Notes From Building Slaide

Building Slaide in public: notes on plain-text slide decks, AI-authored presentations, and the tools that make Markdown into a deck.

Automating Weekly Status Reports With Plain Text Slides

The weekly deck was the same ten minutes of copy-paste every Monday. A template file and a script ended that.

Investors give a deck under four minutes before deciding. Here is what they actually look at in that window, and what kills a deck before slide 3.

A .slaide file is Markdown with a YAML header, which means it's just a string. Templating one is nothing special, and that's the point.

I write decks in my editor now, render them from the terminal, and only touch PowerPoint when someone else needs to.

The iOS app is live. Voice input, AI deck generation, clean exports - from your phone.

PowerPoint files in git give you a commit log and nothing else. Here is what a real diff on a slide deck looks like.

Paste notes, add structure constraints, render, fix three things, export. Five minutes from raw bullets to a PDF.

Five sections, twelve slides maximum, and one number the room remembers. The rest is noise.

Five slides, one number the room remembers, and an ask nobody has to guess. Here is what actually works on demo day.

Data from 6,000+ pitch decks reveals investors spend under 2:18 per deck, team slides now get the most attention, and 14-slide decks win more often.

I gave Claude, GPT-4o, and Gemini the same 10-slide brief. One structured it best, one wrote the least text, and one surprised me.

The exact prompt structure I feed an AI to get a 12-slide investor deck, section by section, plus what I always fix by hand afterward.

Slaide keeps a slide deck in one plain-text file, so it diffs in git, reviews like code, and an agent can write it without touching a GUI.