Why? Because one of us (the data scientist) kept asking the other (a backend engineer) to move metrics from ClickHouse and CockroachDB, to Snowflake, to Looker, and then to Excel, so that she could make a chart in Excel for the BizOps team to screenshot, and finally stick in Google Slides. Besides being annoying for everyone, this produces inconsistencies and inaccuracies between the actual data and what got presented. We wasted three peoples’ time tracking down queries, going back and forth, and reformatting the same information. We’re building something that can replace PowerPoint/Google Slides for this kind of recurring presentation, with direct data connections and native charting, so that we can all stop screenshotting.
Here are some example presentations:
- A postmortem report: https://app.thorntale.com/report/Postmortem-Template-1755293...
- A product weekly OKR update: https://app.thorntale.com/report/Weekly-Product-OKR-Update-8...
- An exoplanet analysis: https://app.thorntale.com/report/Exoplanet-Analysis-demo-rep...
Thorntale has direct data connections and native charting, eliminating the need for screenshotting or pixel pushing. Currently, we can connect to and visualize data from Google Sheets, Snowflake, and Postgres, with plans to add more source types. We can create or update decks for recurring meetings (like weekly product updates) in minutes instead of hours, and our charts can be re-segmented to answer questions mid-presentation, instead of as a followup days later.
Another thing we’re trying to fix is the need to write a report in a document, only to recreate that report later in a slide deck. This is duplicate work, and splits what should be a single point of truth. Every Thorntale report is actually both a presentation and a document, in one. You can write your long version, choose which points are the most important, and include only those points in the presentation view. When people go back to read your work later, they can see the full context you started with. Try it with the /reportonly command in the tool.
We have grand plans for more — dbt support, more datasource connectors, direct embedding from BI tools like Looker and Tableau, contextual search, and more graph types — but right now we’ve got an early beta. You can check out our sandbox at https://app.sandbox.thorntale.com. Some features are restricted in sandbox mode, but if you like it, we’ve also got free and open signups at https://app.thorntale.com.
We’re really excited to share this with you all, and looking forward to your comments and feedback!
A quick note: while playing around with the postmortem report presentation, I ran into a white screen of death. I appreciate you gave the user an error message, many folks just let the white screen appear and that's it! Anyway, if you'd like to reproduce the crash, here's what you do:
1. Open up the presentation mode by clicking on the "> Present" button in the top right corner
2. Navigate to the first graph page
3. Click the settings icon
4. Change the graph type to a bar graph
5. Under the "X" coordinate section of the graph settings, change the dropdown from "TIMESTAMP" to "100*(...)"
6. This will give an error message stating "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."
and in the console I'm given a message saying
maybe that's useful?Anyway, congratulations again, I'm excited to see Thorntale's future progress!
I’m happy to jump on a 15-min call if you want to brainstorm. I’m a product designer with 10+ yrs experience. More about me on https://contrast.studio
Main users are people that make presentations and communicate data. It's not one specific role, as this could mean PMs, tech leads, BizOps, Data Scientists, etc. Specific workflows: weekly product updates, post mortems, ad hoc analyses, all-hands, board decks, revenue updates. Anything where understanding data is important.
Also, in your video description you linked the wrong startup homepage!
One thing that could be useful though is the ability to export a snapshot of what the slides would've been on any given day, for reference in the future (data might not be available in 2 years etc).
Good luck with your product. As someone who regularly worked with tools like R Studio or Jupyter notebooks, it boggles my mind to still see monthly and quarterly presentations that are the same, except for some (badly) copy-pasta'd data, so there is a need for this!
For internal office presentation, I don’t see this being all that beneficial. Throwing multiple views and cuts of data in the appendix is pretty standard, and the data team usually collects those views as they decide what data to present to the business.
This is of course for larger readouts and companies. At smaller companies & for non-critical presentations, I didn’t even have time to create appendix slides. So instead my audience ended up with a backlog of questions that would never be answered.
Maybe if you could get analysts to create some of those reports for free until the decision makers see the value? I wish you success!
An old boss once said "any data tool that lives long enough becomes a BI tool," and our hypothesis is that one reason there are so many BI tools floating around without market dominance is because all of them stop one step short of the final destination, which is (regrettably?) a presentation.
The obvious player that should do this and hasn't is Google. They have Looker, they have BigQuery (and Stackdriver, and Cloudsql...), they have Slides, but apparently they don't have the desire to put them all together. Meanwhile, Microsoft does have this kind of integration between PowerBI/PowerPoint, but they're locked in to their own ecosystem.
Basically, it seemed like something that someone should be doing (and we originally started from the BI tool side, like you were thinking) but nobody is, so we decided to go ahead and throw our hat in the ring.
Mostly, we think it's unhinged that companies spend so much cash on Snowflake/BQ/Looker and friends, not to mention the cost of hiring data engineers and data scientists, and then don't actually finish integrating it into the presentation layer.
One thing we're working on at https://www.definite.app/ (full data stack for less than you spend on your daily coffee)
However, my client still wants a .pptx that looks great because they then present it internally, and while the current workflow isn’t great it’s very cheap and effortless (for me, at least)
I think with Thorntale we're actually trying to take a slightly different route to a solution; being the actual presentation tool is going to unlock a lot of interactivity features that exporting to powerpoint probably can't ever do. Hopefully we'll be able to show some of those off after a few more months of dev!
(Safari)
What sources are you using for investor updates?