Making presentations less boring and creating a new storytelling format

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The idea of rethinking how we make presentations is an appealing one. I don’t come at it from an aesthetic or creative lens.

I care more about reimagining Google Slides, Microsoft Word, or Apple Keynote through the lens of speed. We make slides, not for the sake of making slides at work but for more downstream goals like updating the team, making a decision, or persuading an executive to do something. Anything that hinders those desirable goals is and should be thought of as a bottleneck.

Two quirks slow down how we make sides at work. First is the meta work of formatting and designing slides. Those tasks are helpful in making compelling slides, but every minute spent on doing them is a minute taken away from making ideas more compelling. Second, sharing real-time information from other tools in the slides is tedious for making data-driven or visually compelling arguments. There is no reason we should still have to copy-paste information from other tools or link to other places where work gets done in 2022.

When I came across Tome and learned they were addressing those problems, I decided to reach out and talk to Tome’s CEO, Keith.

Learnings from Meta from the 2012-2018 era

“Social storytelling has completely evolved over the past decade - think TikTok and IG vs. AIM and MySpace,” said Keith.

In his 7-year tenure at Meta, he worked on NLP at Facebook and launched Graph search in 2013. Then, he focused on Instagram’s AR and Camera efforts, where he helped make it fun to share spontaneous and often silly updates with friends and family, launching Stories in 2016.

“We learned to be surgical and precise when mapping effects to human needs. We knew young people wanted to send a message to their friends and crushes at school but didn’t have an opener - so we invested in goofy AR effects that could serve as a conversation starter,” he told me.

Later, during the pandemic, when high-stakes debates swirled on everything from lockdowns to vaccines, Keith and his cofounder Henri Liriani (a Messenger alum) became acutely aware that the same compute evolution hadn’t touched storytelling for big ideas or work.

“What if we applied rigorous thinking and technology to the stuff inside our head instead of just the stuff our camera sees?”

That gap spurred him and Henri to start Tome.

The philosophy behind Tome

To understand Tome, you have to believe the following about modern storytelling tools at work :

• They have not evolved as much as the tools in our personal lives have.

• They shouldn’t make us spend unnecessary time designing slides.

• They shouldn’t make us choose between formats (audio, video, or text)

• They should pull real-time information from other tools.

He said, “Our mission is to help anyone tell a compelling story. If we chip away at that mission, we could accelerate the progress of good ideas. If we can reduce the barrier to telling a compelling visual story, you’d imagine more people would pitch their ideas successfully, and companies could make better decisions faster.”

Product strategy

Their initial focus was on the internal presentation use cases like product reviews and quarterly business reviews.

First version: “As a middle manager at big companies, I’d often receive beautifully constructed decks the night before a big meeting with the limited effort put into the story. When looking at a conventional deck tool with a beginner’s eyes, they look like design tools. They invite you to draw boxes, move things around, and paint instead of writing a linear and simple story,” he told me. “I wanted to build a slide product where you couldn’t change the styling and could only put two things on a page. That’s what Tome v1 was. It was probably a little too reductive for most people.”

Current version: “The toolset for talking about an idea at work and on the internet is surprisingly similar. This pushed us to build many more features for pitching your ideas, products, and companies outside your organization (e.g., color themes, branding, analytics, and mobile web performance). In its current evolution, we give you the minimum design capabilities to be on brand and get everything on the page.”

Keith has talked to many creators who use Tome for their ideas outside of work, too: Blogging, pitch decks, landing pages, and visual podcasts.

Product breakdown

It is built using several components - a tome, a page, and a tile.

Primitives: “A tome is composed of pages, and pages are composed of tiles. To add content on a page, you’ll add a tile type (e.g., text, image) and populate the tile with content,” Keith explained. “You can take plenty of shortcuts to improve the workflow, but this is roughly how the system works.”

The tile primitive allows you to display virtually any content type (Figma, YouTube, Spotify, Looker, or a website) in the presentation.

Since launching the beta in March and GA in September, they have built out flexibility and functionality based on three pillars:

1. Supporting a range of content, including live interactive embeds of tools like Google Sheets and Looker

2. AI assistance to help make narratives more compelling.

3. Intuitive drag-and-drop creation, so creators can focus on their ideas, not designing slides.

“You have a visual cue that the tiles are independent of each other. This allows us to make the pages mobile responsive by stacking the tiles on top of each other on a mobile device,” Keith told me.

Making presentations less boring

We have all sat through boring presentations in town halls or zoom meetings where it’s just bland 1:many communication of information.

I asked Keith how Tome could make it more engaging.

He explained, “Once you’ve figured out what to say, you can ask yourself how to make each point using the appropriate medium. It’s easier to convey an emotional argument using video or audio. Or similarly, it’s easy to describe the relationship between two parameters using a chart. We’ve focused on creating that linear and expressive story so far, but there’s much more to come.”

Many users embed interactive elements like Slido, Calendly, or Typeform to make it a two-way engagement between the audience and the presenter.

Reid Hoffman has used Tome to create a visual podcast, and voting registration nonprofit HeadCount used Tome to reach Gen Z and millennials ahead of the midterms with key data through an interactive, mobile narrative.

Mobile

It is a nightmare to flip through slides on the phone. I’m not even talking about being able to create or edit comfortably!

The mobile app has always been part of Tome’s vision. Users use the app to collaborate and edit on the go.

Consumption: “We believe that it’s important to meet your audience where they are. A lot of pitch decks, product review decks, and sales decks get reviewed on phones before the meeting,” he said. “Mobile usage of Google Slides has been increasing yearly for the past five years.”

I asked if mobile creation was superior in some ways.

Creation: “Over time, I could see us leaning into the parts of creation that are better on the phone. For example, the selfie cam is way better than most laptop cameras. Newer iPhones have a depth sensor connected to the selfie cam, so we can do face tracking and detection for lighting improvements. Uploading images, videos, and iOS screen recordings from mobile apps feels strong.”

He said it surprised him that many people were creating Tomes that started from the iOS app.

Metrics

He said they measure surprisingly little, given their stage, and that something is only worth measuring if it’s a business outcome and you can directly affect it.

Sign-ups and activation: “We can directly affect sign-ups and activation by working on awareness, content loops, onboarding, and more.”

Retention: “We have a core belief that retention will go up by responding to customer feedback and making the product more powerful. This isn’t the sort of thing you can measure and change on a feature-by-feature basis, so we don’t even bother.”

He used an example to point out that metrics tell only a part of the story.

“We’ve talked to multiple customers who raised their seed/series A in Tome and didn’t have any visual stories to tell for four months because they run their < 5-person company with documents. By any quantitative definition, these folks have churned. When we called them, they were still willing to pay because Tome helped them with a meaningful part of their business.”

He told me the only leading indicator he’s found of true PMF is how much and how intense customer feedback is.

Keith said, “During our earliest versions of Tome, we needed to ask multiple times and beg for feedback. With our newest version of Tome, we don’t have to ask for it. It’s flowing freely on Intercom, emails, Twitter DMs, and my text messages - the feedback finds you if someone is using your tool for something substantive.”

Building a horizontal product

He said one of the strange things he has observed is that people who have never built a productivity tool will tell you to focus on one use case and one persona.

He believes they need to be useful in multiple ways to multiple people to grow inside of a company and displace existing tools used for many things.

He admits they face the challenge of “staying permissive of broad usage and unexpected use cases while getting more disciplined to focus on top use cases and personas.”

“This is why the design challenge is non-obvious and why I think having a product design cofounder is so sensible in this space. The product briefs are about building a feature set that’s 10x better for product reviews, pitch decks, status updates, asset libraries, and twenty other things - the way that you synthesise that into code and pixels is the magic.”

Competing with the big guys

“I think it’s easy to get swept up in the undulations of different startups working on adjacent products; however, it statistically doesn’t matter.”

He said the majority of their customers are moving to Tome from the big general productivity suites (e.g., PowerPoint and Google Slides).

“Our uphill battle will be convincing folks with existing subscriptions to the general productivity suites to consider us,” Keith said. “We’re razor-focused on making it irrational not to give us a shot if you’re using one of those tools.”

Big companies versus startup operating styles

He told me the biggest change has been converting from a “process person” to a “content person.”

Process versus Content: “I think being a “process person” means you optimize for running meetings on time, making decisions the “right” way, avoiding thrash, only looking at data when it’s statistically significant, and being somewhat agnostic about the output,” he explained. “Being a “content” person means you’ll break the rules, embrace the thrash and bend the processes to make something people love. In many ways, the process doesn’t matter if the output isn’t amazing.”

You get points for running the trains on time and adhering to the process even if the outcomes aren’t great at big companies. It’s the reverse at a startup, he added.

Product development: “Building a feature with an existing distribution is easy-mode product development. Most of your time building a new company will be fighting the battle that nobody has heard of your product and nobody cares. The fact that you have fabulous retention and engagement metrics is largely irrelevant if you can’t find efficient ways to drive distribution and awareness.”

What’s next for Tome

Keith said the next version of Tome would go further into the idea formation stage versus coming to the editor with a plan of exactly what and how to say it.

They have already launched automatic color picking, image sizing, and image generation. Next up are image extension, text summarization, and automatic layouts.

“We’re working towards a place where you’ll be able to tell Tome what kind of story you’d like to build and have Tome generate a compelling skeleton or starter to fill in,” he said in the end. “We’re just at the start of AI-assisted storytelling, and we think it will radically help level the playing field and give more people a real shot at having their best ideas heard. That’s ultimately a good thing for everyone.”

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I recently wrote about how Scatter Brain came to be, along with a personal note. I also kicked off roundups of interesting reads. I also shared how I approached these conversations and how my dumb opinions got challenged.

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