Most white collar jobs involve creating presentations. And this can be a time-consuming, laborious process. Presentations include data points, and ensuring that these data points remain accurate and up to date is a challenging task in its own right.
A study from Coveo, in fact, has found that the stress and hassle of locating the right information in workplaces is causing employee burnout. Employees report spending nearly four hours each day searching for info; over 31% of those surveyed said the frustration of being unable to find information made them feel burned out.
To help ease the burden — at least on the data points front — Nabil Jallouli, Bahir Saad and Younes Jallouli co-founded Rollstack, a platform that automatically updates the metrics and figures in slide decks, reports and documents. A member of Y Combinator’s Winter 2023 cohort, Rollstack has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from investors including Y Combinator, UpHonest Capital, Kima Ventures, Monte Carlo Capital and Roosh Ventures.
“Recurring reporting isn’t just a task — it’s a cornerstone of teams’ decision-making processes,” Nabil told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Teams operate in a constant cycle of data extraction, synthesis and presentation, both for internal strategizing and external communications. Traditionally, this workflow has been labor-intensive, but Rollstack is specifically designed for these challenges.”
Image Credits: Rollstack
Prior to founding Rollstack, Nabil led data, strategy and revenue operations teams at Pinterest, Deel and Groupon. Bahir was a software and DevOps engineer at cashierless checkout startup AiFi, while Younes held various engineering and product positions at Tesla.
With Rollstack, Nabil, Bahir and Younes sought to create a tool that allows teams to automatically update their presentations using data sources like Tableau, Salesforce and Looker. Rollstack lets users connect to data sources – including business intelligence tools, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and databases — and set up scheduled data and visualization refreshes for presentations and reports created with Google Slides, PowerPoint, Google Docs, Word or Notion.
Rollstack takes care of refreshing the data where it’s presented and saves formatting and visualization preferences for future use. In addition, it allows users to create new versions of the same deck programmatically, and implement version control to roll back to historical data snapshots (e.g. data from a previous fiscal year).
“These automations allow employees to concentrate on their core tasks like analysis, strategy or selling, rather than the tedious process of generating data reports,” Nabil said.
Rollstack has competition in Coefficient, which lets users create, share and automate live reports, set up alerts and write data back to connected software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools. Actiondesk similarly connects with databases, CRMs and SaaS tools to feed live data into Excel and Google Sheets spreadsheets. But Nabil points out that Rollstack supports a wide range of document types — wider than most of its rivals, he asserts.
Rollstack claims that its customer base is growing by 50% every month and includes companies ranging from startups to “large publicly-listed firms.” Nabil wouldn’t disclose revenue — or burn rate. But he said that Rollstack plans to double the size of its seven-person team by the end of Q1 2024.
“Manual work is Rollstack’s primary competitor,” he added. “With the team’s expertise in the field, Rollstack is well positioned to leverage AI to further enhance its clients’ efficiency. The focus remains on delivering real value and impact to its users — rather than just following trends.”