Pitch.com Tried To Compete With PowerPoint With $137m of VC Funding – They Let Go Most Of Their Team Yesterday.
Pitch.com Tried To Compete With PowerPoint With $137m of VC Funding – They Let Go Most Of Their Team Yesterday.
If Canva can do it, then Pitch can... Not really – The keyword is USP.
Let’s skip the TLDR for this one and get to the point – Competing with a Fortune 100 company needs a unique selling point (USP).
That USP does not have to be a revolutionary generative AI like OpenAI.
It does not have to wow investors.
It simply has to get the end user to say, “Oh, that’s quite cool. I needed that.”
In case you don’t know Pitch.com, it’s a presentation software very similar to Canva. They have $137.7 million of VC backing. Yesterday, their CEO stepped down, and they laid off 2/3 of their employees.
First of all, I write many analyses similar to this. Before we go on to speak about their product, let’s keep in mind that roughly 59 people lost their jobs due to this. Entrepreneurship is a beautiful game, but it comes with responsibility.
Yet, those people chose to work in a startup that aims to take over industry giants. For that reason, I’m confident that they’ll be able to ace jobs elsewhere. There’s a certain level of entrepreneurship in the blood of those people that can’t be simply ignored.
Now, let’s analyze
Raising this amount of funds puts expectations above the roof.
We’ve seen this story more than once. You get funding to accelerate your growth. But the word “accelerate” means something different to those investors. They’ll compare you to Uber and Airbnb.
WeWork grew.
Slack grew.
OpenAI grew.
You’ve raised $138 million; you’re expected to grow as such. This ends in one of two things:
You get a burnout.
You get a burnout.
Most founders get a burnout. What happens next depends on their previous choices.
Sam Altman would get ousted by his board (then return heroically.)
Adam Neumann would get ousted.
Elon Musk would be given a warning.
Zuckerberg would be… well, there’s nothing anyone could do to that person anyway.
But the truth is, you’ll move on. Will your product move on, though? That does not depend on the past. This is a test of how vital your unique selling point is.
I’ve used PPT, Canva, and Pitch.
I work on creating presentations every day that are viewed by investors. So, the nature of my work depends on presentation software.
What do I use, you ask?
Surprisingly, I mostly use Google Slides because it’s a replica of PowerPoint. But I trust it more in saving my work. Microsoft has failed me a few times in losing my work.
I’ve been studying this market very well as I’m working on a badass product that operates in this market. At the moment, it’s just draining my wallet non-stop.
So, during my market study, I've tried Canva, Pitch, and even Tome (an AI one.)
You want the truth? They’re all a weaker PowerPoint plus a selling point.
So, whatever the funding they get, it transforms into a game of unique selling points.
Canva is the most serious competitor to PowerPoint. But I don’t believe for a second that they have a bigger market share than PowerPoint. Their unique selling point was part of their go-to-market strategy. That’s what really put them on the radar. That was their templates. PowerPoint has awful templates. Canva made an entire market out of this small sentence. It paid off. They have more than $39 billion in valuation.
Tome has an easy-to-remember USP – AI writing. Their designs are okay. But their main USP is the fact that you can use AI to create presentations. They’ve raised over $75 million, and they’re growing. I’ve tested it a few times. Their product is not fascinating but still has AI, which could save someone time. Unless they improve their product tenfold, I doubt that they’ll see any reasonable growth.
Pitch has templates and now has AI as well. But it doesn’t have the best of either. Their templates were good but not as varied as Canva's. I would find people on LinkedIn talking about Instagram posts created with Canva. Yet, Pitch is confined to presentations.
PowerPoint is bundled with Microsoft 365. That gives it an edge that is almost impossible to break. Additionally, it’s widely used and has some AI features.
Reading the above, it’s not a surprise that Pitch would let go of most of its team and try to become profitable. It’s time to slow down and go back to the drawing board.
The game of Entrepreneurship does not value your funding.
It does not care about how cool your website looks.
It cares about the market.
If the market had accepted Pitch as they anticipated, then this would’ve never happened.
The reality is that those using PowerPoint are still using PowerPoint.
The Canva believers are still using Canva.
AI worshipers are using Tome.
If you can’t find where you belong, you’ll be slowly pushed out.