TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above)
My team at Irrational Labs makes a lot of slides. So when I heard there was an app that makes them for you—beautifully, using AI—I was all over it. But how well does Beautiful AI deliver on its promise? And is it really zero work?
3 things you’ll learn from watching this:
Why showing pricing upfront can be a good or bad thing
Why Beautiful AI should maybe consider not giving away a free trial
How they use an enterprise software rule of thumb by letting you import from other platforms
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👂 Transcript:
Our team makes so many slides, so when we heard about Beautiful AI, which makes beautiful slides for you, we were like, "Is this too good to be true?" It's kind of what their website makes it feel like. It's just too good to be true. They're making beautiful slides with zero work. I don't buy it. Let's find out.
Okay, "sign up now." Very interesting. It's a big barrier. It's like, do I really want to take this big leap? We usually recommend folks do a little bit more, try "Continue," where the drop-off is just going to move to the next page. But in theory, you won't get as many people scrolling because they don't think it's a hard commit right away.
So what we're noticing here is they're meeting me directly with the pricing, and this could be good or bad at some level. If we wait until the very end to tell people the pricing, they'll be upset and they may have some sunk costs because they've done it, but then they're going to be upset and mad at you.
In the very beginning it's like, look, I know what I'm getting into, so they're going to nag me to upsell after the free trial. I know what I'm working with versus I've done a free trial and I have zero idea how much I'm going to pay. So while this is a ton of friction and typically, pain of paying, where you see the number and you're just like, "ugh," is going to decrease likelihood to convert.
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There are times where you want to set expectations, especially if you're giving a free trial, of how much people will have to pay. Because your goal at some point will be to get me to make this decision. Right now, I get it for free. So, It's curious that I have to make this decision upfront between Pro and Team.
So a classic hack right now is you give away the premium feature for free and then when they downgrade, or when their free trial is up, they get to downgrade to the other one. They're giving up features, classic endowment effect. But it seems like for this one, they're going to make me look and figure out which one I want first.
$40 is a lot a month. That's also a big jump. I can't really imagine that our team at scale would do this, but obviously $40 a month is such a good deal. If you just think about my productivity, of course I would pay $40 to have a slide deck, save myself an hour of time.
So me, I’ll spend five hours of time a day on a slide deck. And so it's funny that we think about $40 to be very large, and yet from a time value of money, it's very small. You can imagine that I'm actually a business purchaser, as somebody who's acting on behalf of a company. I'm not looking $40 as one person.
I'm looking at how much would that scale to our full team, right? That's actually a pretty big number annually if we have a large team, but we'll do it. We're going to do it. We're going to say "Try for free." I'm going to have to, oh, here, we already have signed up, like usual, so we're going to have to go with our, another email address per usual.
Okay. Create account. Verify my email address.
Love the big blue button. You know, on desktop this is quite easy. On mobile, this is a little bit more annoying because you're doing a lot of things. Company name, we'll go with Irrational Labs, and "Invite my team members." So, it's interesting to anchor me on that this is a team product, but of course it'd be very hard to do this unless people are really committed and already know that they want to sign up.
Which by the way, I think with some products and teams, you know that. So if you're somebody who's evaluated Dropbox and now you're a business marketing manager who's signing up on behalf of your team, you don't really need a free trial. You know exactly what you want to do. The team's already decided that Dropbox is going to be part of your software stack.
And so actually, not giving me the free trial would be great because I'm just going to purchase, I want to get started right now. Asking for these email addresses is great because I just want to pay for everyone in one go. I don't want to have to go back and add people and then do more expense reports for it.
And yet this is probably not where folks are at with Beautiful AI at this point, but if you are a business buyer, this is something to consider –when I'm operating on my corporate card, what is the easiest thing for me to do? Is it to swipe my card once, or swipe it multiple times? And likely it could be once.
But again, this is only for folks who already know that they want to get Beautiful AI. Okay? By the way, I hate these forms, usually skip them. It's a classic thing. They skip these if you're not in full browser mode. I know that they can change this, but if you're not in full browser mode, I wonder if they're using Gravity forms, it just automatically goes to the promo code. And we should get people automatically to go to this. So almost you're guaranteeing an error.
I'm starting my trial. I'm going to email myself. Great. Got to remember that one. I'm going to email myself April 14th. Cancel. Cancel. Wonderful. So we talk a lot about having questionnaires for asking people things. Well, this seems to be one of them. So, you know, pick the first one, but we'll say work "Irrational Labs."
These are all required, it seems. I think in general, these questions that are just a little bit too complicated and folks don't have an incentive, it's like, what's in it for me to answer? So if you want to get people to answer these intro type questions, you really want to have a "What's in it for me?" type of question.
Like, what types of templates would you like in your app? And you have four or five beautifully designed example templates, and one is business, one is academic, and now all of a sudden it becomes a benefit associated with a question to answer. I have zero. Instead of here to do anything but answer the first one, just make it easy for myself and do the one that that's default.
Again, a really nice little entryway. So it's basically saying what do you want to do? Actually, it's not asking me, this is just a glorified carousel. Never mind. Oh no, I can't click on these buttons. Okay? So "Make my team more efficient." "Manage content." I guess "Make my team more efficient."
So now this is a carousel. Um, it's such a beautiful platform, but people just aren't going to read this right away. I mean, I love these benefits. It's just, my investment level at this point is pretty low.
So we basically are trying to figure out what do we do? I think the goal right now is to create a new presentation, so, kind of obvious, but probably would put that button a little bit bigger. Wonderful. Okay, so I'm dropped right in here. Now, if I'm familiar with Google Docs, if I'm familiar with PowerPoint, this is actually going to be quite tough because, my norms, my habits on how I design slides are so ingrained from when I was a little child. Just kidding. This could be interesting, but let's see. So let's say we'll go with our minimal style. We'll click "Import from PowerPoint."
Interesting. Okay. This is really great by the way. You know, if you're thinking about enterprise software, there's a really interesting rule of thumb where you want to get it really easy for people to import their stuff over to you and slightly harder for them to get it out. So you notice that PowerPoint does that to Docs, or Docs does that to PowerPoint.
Or if you're downloading a Google Doc, you open up in PowerPoint, all of a sudden you're embarrassed. All this stuff that's not aligned. If you're copy and pasting something from Google Docs into Word, sometimes formatting is weird. The teams have no incentive to make it easy for you to take stuff out.
But we have all the incentive to make it easy for us or should have all the incentive to make it easy for us to put stuff in. And in fact, it's possible that if we are redesigning this Beautiful AI, what we would do is really start there. If you are interested in Beautiful AI, you create PowerPoint slides at some level. And so importing from another PowerPoint slide is going to just one, make the value prop much easier. I can import all my old presentations to start off, and I would have my branding, my templates, normal things I copy paste from. So this is really appealing as a way to do it. So we will pause there and continue and then start to make a presentation.
Questions about your product? Email kristen@irrationallabs.com.
How Beautiful AI Creates Slides With Zero Work: Product Teardown