PITCH

Christian Reber had already built one hit — Wunderlist, the to-do app that Microsoft acquired for $150-200 million in 2015. After the acquisition, he watched Microsoft essentially kill the product (merging it into Microsoft To Do).

In 2018, he started Pitch to attack another Microsoft product: PowerPoint. His thesis: presentations are the last un-modernized workplace tool.

Google Slides is bare-bones. PowerPoint is bloated.

There's room for a best-in-class cloud-native alternative.

Freemium SaaS. Free tier with basic features.

Pro plans at $8/user/month. Business plans with advanced features (brand management, analytics, custom fonts) at $25/user/month.

Enterprise plans with custom pricing. Revenue grows with the number of users and teams.

Pitch Presentations — cloud-native presentation builder with real-time collaboration. Templates — professionally designed templates for every use case.

Brand Management — enforce brand consistency across all presentations. Analytics — track who viewed your deck and which slides they spent time on.

Design quality as the differentiator. Pitch templates look significantly better than PowerPoint or Google Slides defaults.

The "make me look good" factor drove word-of-mouth among marketers, designers, and startup founders who care about presentation aesthetics. Real-time collaboration (like Google Docs) was the table-stakes feature.

PowerPoint inertia. Every company already has PowerPoint through Microsoft 365.

Google Slides is free for Google Workspace users. Switching costs are high — existing decks, templates, and workflows are built around Microsoft/Google.

Canva also entered the presentation space. Getting people to pay for a new presentation tool when they already have two free ones is extremely hard.

Lakestar, Tiger Global, Thrive Capital, and Index Ventures invested. The $100M Series C in 2021 from Lakestar and Tiger Global reflected peak ZIRP enthusiasm for productivity software.