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Congrats on the launch! I'm excited to see how your product develops.

A quick note: while playing around with the postmortem report presentation, I ran into a white screen of death. I appreciate you gave the user an error message, many folks just let the white screen appear and that's it! Anyway, if you'd like to reproduce the crash, here's what you do:

1. Open up the presentation mode by clicking on the "> Present" button in the top right corner

2. Navigate to the first graph page

3. Click the settings icon

4. Change the graph type to a bar graph

5. Under the "X" coordinate section of the graph settings, change the dropdown from "TIMESTAMP" to "100*(...)"

6. This will give an error message stating "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."

and in the console I'm given a message saying

    TypeError: r is null 69-b1345c3baf602dab.js:1:3791

Anyway, congratulations again, I'm excited to see Thorntale's future progress!

Oh that's not good. Thanks for catching it! I got a repro on my machine, we're working on a fix.

Congrats on the launch. Interesting idea. From a UX perspective, I think it won’t be an easy sell. Who’s your main user persona? Getting people to switch tools is very hard. It seems to me this should be an extension/plugin for tools like Slides or Pitch that gives users the option to embed live charts.

I’m happy to jump on a 15-min call if you want to brainstorm. I’m a product designer with 10+ yrs experience. More about me on https://contrast.studio

Congrats on launch! From reading a bit more about what you're doing, I do think there is something there with creating presentations that are evergreen, something beyond just a geckoboard dashboard that lives on past just creating a presentation one time. Do you have an idea of the main types of users who would want to use this? More thoughts https://youtu.be/cwjm6JhS5ZE

Thanks for making a video & detailed feedback! It's super helpful hearing your take. We'll definitely work on adding real use cases and vision to our home page.

Main users are people that make presentations and communicate data. It's not one specific role, as this could mean PMs, tech leads, BizOps, Data Scientists, etc. Specific workflows: weekly product updates, post mortems, ad hoc analyses, all-hands, board decks, revenue updates. Anything where understanding data is important.

Also, in your video description you linked the wrong startup homepage!

I work in security and a use case I've had in the past and hacked together using a combination of Power BI and powerpoint (hey, license was already paid for!) was exporting tons of data from logs, load into Power BI to generate charts and metrics that related to security (especially vulnerability management). It was the same slide every time, just new data.

One thing that could be useful though is the ability to export a snapshot of what the slides would've been on any given day, for reference in the future (data might not be available in 2 years etc).

Snapshots are on our roadmap! It's partially implemented already, we didn't quite have enough time to finish it before launch.

Nice!

Good luck with your product. As someone who regularly worked with tools like R Studio or Jupyter notebooks, it boggles my mind to still see monthly and quarterly presentations that are the same, except for some (badly) copy-pasta'd data, so there is a need for this!

This is a tough sell except maybe for product pre sales demos which you know the types of questions to expect, and the UX needs to be slick as hell.

For internal office presentation, I don’t see this being all that beneficial. Throwing multiple views and cuts of data in the appendix is pretty standard, and the data team usually collects those views as they decide what data to present to the business.

You’re right, unfortunately it is pretty standard, and I found it to be a massive waste of my time. I was the person on the data team prepping those appendix slides. Before meetings, I talked with key stakeholders to make sure I had created charts that would answer potential questions. Instead of working on strategic projects, I was herding cats and formatting charts. A lot of times I was just doing riffs off the same table or query.

This is of course for larger readouts and companies. At smaller companies & for non-critical presentations, I didn’t even have time to create appendix slides. So instead my audience ended up with a backlog of questions that would never be answered.

I think your challenge will be selling it to decision makers who, like the poster above, don't personally deal with that stuff and feel the pain.

Maybe if you could get analysts to create some of those reports for free until the decision makers see the value? I wish you success!

Thank you! It's an excellent point and why we're doing a freemium model. We think data connections and interactivity will help people communicate better with the decision makers.

I agree with other comment and I don't think this is a good idea. In an ideal world, we use data to create visualisation that can then be embedded in a variety of place (powerpoint, web-app or simply in a notebook). Here you are giving presentation the central role which simply doesn't sound right to me.

That's definitely the ideal world, but in our experience everyone says they want dashboards and live data but everything ends up in presentations anyways. Fundamentally, it's the current format for standing in front of someone and making an argument. Maybe it's because the execs with buying power just like slides, but at anything bigger than a startup, decisions and alignment are done off a deck and not a dashboard.

An old boss once said "any data tool that lives long enough becomes a BI tool," and our hypothesis is that one reason there are so many BI tools floating around without market dominance is because all of them stop one step short of the final destination, which is (regrettably?) a presentation.

I do like this idea, but if I am honest I think this should be a feature of a BI tool vs a whole new tool.

A couple of tools are moving in that direction, but oddly enough, it's mostly deeper analytics tools like Hex.

The obvious player that should do this and hasn't is Google. They have Looker, they have BigQuery (and Stackdriver, and Cloudsql...), they have Slides, but apparently they don't have the desire to put them all together. Meanwhile, Microsoft does have this kind of integration between PowerBI/PowerPoint, but they're locked in to their own ecosystem.

Basically, it seemed like something that someone should be doing (and we originally started from the BI tool side, like you were thinking) but nobody is, so we decided to go ahead and throw our hat in the ring.

BI tools haven't been going in this direction. They are moving towards helping you understand your data or embed your dashboards. It's a lot of focus on understanding and monitoring, but not communicating or storytelling. That is where we want to step in.

It's nuts you can't easily embed Looker charts into Google Slides. Google acquired them 4 years ago. If I search for "looker embed in google slide", most of what I see is about a company called "rollstack".

There's a couple of embedding startups out there -- I think there was one doing embedded analytics in our batch earlier on, but I don't remember if they pivoted. Looker is especially egregious in my opinion, since Google owns it.

Mostly, we think it's unhinged that companies spend so much cash on Snowflake/BQ/Looker and friends, not to mention the cost of hiring data engineers and data scientists, and then don't actually finish integrating it into the presentation layer.

Hard agree on the unhinged cost.

One thing we're working on at https://www.definite.app/ (full data stack for less than you spend on your daily coffee)

Congrats on the launch! This could be useful for Customer Success Teams that spend hours building decks for each of their accounts constantly. Have you looked into this?

Thank you! They are a great target group, and yes we have. I've made dashboards for the sole purpose of CSM's copy & pasting numbers into a deck. I think you're absolutely right that we could save them a lot of time.

Does it export to powerpoint? I have the same issue where my client wants weekly data driven decks and I’ve automated the data part but the presentation layer I offload to other people who often make mistakes copy/pasting or with the charts

However, my client still wants a .pptx that looks great because they then present it internally, and while the current workflow isn’t great it’s very cheap and effortless (for me, at least)

I use Quarto to automate slides creation and output as PowerPoint. You can even use a premade PowerPoint template so that the output slides are pretty much done.

That tool looks really cool! We hadn't come across that one before, but we did look into a lot of embedding solutions back when we were making these kinds of presentations regularly.

I think with Thorntale we're actually trying to take a slightly different route to a solution; being the actual presentation tool is going to unlock a lot of interactivity features that exporting to powerpoint probably can't ever do. Hopefully we'll be able to show some of those off after a few more months of dev!

Nice, I didn't know about it – I took a quick look at the templating options and it seems like it might do the job. Thanks!

Thanks for the recommendation, Quarto might be just what I've been looking for.

We do plan to add export as .pptx, .pdf, and to google slides.

Congrats on the launch, but just so you know your website is broken to the point of being unusable on mobile. Bookmarked to check on desktop because the story sounds intriguing!

Thanks for checking it out! What seemed broken to you, exactly? We've tested pretty extensively on mobile, but there always seem to be more edge cases in the wild

Unrelated to their point, but if you click on the "view a query" icon in a presentation and then try to get the popover to disappear, it's stuck and doesn't go away.

(Safari)

Never mind, found it. Just deployed a fix, it should work now!

To chime in: Firefox on MacOS in darkmode makes "Enable this content?" text unreadable (white text on white background)

I messaged your LinkedIn company account with some screenshots.

The app loads very fast. Looks neat. What more data sources do you plan to add? Would use this for my investor updates

Thanks! We've got a PostHog integration baking in our staging environment at the moment, and are working on Metabase and BigQuery next.

What sources are you using for investor updates?

Congrats on the Launch !

Congrats on the launch - rooting for y'all!

congrats on the launch y'all!!

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