Bunkr is a French startup that keeps reinventing itself. After making a big splash by promising the PowerPoint killer we’ve all been waiting for and struggling to raise a seed round, it is now starting from scratch again and rethinking from the ground up its presentation service.
Bunkr now takes advantage of everything that the web has to offer to provide features that don’t even exist in PowerPoint. This is a comeback story in the making for a startup that has a big product ambition and wants to make things right.
“Ever since we closed our seed round, we’ve spent a lot of time under the radar,” co-founder and CEO Alexis Jamet told me in a phone interview. “We had to take some very difficult decisions for a startup, but they were all necessary if we wanted to survive.”
We want to do something different, we want to provide features that you can’t find in any other presentation tool on the market — not even PowerPoint. Alexis Jamet
First, Bunkr now has a new CTO, Thomas Meson. Second, Bunkr had become a crippled code base with features that didn’t properly represent the vision of the company. The service wasn’t scalable, and my first post crashed Bunkr’s servers after just a few minutes. So instead of fixing the old Bunkr, the company kept the name and changed everything.
This wasn’t an easy choice. User growth was going well and the company could have spent time addressing feature requests. Instead, Bunkr had to pause development on the old platform, risking losing its users’ interests. After playing around with the new Bunkr, I can say that it was definitely the right choice.
“Rebooting Bunkr allowed us to go back to the drawing board and build a product that was perfectly in line with our vision,” Jamet said. “We removed all the useless features. We want to do something different, we want to provide features that you can’t find in any other presentation tool on the market — not even PowerPoint.”
Bunkr is the fastest and best way to pull data and content from the web and put a presentation together. When you create your first slide, Bunkr will ask you to add content. Front and center, you will see buttons to pick the kind of content (like on Tumblr). Content can be an image, text, a video, a chart and more.
But Bunkr’s true power lies behind these buttons. For example, when you click on video, you can either browse directly videos on compatible services or paste a URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Vine and many more services. It works exactly the same way for charts with Infogram and Chartblocks support, tweets, Facebook posts, SoundCloud songs, GitHub Gists, Sketchfab 3D models and more.
And this is key to understanding Bunkr’s new approach. Instead of reinventing the wheel, the company will support as many services as possible to integrate well with your current workflow. Infogram knows charts much better than any presentation tool on the web. And if you update your chart on Infogram, it will automatically update your Bunkr presentation.
Soon, there will be a public API and more partnerships with other SaaS products. For example, it could be great if you could pull your Stripe or Google Analytics data in your presentations so that you can show sales numbers without having to regularly update your presentation.
“We deliberately removed some formatting options so that you can stay focused on your content, like on Medium,” co-founder and CMO Edouard Petit told me. “And this way, you can be sure that it will always be mobile friendly.”
Making a presentation in Bunkr can be much more powerful, interactive and quick than making the same presentation in PowerPoint. The difference between PowerPoint and Bunkr is now very clear. If you need to create 10 slides with bullet points and tables, PowerPoint is still the right tool. But if you want to make a modern presentation with videos, articles from the web and tweet embeds, Bunkr is the way to go.
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