Last week, a new startup Bunkr launched the beta version of its presentation software, which hopes to solve the “blank page” problem. While its cloud presentation technology is similar to that of startups like swipe.to, which recently wowed judges at The Next Web Conference, where it really stands apart is its storage side. The product allows users to grab anything on the internet – an image, a web page,a snippet of text, etc. – that catches their fancy, and save it for use later. In addition, the service lets (or is on the way to letting) users integrate easily with services like Twitter & Facebook to provide beautiful displays of tweets and other social posts.
After launching for just one week, I sat down with Bunkr CMO Edouard Petit to talk about their past, present and future. Born out of a communication agency, Petit said he found himself in charge of recommending technology that his company could use to speed up productivity, and so every week he was creating powerpoint presentations. “I have a Masters in Powerpoint,” he boasts – I know the feeling. “everytime I started a new project, I got stuck with the same problem – the blank page. by the end of it, I was spending more time trying to make it beautiful than actually thinking about what goes into the presentation.” After building part of the technology while still working at the agency, he quickly realized the potential, re-oriented the technology for general use, and created Bunkr.
“At first, Bunkr was based in Paris; however, I had put my mother’s Rouen address because I move around a lot in Paris. One day, the Rouen CCI called me up and said “we checked out your project” (we had a mvp website up at the time), ” and we’d love to fund it.” In the end we got 100K€ from the region, something that would’ve taken us much longer in Ile-De-France, which is saturated with innovative projects.”
Now based in Rouen, one hour by train outside of Paris, Petit says the company has enough cash to last them for the next 12 months, but they aren’t wasting any time. They just launched their product to the tune of 3000 users (1500 in the first week, 1500 private beta testers from the month before). 4,500 slides have already been created in a total of 640 presentations, such as the presentation of Bunkr below.
The company has one big barrier that I can see so far – they are a paid product. They have offered a 45-day free trial to all users, with the ability to extend their free trial by social recruitment (i.e: tweets,etc.). While Petit admits he is not stuck in the mud about the product being paid – “If it doesn’t work, we’ll switch. Simple as that.” – he sees the value in the product he’s created, and he hopes to capitalize on it early. By integrating with services like Evernote (their top priority today), Petit says that the company is providing context to all that data and information that millions of Evernote users are storing, to finally pull out your old notes and put them to use. The company also plans to integrate with Dropbox, Google Drive, and other storages services to give people easier access to their stored data.
One thing that is unnecessarily cool about this product is that you can export all your presentations. To PDF, to Keynote, and even to .PPT – Petit said they spent a little over 7 months making sure this worked seamlessly, so that users who spend time making presentations on Bunkr (unlike competitors like Prezi or Swipe.to) always know that, should they want to switch back to the dark side, they are always just one export away. What’s more, because this feature is so well built, Petit says some users are using Bunkr to build all the images to their presentation (that really is a pain in the ass on Powerpoint), and then exporting and wrapping up in Powerpoint.
So say Goobye Powerpoint and give Bunkr a try today ! Personally, I’ll be trying it out – likely just for 45 days, but we’ll see.
Bunkr is currently a member of TheFamily, a new accelerator in Paris that we’ve written about a few times.
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