MeetSlides
Create slides fast and easy
I wrote an article on IH about to help people gain new skill.
Draw The Big Picture: Help people understand what's really important in the skill they're learning. This is like giving them a strong foundation. It's what separates a job done okay from one done brilliantly. For example, if it's about organizing a conference, highlight the crucial stuff, like getting awesome speakers, not just the venue or tickets.
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/guiding-others-in-learning-new-skills-597c749745
Nine days ago April 3 I wrote an article on IndieHackers about the presentation slides software I built.
MeetSlides allows to create slides really fast, while staying focused on creating supportive slides for your main message.
Here I would love to share some insights I discovered after the publishing the first article.
TLTR: IndieHackers worth publishing you product because the community is alive and people would leave you some real feedback.
RESULT IN NINE DAYS
258 visitors, 250 new visitors -- google analytics, see screenshots
Four (4) meaningful comments on IH. It's a lot. When publishing on ProductHunt I might of have hundreds of upvotes and some cheer-up comments but truly MEANINGFUL comment was rare, if any.
Found quite many problems with website, see details below
The problems I found
#1 Sign up was broken
I used google firebase authentification and CDN, but when I changed CDN to vercel then google confirm email link got broken. Needed to change DNS/Auth settings.
#2 Feedback form was extremely obtrusive
It appear to often and quite randomly. Some people closed window just after dialog appeared. Fixed that.
#3 Title of the article was too vague
It's not obvious what product does from the article title, LOL
#4 Wrong choice of analytics tools
I'm engineer and so I showed results to my friend who is good with marketing and they told I should change analytics to see everything in one place. So, I switched.
In short, IndieHackers launch was valuable for the following reasons:
-- I found and fixed very obvious problems with the website
-- I configured analytics to track the real data
-- I got FOUR REAL comments which shows IndieHackers community alive and cares.
-- I got 250 new visitors to website and I learned from their experiences.
About 3 years ago I joined my current employer. Yes, I’m bootstrapping and have not quit my day job yet. I joined venture backed company early on a position of a lead software engineer.
At some point, company was expiring enormous growth: from 20 to 300 employees during 1.5 years period of time. Number of engineers grew from 2 to 30.
After discussion with CTO, we decided to hire and train no previous experience engineers. For two reasons:
— they are cheap;
— we wanted to build a product culture RnD department. In our region most engineers working in outsourcing companies. And it’s not a proper fit for us.
So, one of my direct responsibilities became training new engineers. By the way, I became Director of Engineering at that time.
At some day, I realised I’m going to make five training presentation that day. And that I’m not making any slides or google slide -like presentations anymore. I just have no time for that.
Other that that, I hate editing google slides for a couple more reasons.
First, all the time I getting distracted from the topic I wanted to communicate. I spent too much time fixing layout, fonts, sizes, languages, colours, backgrounds and other things. And the worst, I do it in the middle of process of figuring out the message I want to communicate.
Second. I’m not happy with the result. Over time crafted my own presentation template, and it’s much better than standard themes. And yet it’s just subpar.
Also, I was looking for a business idea I would understand the customer standpoint. So, I wrote my pain points and add this idea to the list of my business ideas.
After some period of time, I decided to give it shot create an online software which would help me and hopefully others to create slides for their presentations.
My requirements were simple:
— I should be able to focus on my message content during creating slides;
— Slides should looks nice without extra effort;
— Creating slides should take no more time as creating presentation checklist.
And so today is the first day I’m showing the product to public. I would love to experience product and leave you feedback, please try MeetSlides yourself https://meetslides.com!
Thank you!
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I don't make a lot of slide presentations so I'm not your target, but...
For me, the place I think about content is when writing a bullet list in Google Docs. What I would want is a thing that could take a bullet list from Google Docs and make it a presentation. I don't want to edit my slides using your editor because then you own my data. I want to be able to edit my bullet lists quickly using all the methods I'm used to in Google Docs (e.g., selected several lines with control-down-arrow and indent them with tab).
What I would want is some understanding of how I can use Google Docs to create the presentation structure. For instance, if I have several sub-bullets under a main bullet, those would automatically be a sequence of slides under one heading, perhaps using a different color to call out that group. Similarly, I could just paste images into the Google Doc and they would automatically look good in the slide. And there could be a simple language ("fade 500" or "slide right") to control transitions between slides and other animations.
So it's "Text2Pres" like "Sheet2Site".
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Hi Michael.
Thank you for your feedback. I created slides in a very similar manner as you describe here. I used google keep to write down bullet points for my ideas. By the way, one advantage of google keep vs google docs is that its much better on the go.
But, also I love to see my slides as I write them. For a very simple reason: this way I can imagine how my listeners will comprehend the message.
I love to create presentation with strong focus on my listeners. I found that What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get tools are the best for the matter.
Despite of what I said I'm strongly considering creating paste text to create slides feature. I believe this might have better support for multiple text editors people might use.
Thank you very much for the very precise feedback and use cases you provided.
Best!
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Great idea.
I find myself using the Outline view in Powerpoint a lot to create presentations fast. Your solution starts from the same need but adds graphical elements.
Of course, you'll need to be careful about your roadmap. Everyone will compare your feature set to the giant (PowerPoint) and claim they need slide templates, animation, and so on. Potentially a never ending story.
So you'll need to find a good balance to keep it simple, but powerful and beautiful.
Great job!
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That's so true!
By the way, I have very specific idea of how to create much better templates than conventional software uses. Proper road is the key, very true.
The main thing is that PowerPoint and other tools found no significant progress compared to other tools.
Let look to path of ms word => google docs => notion. It made content more structured and yet more beautiful. I believe the same approach should also work here.
Also, I believe I split people vs company usage early on.
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