Piqued for Gamma
Who has made a PowerPoint deck in their lives and hated every moment?
✋🏻✋🏻✋🏻
It's clunky in features.
It's hard to make "pretty."
It's slow in function.
It doesn't adapt well.
It's not easy to diversify visuals.
It's hard to iterate quickly.
It's pretty much a giant PITA.
Some tools have tried to fix the problem but haven't made an impact that sticks yet:
Prezi
Google Slides
Keynote
BUT, one beautiful August morning, I received a ProductHunt email featuring a brand that immediately caught my 👀.
OK, idk if it was a beautiful morning, but Gamma's branding was so on point that I looked into it more than once and decided to write about it.
So in this release, I'm focusing on Gamma's brand, product marketing, and software execution.
Brand
Gamma's brand is drool-worthy 🤤.
First, whoever said gradients were dead was doing them wrong. Sorry, not sorry.
Second, the astronaut... just love it.
Third, the combination of brand elements, gradients, and animations to tell the story of WHY GAMMA, is incredibly fresh.
For the non-designers: Creating designs is hard because pretty much anything you do won't be original. We've seen it all. We've seen designs repurposed, we've seen them inversed, and we've seen them removed. It's all been done before.
I call this out because I genuinely believe the Gamma design team was able to capture their brand essence in such an exciting way that it made these elements feel original.
My last note on the design is about the fonts. I'm a stickler for fonts - kerning, line heights, white space, and combinations. It’s the Type A in me 🤷🏻♀️.
I ❤️ their serif and sans serif pairing. It feels youthful but trustworthy.
Just kudos all around here. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Product Marketing
Write like a doc. Present like a deck.This tagline makes sense when you see how the software works.
I firmly believe that product marketing should include videos, animations, or graphical elements to convey what the product does up front. There is no better way to grab a potential customer's attention than by showing them (in under 60 seconds) what your software does.
Check out this opening animated video explaining the WHY and behind Gamma:
The video is spot on because it states the pain point immediately and then explains why Gamma is better.
They wisely continue this trend within their simple website by breaking down the product into feature segments. Each segment appears as you scroll and outlines the HOW of the product:
When you’re investing in product marketing there are many pieces to the puzzle. The top 3 I look for when investigating product marketing for software are:
Does it tell a good story? Does it capture me?
Can your team and ICP understand it?
Do the visuals convey the problem + solution quickly and effectively?
When I narrow these 3 down, Gamma checks all the boxes for me. ✅ ✅ ✅
My primary question will be > does the software live up to its brand and marketing?
Let’s get to my favorite part…
Software Execution
Gamma Pro is in beta and free for now, so I signed up for it to see all the features they offer in this software exploration session.
Registration
Right now the only way you can register is via Google SSO. IMO, that’s the way to go for an MVP. It’s an easy integration to build - less than a sprint’s worth of time and testing and it onboards customers fast and frictionless.
After registering, I was caught off guard… in a good way. I’m asked to create a workspace for me or my team.
My first impression of the software before registration was that it was a 1:1 solution for me and my work. Now that I see the focus on team collaboration and CMS-style features, I’m aware Gamma has a broader vision.
Onboarding
Onboarding experiences are often overlooked when building MVP solutions. Now, Gamma has 7M in funding, so idk if I’d qualify this as MVP but they have spent time and effort in executing an experience that gets people to convert with learning the tool right away.
I’m indifferent to the experience.
It’s creative and rehashes the HOW from the website but it’s separated from the UI of the software so putting these tips into action will be more difficult when I begin.
Exploration context is important when onboarding and for those that do go through the flow the impact is to remove friction from discovery to implementation. This onboarding doesn’t do that for me.
Did you know? 80% of users say they’ve deleted an app because they didn’t know how to use it*
Gamma Platform
I wasn’t going to use the term “platform” but I’m getting major Notion vibes from Gamma. The landing page has all the following:
Easy navigation
Ability to switch workspaces (notion, right?)
Clear call-to-actions > New Deck, New from Template, Import
Body to view all your work
The UI of the landing page is screaming “grow with me. use me for all your powerpoints.” and I’m sort of buying it.
Create Deck
The creation process is different than I expected. But I think that’s a good thing. They are, after all, trying to change the game for PowerPoint creations.
You build presentations by cards. Each card can be filled in with the right panel of options: GIPHY, Integrations, Text, etc. There are a lot of options to create.
I’m impressed by the integrations panel. Creating any kind of document to share has a limited function to bringing in other tools. You’re forced to take screenshots and plow them in. For me, this is their biggest selling point.
Dynamic integrations for constant iterative building without going through the tedious Replace Image function relieve a major pain point for anyone creating decks.
Present
Presenting is easy and it gives the options to export which was the first thing I looked for. I imagine others would look for the same. Honestly, I don’t think I’d ever use the present feature they have available. I think it’s too far away from the expectation of standard presentations.
Analytics
The second most appealing feature to me is the Analytics availability. If I was a founder or a sales rep I’d want to see which pages were the most impactful and how often it was viewed. This would give me leverage in follow-ups and optimizations.
Any data you can give me to be better at execution is gold, IMO.
Bottom Line
Will I use this? Probably not. I think it’s a cool tool. Am I their audience? No.
If I was a college student I’d use this for every class. It’s the first thing that came to mind: college courses and presentations.
Since I write about founders, I could totally see entrepreneurs wanting to use this. Analytics on their decks sent to VCs? No brainer.
It’s not a big enough pain point for me to want to invest in another tool, though.
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Have any thoughts on the feedback? Use the comment section, and let’s dive into it!
Before I end this release, I want to call out that the founders and startups I typically work with are building bootstrapped or with much smaller amounts of funding.
I believe the execution of the platform as a Seed funded company has a lot to do with the amount of money they’ve secured to build. It’s done well and I applaud the team.
What they do both have in common though, is vision. You can tell when software has a vision and everyone I’ve spoken to thus far knows where they are at and where they want to be. I love that about this community.
Keep building. Keep dreaming.
Thank you for being here. ❤️ ✌🏻