That’s a perfectly valid question, and I don’t think you’ll be the last to ask it. Throughout our beta, we learned that people creating presentations for work end up using more than one tool to get the result they want. Slides for collaboration, Keynote for design, PowerPoint for charts, etc. Sure, Google Slides can be good enough — but it’s rare that people tell us it’s great.
We want to be great.
We’re obviously still early in our journey, but there are a few areas where we already provide a lot of value compared to the status quo:
* Pitch promotes speed and consistency. Honestly, you should be able to build a deck 10x faster than before. Part of this is due to our template gallery — we already have 40 beautiful, business-ready templates and are shipping more each month. We also have presentation styles, which effectively serve as CSS for slides. That means you can set up your brand style and reskin our templates to look like yours.
* There’s no learning curve. Anyone can get up to speed quite quickly without having to wrestle with a complicated ribbon or series of menus. We’ve worked to make our editor intuitive enough for non-designers, but powerful enough for pros.
* Pitch connects to other popular services. Today we support Unsplash, Giphy, Loom, Google Analytics, and more. And next year we want to start opening up Pitch to other developers so that you can bring live data directly into Pitch.
It's still early days for Pitch. Our broader vision is much bigger than what you see on our site (more emphasis on video, AI-driven design, and data — I go into it a bit more here: https://www.protocol.com/pitch-app-slide-decks.) PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides have decades on us, so we don’t expect to surpass them overnight.
I hope you’ll still take the time to give Pitch a try and let us know your thoughts — and hopefully in a few months what sets us apart will be even clearer.
It sounds like you might have some idea of what a killer feature for presentation software might be. I’d love to hear your thoughts. You can find my email address in my profile.
I love the article, and I do agree focus & clarity is more than important for a young business. But when a team/company is successful, you need to be able to spread your focus on more than one thing.
True success it is (I think) if you can enter any market, build the best product, and dominate it.
Wunderkit will remain stable for some time yet. Once Wunderlist 2 is ready we will be offering an export tool, so that your friends and family will be able to transfer their data directly from Wunderkit to Wunderlist 2.
Thanks for the reply Christian. I'll be sure to let them know if that fact. I respect the nature of the decision, and i know it was certainly not an easy one. You've handled it very well, and the communication around that fact very well.
We focus on building a solid product with a consistent experience for several platforms - Wunderlist 2 will launch with native clients on Web, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. To build a high quality product on every platform, I think you need at least 2 developers for each platform. If you are interested this is how we split our team:
3 iOS Developers
3 Android Developers
2 Mac Developers
2 Windows Developers
5 Web Developers (they not only build the web app)
Yes, it is a serious burn rate, but we have three million users to maintain. That's why we are now just focused on our successful product. Wunderlist is a freemium product, we'll add premium features probably at the beginning of next year for a monthly subscription fee.
Do you expect those users to be sticky? The barrier to entry for making a to-do list is negligible, and having a long history of completed tasks is of very little value.
With Wunderlist we've already seen many repeat users and have daily users adding new tasks, especially during the week. With Wunderlist 2 we will have more features that will help grow this.
Fred Wilson wrote about user metrics, he called it the 30/10/10 rule (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/07/301010.html) - 30% monthly active users, 10% daily active users and 10% new users each month. We can apply this rule to Wunderlist, but as we're in the 'task' market, we generally have more monthly users than daily users - because the product is more optimized for weekly use.
Sorry - I meant to clarify stickiness when asked to pay. Freemium conversion is like 1-5%, so I'd imagine somewhere closer to 1% with you guys.
With 30ish people, let's say you burn $2 million a year. You'd need to get 30,000 people to each pay ~$70 a year for your app. My numbers might be wrong, but I'm just curious how you'd get people to spend that when it's so easy to switch to another task app.
We split between backend developers (mainly Rails) and frontend/web developers (mainly Backbone). Our backend developers are maintaining the backend of Wunderlist 1, and have built the backend for Wunderkit. Now they are rebuilding the backend for Wunderlist 2 and from scratch. With Wunderlist alone we have three million users, so it is a big job!
It's a nice, pithy answer to give, and in general you shouldn't rewrite a backend "just cause". However, Wunderlist's backend was built with the intention of being a bit of a prototype, and the skills on the team are vastly different from when it was written (in PHP) compared to where we are now (using mainly Rails with a little Node.js in the backend).
In addition, contrary to Spolsky's claim, unmaintained code does rust, or "rot". Libraries you were using might go unmaintained in newer versions of a framework that fixes critical vulnerabilities. Code that held up well to thousands of users doesn't necessarily when you're talking about millions of users. Fighting code/app entropy is a real thing.
But we're taking steps to make sure this backend neither suffers from the "second system effect" (we got that out of the way with Wunderkit ;-)), nor simply needs to be rewritten again in a year or so. Spolsky is correct that in general, code is harder to read than write - which is why we're writing Wunderlist 2's backend to be easier to read at the cost of extra work up front. Strict conventions, enforcing documentation, challenging any code that isn't the clearest way to express the problem it's solving - well, we'll have an engineering blog post to discuss our "Pull Request Parties" and other related process improvements in depth at a later point in time/
The short version, though is that the WL2 backend is probably the most beautiful, readable codebase I've ever had the privilege of working with. Of course I'm more than a little biased, but hopefully the proof will be in the pudding when we launch it out into the world.
At one point, the web and API team were a little more intermeshed, but this had the unfortunate side effect that the web was a de-facto a "privileged" client, while the other clients were like second-class citizens. These days, the Rails app serves no human-readable web interface, only a RESTful JSON API. In fact, the Web app uses CORS to speak to the API on an entirely different host! There's literally no overlap whatsoever between the codebases, deployments, or teams now; the web client has exactly the same status as the Mac, Windows, iOS and Android clients.
Yes Linux is in our plans, however, it won't be the first platform we launch on. Wunderlist 1 will be backwards compatible though, so you'll still be able to use it!
