My thoughts on Pitch 🖥

I’m really lucky with what I do, as I get the chance to collaborate and work with lots of different people doing lots of different things. With that comes new and exciting platforms. It’s great to be able to see what other tools are out there and understand if there are any better alternatives to what you’re already using. Pitch has been on my radar for a while and I finally decided that it was time to give it a whirl.

What is Pitch I hear you say?

Pitch combines the best parts of productivity, design and presentation software to help fast-moving teams create beautifully designed decks in minutes. It’s a gorgeous platform that encourages you to use it.

In an interview with tech.au, Christian Reber, Founder of Pitch, explained that through research and experience, they managed to identify 4 major problems with presentation software:

Most presentations are being created from scratch, and not 'on brand' – users are forced to create most slides from scratch with existing software, which can be a time consuming exercise. A lot of the work is repetitive and slows down teams and companies in getting the results they’re after.We've learned that people want to recycle presentations a lot, so we're investing heavily into making Pitch really fast, especially if you create slides you've created before.

It's painful to collaborate on slides – with software like Slack, Zoom and Figma. As designers, developers and creatives in modern companies we're used to working with collaborative software, making it easy to work with and share ideas with large teams on projects, code, or designs. But for some reason, it's really hard on slides. Pitch is truly collaborative, with powerful workflow features to help teams to coordinate work around slides effectively.

Integrating data is nearly impossible – most people take screenshots of data and charts, and put them into presentations. In the age of Slack, we felt like that's a problem that deserves to be solved. Our ambition is to seamlessly integrate Pitch with any tool you're already using.

Working with presentations is no fun – that's probably the biggest problem we've identified. People don't have a happy relationship with existing tools. In fact, they waste an enormous amount of time working on moving boxes around. There were so many smaller problems people had -Sharing, versioning, exporting, working on multiple devices, offline/online capabilities, broken fonts... the list goes on and on. A quote we heard from one of our research participants was: "I didn't go to business school to align boxes". We aim to fix all of those problems people have, step by step.

We can probably all relate to the above in some way or another. When I was a Project Manager, I would spend hours recreating decks and documents that looked similar to the original but were slightly different. By the time I had got the design of the deck in an ok place I would have lost all motivation to actually include the important info that we needed to include. Don’t even get me started on trying to embed and implement data…

So I decided to put Pitch to the test. Is Pitch more fun, easier to use and more collaborative than any other presentation software out there?

Here’s what I think 👇

Templates

Pitch offer a plethora of different, beautifully designed templates, they pretty much have a template for every kind of document out there.

This is perfect for someone who maybe doesn’t have an eye for design, but still wants to create something visually strong. Before committing to a template, you’re able to flick through the pages and assess if it’s the right fit for you.

They also share pointers on the best ways to use the template, so if you have any questions - you’ve got your answers straight away! Saving you time and making sure that you are on the right track to create a beautifully designed deck.

Collaboration, integration and embedding.

A lot like Google slides, Pitch allows multiple people to view and edit the presentation at the same time, which is great when you’re working towards a tight deadline.

But what’s different is that Pitch allows you to view exactly what your team are doing and the edits they are making, so you can avoid amending the same thing. If that isn’t enough you can hop on a live call (with up to 15 people) to talk through your ideas, all in the platform. 🤯 Saving yourself so much time, there’s no longer a need to share a Zoom link. Well done to Pitch because I think this is brilliant. 👏

Just like Google slides, you are able to share presentations with your team members, individual guests and to the public. You can also embed the presentations online with a simple embed code. Sharing presentations has never been easier!

Fun and features

Recordings

Pitch added Recordings as a feature earlier this year. It’s the best. Instead of having to jump on another call or join a meeting and fumble your way through a shared presentation. You can now prerecord a video and add it to a slide without any worry. Include relevant info to each slide, so you won’t get tongue tired, nervous or fighting for the mic with your team members.

Apologies for my mug in the screenshots (but you get the jist!).

Reactions

An Emoji paints a thousand words, that’s the saying right? Everyone loves an Emoji, so it only makes sense that Pitch has included ‘Reactions’ as a feature in the slides. The use of the reactions will save you time to understanding your team's thoughts on your work. Save time and get cracking! 👏👏👏

Status & stickers ⭐️

Another great time saver! Having the chance to choose the status of the slides will bring you a lot of clarity and save you from asking lots of different questions. The amount of times I’ve been working into a deck with other people and you’re questioning if they’ve finished their slide or not. The stickers are bright, super useful and bring some much needed personality to the presentations. I’m embarrassed by the amount of time I have wasted in the past on creating different sized arrows… If other platforms had offered something similar, I wouldn’t have wasted so much time!

So we’ve already gathered that Pitch will save you a lot of time which is great! But they really are the gift that keeps on giving.

If you’re the type of person who prefers to learn by watching, Pitch have created a series on YouTube called Pitch Academy. In this series they run through intros to workspaces, templates, collaboration, sharing etc. They’ve truly got your back, so you can create a lush presentation, easily.

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Pitch can do, they have so much more going on! Saying that, I would highly recommend you to check Pitch out. It’s super easy to navigate and use. In my opinion, Pitch’s claim ‘Pitch combines the best parts of productivity, design, and presentation software’, is true. The process of creating, sharing and collaborating on a presentation is a lot more pleasant with Pitch than other platforms and it makes me want to create more.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on Pitch. Let me know if you’d like me test out any other platforms out there! ✨