You’d anticipate the co-founder of a startup that improves on conventional slide shows to hate instruments like PowerPoint. However that’s not the case with Mayuresh Patole, the CEO of Chronicle. He says he cherished PowerPoint and earlier than turning into a founder, spent 10 years constructing shows, together with stints instructing college college students learn how to make participating ones, after which at his first job at a advisor at BCG. However he discovered that creating good shows took hours of labor and was particularly tough for folks with out a visible design background.
Sydney- and San Francisco-based Chronicle was born consequently. Co-founded with Tejas Gawande, the startup’s objective is to make constructing attention-grabbing shows as simple as dragging and dropping interactive, pre-designed blocks. The expertise is supposed to be so simple as arranging widgets on an iPhone, and the founders say decks could be created in simply eight minutes.
As anticipated, Patole and Gawande used Chronicle to construct their pitch deck for fundraising. The 2-year-old startup introduced immediately it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Accel and Sq. Peg, together with angel traders from Apple, Google, Meta, Slack, Stripe, Superhuman, OnDeck and Adobe.
Chronicle founders Mayuresh Patole and Tejas Gawande
Chronicle was created to unravel two foremost issues. The primary is that creating slides is time consuming as a result of many presentation instruments anticipate customers to be visible designers, and most will not be. The second is that the outcomes are normally unappealing and static. Patole and Gawande cite analysis that reveals folks cease listening to shows after 10 minutes, except there’s one thing else that captures their consideration, like movies, props, demos or being requested questions.
Chronicle’s typical customers are individuals who have already stopped utilizing conventional slide instruments and moved on to Notion or Figjam. However Patole and Gawande say these instruments weren’t created for efficient storytelling.
Patole informed TechCrunch that the way in which folks eat info has modified rather a lot over the past decade. “The conduct is dominated by these fleeting form of experiences, bite-sized consumption codecs that persons are extra used to. Most customers learn complicated info on social media. So slides primarily have been an outdated formation.”
But it surely’s difficult to create shows for folks with quick consideration spans and “extraordinarily, extraordinarily simple to finish up with dangerous ones,” he added. Patole loved utilizing PowerPoint as a result of he has an curiosity in visible design, however many individuals tasked with creating shows don’t.
“The truth is, PowerPoint primarily forces you to be a designer. You begin with a clean canvas, drawing shapes and textual content to finish up along with your output. However that’s now how everybody works,” he stated, including “What folks really need shouldn’t be these uncooked materials decisions of design, like fonts and colours and area.”
An instance of a presentation made with Chronicle
Patole and Gawande walked me by way of how Chronicle works. The principle approach it differentiates from different presentation instruments is pre-designed blocks, which customers can drag-and-drop. The blocks are interactive—for instance, customers can add a photograph, animation or hyperlink to pack extra info into one. Customers may paste hyperlinks of all of the completely different info they need to present and Chronicle will routinely package deal that info into a horny format. Chronicle is built-in with greater than 100 apps, together with Twitter, Notion, Slack and Figma, which makes it simpler so as to add information from them into blocks.
“I believe the mission we’re on is to actually design the precise format for immediately’s consumption,” Patole stated. “If we begin from a clean slate and actually ask ourselves what’s the most effective format for customers immediately within the context of distant work and the truth that workplaces have Gen Z and millennials. The reply is a format that’s much more bite-sized, reduces consumption instances and is interactive.”
Chronicle is presently in closed beta, working with about 200 pilot customers on a primary model targeted on founders’ pitch decks. It plans to develop to different use circumstances quickly, like gross sales decks, product sharebacks, investor and board updates, group documentation, enterprise technique and stories and all palms.
Chronicle’s founders kind its rivals into 4 classes. The primary are conventional slide instruments, like Google Slides, PowerPoint and KeyNote. The second are design instruments like Canva and Pitch. The third is productiveness instruments like Notion, Figjam and Miro that weren’t created for storytelling, however are used due to their comfort. Lastly, Chronicle can be up in opposition to newer presentation instruments like Prezi, Tome and Gamma.
The founders say Chronicle’s key differentiation is its creation course of, since its pre-built, drag-and-drop blocks imply customers not have to spend so much of time formatting shapes and texts. It’s additionally designed for storytelling, with a “chew sized” and mobile-first format that enables for distant and asynchronous collaboration.
Chronicle remains to be pre-revenue, however it would monetize by way of a subscription-based mannequin. Tiers embody free plans for particular person customers who need to check out the software program, a group plan for $10 to $20 a month that may embody collaboration and sharing and a tailor-made enterprise plan with options like personalized branding and firm particular blocks.
In a ready assertion in regards to the funding, Sq. Peg founder Paul Basset stated, “It’s uncommon to discover a founder who has such a particular reference to the issue. Mayuresh is completely obsessed and uniquely expert to craft a brand new storytelling medium. When he confirmed us what he means by a ‘new format’ it was instantly clear that the chance is large and they’re fascinated with this very in another way.”