Lesson 1.2 — The DM that turned into the tool

Transcript

In two thousand twenty two I was working on a spreadsheet tool called SheetAI. Somebody messaged me on Twitter and asked me for a pitch deck for it. And I did not want to sit down and make it. That is the whole origin story. I would rather build a tool for four days than do a task for four hours. So I built a small Google Slides add-on that generated the deck for me, and I put it on Reddit. SheetAI was supposed to be the main thing. MagicSlides was the thing I built to avoid an afternoon of work. One and a half million users later, the side project has eaten the main project. Ten million presentations have been made with it. And I want to be straight about the rest of it, because the numbers make it sound tidy. Five years before that I was doing night shifts in a call center taking angry customer calls. I was making YouTube videos that got two hundred views and feeling completely invisible. None of this was fast and almost none of it was planned. I tell you this because it explains how the tool is built. It was made by somebody trying to get out of making a deck. So everything in it optimises for the shortest path to a finished file. That bias is going to show up in every lesson from here.