HN user

astartupaday1

82 karma

Co-founder of Haiku Deck. You can contact me at kevin at haikudeck.com

Posts4
Comments16
View on HN

We've been a happy paying Testelf customer since I first learned about it on HN several months ago. We save so much time by just sending over our beta builds without having to write exhaustive test cases, and we've gotten back extremely thorough reports. Since the initial mvp they've added awesome features like animated gifs of complex repro steps and full crash logs for crashing bugs. It's not a drop-in replacement for unit testing + customer beta testing, but it's a quick and inexpensive addition to any QA process. I recommend this to every iOS developer I know, it's seriously awesome.

Seattle, WA - Haiku Deck - iOS developer, Front-End Web

Haiku Deck, a venture-backed Seattle startup, is hiring full time iOS and front-end web developers to shape the future of our simple and beautiful presentation creation app. Join us on our mission to revolutionize the way presentations are created, viewed, and shared.

We’re a small team of passionate geeks who believe in shipping beautiful products that our users love. We take pride in our work, and we are good at what we do. We are on a quest to build a small elite team over a large mediocre one, and as a result, we are extremely selective about who we hire.

500 million people around the world use presentation software, and yet the tools they rely on to get their jobs done have barely changed in the past 15 years. We see an opportunity to rethink the way presentations are created from the ground up, and we want you to deliver this vision. We have a fast-growing, passionate user base and have been consistently ranked among the top 50 productivity apps in the App Store (without resorting to any shady advertising tricks). We've been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Fast Company, ABC News, Lifehacker, and many more.

We offer:

- Competitive compensation packages, including stock options + health benefits

- An office located in the center of the center of the universe (Fremont), surrounded by great lunch options, walking trails, grocery stores, public transit and bars

- The ability to spend your time on software that thousands (and soon millions) of people rely on every day

- A fun, high-caliber, nice team that trusts you, and gives you the freedom to build awesome stuff your way

Interested? Email me: kevin@haikudeck.com

I'm the developer of Haiku Deck. Chute is powering a core piece of our functionality, and they've been a joy to work with. Our early beta testers were asking to import their own images from their device and existing online albums like Facebook and Instagram, and with Chute I was able to add that functionality to our app in less than an hour. We're a small team, so it's incredibly helpful to use tools like Chute as leverage points to get our v1 app in users' hands as quickly as possible.

Thanks, glad you like the image search (it was a lot of work!) :) Sorry for the issues on the deck chooser, I've been meaning to re-write that for a while and will bump it up the list. I actually just added in a new first-launch experience, and I'm cleaning up a bug with those overlays, will be available in the next update.

Thanks, appreciate the feedback. One of the goals we have is to make you a better presenter. For v1, we researched presentation best practices and built the app so users automatically do things like limit the amount of text per slide, use consistent fonts and text placements, and add emotional impact to words with high-quality (no clip-art!) images. The constraints are intentional, and in fact was the inspiration for the name, as a Haiku is an art form that promotes creativity through constraint.

That being said, I think there are lots of opportunities in the future to help users add features like bullet points and charts, while still keeping it simple and guiding the users towards creating effective presentations.

Thanks, glad you like it.

Actually our initial plan was to launch the web version and tablet version at the same time, but we decided to focus 100% on the iPad for the v1 launch, and use feedback (like this) to determine the next platform to expand to. We're a team of three so we're trying not to get spread too thin. :)

We built Haiku Deck because we hated boring PowerPoint presentations. We stripped out most of the features of a traditional presentation software and built it from the ground up to be optimized for content-creation on a tablet. Decks can be shared online, and also exported to PowerPoint or pdf for offline viewing.

To get a sense of what a typical deck looks like, here's a sample presentation that showcases some of my favorite quotes from the amazing @shit_hn_says twitter account: http://www.haikudeck.com/p/aP4taPvt7w/shit-hn-says

Would love to hear what you guys think.

Airtime Launches 14 years ago

The same thing happened to me. Chrome 19 on Lion. Just visited the site and within seconds I had an email from you guys saying I had created an account, even though I didn't click anything. You should fix this ASAP.

I totally agree. The value of ideas is zero, but by making a list like this, you start to build your own internal filter for ideas. That filter, in my opinion, is actually quite valuable.

For reference, I've posted about 200 ideas over the past three years at http://astartupaday.com . And yes, the majority are crap, but there was one idea that got some traction and now I'm executing on it full-time as part of TechStars.