ellenfkh

Our main tool (app.thorntale.com) is this concept! But yeah, the problem we've noticed is that without a lot of constraints, the generated presentations look very disjointed and tend to be incoherent.

My theory is that while Claude and similar can generate html-based documents fine, presentation slides are such an unconstrained medium that it's closer to image generation than code generation, so getting it to have a stable style is much more difficult. We constrained our app to a Notion-like architecture for this reason.

It's definitely the next step -- adding the ability to tune the intended audience and (for instance) give them your specific context. The personas are a shortcut for more generic feedback, for if you don't know your audience very well, or for kicking the tires.

Pretty cool! The health insurance set would have been pretty useful when shopping for insurance.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.