, can't really say.<p>Pitch team, good job, thx. I'm not paying you so hope that at least this comment will do some good for you.<p>P.S. I've read that Pitch raised $50M pre-launch. Did they pivot or what?<p>[1] <a href="https://app.pitch.com/app/presentation/61deced0-886c-4c28-a657-72013d35c04e/e7846aa5-5432-4273-9e9b-1d1fabd81cb4" rel="nofollow">https://app.pitch.com/app/presentation/61deced0-886c-4c28-a6...</a>
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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>It looks like a cool product and I might sign up to play around but something doesn't add up.
I find it interesting that real time collaboration is now a headline feature appearing in all sorts of products.<p>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.".<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>It seems like you're squandering an opportunity to use Pitch to pitch me Pitch.
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.
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.<p>There are a couple of things I wish Pitch supported, like vector image uploads and better looking diagrams and charts.<p>Overall I’m a big fan, and can’t see myself ever opening Google Slides again.<p>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:<p><a href="https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/e6b7e457-430f-4975-b589-9463f4729d9e/5e8556ae-6604-48ca-a2ae-08df8a916697" rel="nofollow">https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/e6b7e457-430f-...</a><p><a href="https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/9787c433-3dc0-465b-acf0-8b52359a6590" rel="nofollow">https://app.pitch.com/app/public/presentation/9787c433-3dc0-...</a>
There are many usability improvements that can be made to this for speed of slide creation.<p>Feedback<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I think this will be really powerful for events. Imagine if you had ONE master slide deck that had:<p>- A slide for audience polling<p>- A slide for a zoom call with one of your speakers<p>- A slide that managed an icebreaker activity (like Kahoot)<p>- A slide that tracked merch sales in real time<p>- A slide with general analytics about your event (ie. how many registered attendees are actually in the room)<p>All you have to do is hit NEXT SLIDE
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.<p>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.<p>That said, I have only worked on Pitch for hours so YMMV. Congrats on the launch!
This looks great to be honest to build collaborative slide decks.<p>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.<p>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.<p><a href="https://paste.bywetransfer.com/" rel="nofollow">https://paste.bywetransfer.com/</a>
Figma is better for pure design and has great built in collaboration too.<p>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?<p>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.<p>You need balls to get in a crowded area with players like Google and Microsoft.<p>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.<p>Good luck with the next steps! I'll give it a try for my next pitch :finger-crossed:
I really like Pitch’s emphasis on Keyboard shortcuts. IMO all UIs should have a keyboard-centric mode. See Kitemaker and Superhuman.<p>It doesn’t yet have basics like dotted lines and curves lines etc but I assume those and more will come soon.<p>What is the differentiation compared to SlideBean? And Canva ?
Congrats to the Pitch Team. Looks like a beautiful product.<p>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.
Disclaimer, I work at Pitch!<p>Thought I'd mention we are hiring :)<p><a href="https://pitch.com/about#hiring" rel="nofollow">https://pitch.com/about#hiring</a>
"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.