"We celebrate perfectionism & love building opinionated products with craft" says Chronicle Founder

HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words?

Mayuresh Patole: Chronicle is a modern presentation tool.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

Today, there is a shift happening in the workplace with gen-z and millenials entering offices. This new demographic has a different way of absorbing information, lower attention spans and an elevated aesthetic. Their expectations are that things look great by default without having to do any pixel pushing (a lot of these behaviours have been formed by social media usage). This is therefore the right time for a modern take on presentations.

Secondly, with emergence of AI and LLMs - there is an opportunity to truly make everyone a better storyteller. However, it is more important now than ever to ensure that outputs are always high quality and therefore designed with taste. This is the perfect time for Chronicle to exist - to combine a modern form factor, AI foundations and taste for the modern user.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a deep and personal connection with presentations. Chronicle has started out of a decade long affair with presentation for the founders. The team is extremely passionate and detail oriented about every aspect of the experience. We are nerds. We celebrate perfectionism. We love building opinionated products with craft.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Me personally - I would still be designing and building a product with craft and taste. Possibly I would be spending a lot of time painting.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

We are focussed on our monthly retention at the moment. We also try to gauge how proud our users are of the outputs they create in Chronicle - we are obsessed with enabling them to creating their top 1% outputs - something they couldn’t have done without Chronicle.

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

We offer a new way of organising your raw thoughts into stunning, interactive presentations. Today Chronicle is aimed at modern mid-sized companies, startups. People use Chronicle to create pitch decks, sales decks, product showcases, marketing/branding presentations, all hands and more.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Our waitlist is ~80k that has grown completely organically and through word of mouth. We have started going through this waitlist now. The most exciting thing is that whenever we give someone an invite - we often get more people asking to try Chronicle.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

Next year we plan on opening Chronicle to the world and doing general access. We expect millions of users by end of next year.

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

We have kept Chronicle free at the moment. We aim to create a priced offering for teams as we go to general access next year.

What’s your biggest threat?

Presentations are on the way out (slides are an outdated medium). But at the same time, users are quite accustomed to existing ways of making presentations. We need to strike the balance between pushing the users too much towards a new way of doing things vs succumbing to the pressure of being a traditional slide tool.

Our competitors are slide tools (Pitch, GSlides, Keynote, Canva, Figma Slides), modern formats (Tome, Gamma) and new ways of sharing information (Notion, Figjam).