I spent 2 weeks on building this micro tool, which got only 27 users
Hi it is Iuliia here👋
Small background, I started learning code a year ago from micro-tool which I built with a lot of help of GPT, which got a lot of views like 200k in first days and users.
And since then continue building micro- tools, to grow existing projects or maybe see if smth new can evolve.
I started building this micro tool more than two weeks ago and planned to finish in couple of days, as it was from existing tool.
So, the micro tool I worked on is Pitch Deck Generator is a micro tool to generate a pitch deck and instantly get a trackable link to it.
https://deck.papermark.io
Challenges I faced:
- Create input fields, where users insert details for startup
- Next part was to put variables on different slides of the deck
- Create AI generated responses for fields.
- Than this html deck, was turned into pdf with ReactPDF (this was main challenge, I rebuilt all design for each slide to fit ReactPDF)
- PDF connected to Papermark to get link instantly I don't store any data, it is all in local storage.
How it works?
1.Add startup details
2. Generate your deck
3. Edit slides
4. Turn it instantly in a link
5. Share and track views
Where design and inspiration come from ?
The design come from Midday cool deck which got over 17k views.
So, there come the inspiration and some of components built with v0, Vercel
Stats so far:
So far (last 24h) it got around 100 views on page and 27 users, who actually generated pitch deck.
Twitter post and demo https://x.com/shnai0/status/1790738582723764254
I shared it in different communities and places for people to try it out, not super excited with results. Especially as i planned to work on SEO for it with it for the term so get more users.
Waste of time ?
No idea, but lets see, i will push it in couple of more places..
🔗 Happy to share link to it with you if you interested to give it a try, it is fully open and free.🔗
What is the tech stack you build this upon
All in NextJs, Tailwind CSS
I am doing market research for a project that should help developers build better side projects. Would you be open to a 10 minute interview? If so here’s my Calendly link. https://calendly.com/davidjustice28/developer-q-a-meeting
Interesting, I think you need to work a bit on the presentation of the generated deck, but it's interesting.
I meant it was hard one, as because I needed to turn it into pdf, I created each slide to times, and second time adapted them to ReactPDF. Because of that I feel like it is not super sustainable.... But let's see how it goes.
Thanks for support
I would love to give it a try
One tip I heard from others, when you build free tools as a marketing, consider using it on a main domain, followed by a path like /tools/free-xyz-tool to get the most from the SEO juice, backlinks, domain authority.
I did this with my free tool: https://startuputils.com/tools/free-bento-grid-generator
and I saw a few successful Founders doing the same, not using different subdomains for those free tools!
This is a good tip, and we tried to do it to connect papermark to the project.
But papermark open source and project are separately. Also nothing is hosted in database, so would not be possible to connect to same domain. But will try again
Not sure how you're hosting those projects, but from my knowledge it should be easy to do with two separate projects anyway.
You can try using DNS Records to point specific path to your second project, so it would be
root.com - main project server IP
root.com/my-path - point to second project
Look at Google for more info, maybe you can set it up ;)
Guessing it should be a difficult project. Thanks for sharing!
Got harder than I thought, somehow because of react pdf and converting presentations to pdf
Credits to you for starting this :)
Yes, on it. Thanks Marius