Live data from Hacker News

Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 42 posts

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#21

The app loads very fast. Looks neat. What more data sources do you plan to add? Would use this for my investor updates

Thanks! We've got a PostHog integration baking in our staging environment at the moment, and are working on Metabase and BigQuery next.

What sources are you using for investor updates?

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#22
Congrats on the launch! I'm excited to see how your product develops.

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

    TypeError: r is null 69-b1345c3baf602dab.js:1:3791
maybe that's useful?

Anyway, congratulations again, I'm excited to see Thorntale's future progress!

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#23
post #22

Congrats on the launch! I'm excited to see how your product develops. 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"…

Oh that's not good. Thanks for catching it! I got a repro on my machine, we're working on a fix.

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#24
post #4

Congrats on the launch, but just so you know your website is broken to the point of being unusable on mobile. Bookmarked to check on desktop because the story sounds intriguing!

Thanks for checking it out! What seemed broken to you, exactly? We've tested pretty extensively on mobile, but there always seem to be more edge cases in the wild

To chime in: Firefox on MacOS in darkmode makes "Enable this content?" text unreadable (white text on white background)

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#25
post #18
post #13

This is a tough sell except maybe for product pre sales demos which you know the types of questions to expect, and the UX needs to be slick as hell. 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.

You’re right, unfortunately it is pretty standard, and I found it to be a massive waste of my time. I was the person on the data team prepping those appendix slides. Before meetings, I talked with key stakeholders to make sure I had created charts that would answer potential questions. Instead of working on strategic projects, I was herding cats and formatting charts. A lot of times I was just doing riffs off the sam…

I think your challenge will be selling it to decision makers who, like the poster above, don't personally deal with that stuff and feel the pain.

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!

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#26
post #25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, unfortunately it is pretty standard, and I found it to be a massive waste of my time. I was the person on the data team prepping those appendix slides. Before meetings, I talked with key stakeholders to make sure I had created charts that would answer potential questions. Instead of working on strategic projects, I was herding cats and formatting charts. A lot of times I was just doing riffs off the sam…

I think your challenge will be selling it to decision makers who, like the poster above, don't personally deal with that stuff and feel the pain. 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!

Thank you! It's an excellent point and why we're doing a freemium model. We think data connections and interactivity will help people communicate better with the decision makers.

Re: Launch HN: Thorntale (YC W24) – Presentation software that works with your data

#28
Does it export to powerpoint? I have the same issue where my client wants weekly data driven decks and I’ve automated the data part but the presentation layer I offload to other people who often make mistakes copy/pasting or with the charts

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)

Post reply on HN