FlashSlides
AI Presentation Maker
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The Problem
I'm a game and app developer. I started coding at 12, and over the years I've created countless presentations — for game pitches, project proposals, marketing campaigns, you name it.
And I was terrible at it.
Not the ideas. The ideas were solid. But the presentations? They looked like they were designed by a developer with zero design skills. Because they were. I'd spend hours wrestling with PowerPoint templates, trying to make slides that didn't look embarrassing, and by the time the design was passable, I'd lost the energy for the actual content.
I realized I wasn't alone. Most developers, educators, and creators aren't designers. We have great ideas, but the barrier between those ideas and a compelling presentation is steep.
The tools that existed fell into two camps:
Manual tools (PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva) — powerful but slow, require heavy design skills.
AI tools (Gamma, Tome) — nice but expensive, often lack native PPTX editing, and major players like Tome have completely shut down their slide products, leaving users locked out.
So I decided to build my own.
Building Flash
I started building Flash about a year ago. The concept was simple: type a topic describing your presentation, get back a complete slide deck with titles, content, images, and charts — ready to export and present.
Technically, it's interesting under the hood:
No traditional backend — everything runs entirely serverless on Next.js Server Actions paired with a secure cloud database.
Structured AI Data — The AI engine outputs structured JSON validated via strict schema definitions, mapping directly to custom dynamic slide layouts.
Dynamic Asset Pipeline — Images are fetched programmatically via a fast AI image generation API, utilizing a high-quality stock photo API as a seamless fallback to prevent broken UI layouts.
Native Export — Compiles the web layout data into native, fully editable PPTX binary files on the fly.
Cross-Platform Delivery — The exact same web codebase is wrapped with lightweight native wrappers to build and ship the native Android/iOS mobile apps and the desktop application simultaneously.
But the product is the easy part. The journey was messy.
The Real Journey
I've been iterating on this for over a year, and it was not a straight line.
Monetization experiments:
Started with standard digital product marketplaces — didn't work well for SaaS infrastructure.
Moved to open developer funding platforms — got it working, then hit scale limitations.
Finally landed on a robust merchant of record for web payments paired with an enterprise SDK for mobile in-app subscriptions.
Identity shifts:
The product went through an entirely different name during early development.
The landing page has been completely redesigned at least 4-5 times.
Pricing has changed dramatically (went through multiple subscription models before landing on the current credit-based economy).
The low moments:
Debugging merchant payment webhooks for days, hitting the same silent errors over and over.
Frustrated git messages at 3 AM like:
"PLEASE FIX THIS" and "you idiot!!!" — yes, those are real commit messages in my local history.
Moments where I sat at my desk wondering if anyone would actually use this.
The wins:
When the first few users started leaving reviews:
"I never imagined getting such an incredible app" and "I do all my homework presentations in just one click."
When I hit the "woahhh finally external customer ID syncing is working!!" moment at 2 AM.
When I opened my dashboard and realized people were actually paying real money for something I built.
Where It Is Now
Flash today has thousands of users across web, Android/iOS, and desktop. It features:
4 pricing tiers (Free / $5 / $12 / $50) with a flexible, user-friendly credit economy.
8 presentation styles (General, Educational, Business, Startup Pitch, Sales, Marketing, Research, Technical).
AI editing with tone adjustments (Formal, Friendly, Persuasive, Casual, etc.).
AI expansion that intelligently contextualizes and adds relevant slides.
Real data rendering (automatic bar, line, and pie charts).
Editable PPTX and PDF export.
And I'm still just one person building this part-time, competing against products from giant teams with millions in VC funding.
What I Learned
A few things that might help other indie hackers:
Start with your own pain. I built Flash because I needed it myself. That made the motivation real and sustained me through the hard parts.
Iterate on monetization early. Moving to a credit-based economy was a game-changer. It's more flexible than hard paywalls, limits API abuse, and feels fairer to users.
Cross-platform from day one. Maintaining one core unified web codebase that compiles down into mobile and desktop wrappers is remarkably productive for a solo dev. It saves weeks of duplicate engineering.
Ship fast, even if it's ugly. The first version of Flash was rough. But getting real users on it early gave me the exact production logs and feedback that shaped everything.
AI coding assistants are a real force multiplier. I won't pretend I built this entirely by hand. There are over 700+ commits in the repository, and working closely with AI throughout the development pipeline is what allows a single developer to go toe-to-toe with an entire engineering team.
What's Next
I'm still actively figuring out product-market fit. There's a lot left to expand on:
More slide templates and design variety
Advanced engine layout processing
Team/collaboration spaces
API access for developers
If you want to try it out, it's completely free to get started (no credit card required): FlashSlides.app
I'd genuinely love feedback from this community — on the user experience, the credit pricing model, the architecture, or anything else. That's the whole point of building in public.
Thanks for reading! 🙏
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