Kahoot for Business

Make your presentation interactive.

If you’ve ever been to a conference, you’ve noticed the behavior of people taking pictures of slides. You’ve probably done it too. Have you ever asked yourself, “why are we taking pictures of slides if we all have devices in our hands?” Why aren’t the slides here on my device? Why isn’t there a QR code on the screen that lets everyone join the presentation? And why isn’t it interactive? And why isn’t slide 4 a poll that we can all vote on and see how we compare in the results? And why aren’t slides 14-18 quiz questions with the results on the screen and a leader board in between? And why is slide 24 a slide that says “questions?” Why aren’t we asking questions when they occur to us? And why aren’t we able to upvote the best questions? And why isn’t AI compiling duplicate questions?

Those are good questions.

Have you ever played Kahoot? Your kids certainly have. They have over 50 million monthly active users, mostly at K-12 schools. Kahoot is kind of like Jackbox for kids. You go to a URL and enter a 4-digit code and you’re in the game. The teacher can ask questions and the students can answer live and see how they stack up. It’s a great way to make a classroom interactive and also level the playing field. We’ve all been in a class where the pet student gets most of the attention.

But meetings and presentations have the same needs. The presenter needs to share ideas and get feedback from the audience. It’s often hard to compete for air time because the same dynamics that exist in the classroom also exist in the boardroom or audience.

So, why isn’t Kahoot used in business? My assertion is that the experience is geared for kids and too basic and childish with primary colors and campy music. The other reason is Kahoot is kind of it’s own experience. It isn’t stitched into the workflow of a presentation, so if you’re going to use Kahoot, you would have to exit out of your presentation and jump into the game, then exit the game and go back to your presentation (clumsy).

Slido has created an experience more appropriate for business use, but has the same issue that it’s on an island. You have to jump back and forth between Slido and your presentation.

Kahoot for business

What if there was a product that let you build interactions (quizzes, polls, Q&A, or games) stitched into your slides? Everyone in the meeting or audience could join your presentation and not only have the slides, but also interact with them.

You wouldn’t want to have to compete with existing slide tools as people are heavily committed to their tool of choice and those tools have built a bazillion features over the last couple of decades. You would want to start as a companion.

There are two ways to go after this:

1. Plugin to existing slide tools (Powerpoint, Keynote, Google Slides). This would be ideal as a user wouldn’t have to interrupt their workflow. Just build a deck as you normally would and insert interactive slides as needed. However, in my rudimentary research into the APIs for slide tools it appears that your write functionality is quite limited. And you most likely won’t be able to pull off the live interaction piece in presentation mode as you’re relying on their existing functionality and HTML embeds aren’t allowed in 2 of the 3 main slide tools.

2. Import a deck and build on top of it. This is less ideal because it’s another step: build a deck—>import to interactive tool. However, this would give you full control over the interactions and presentation experience. Just import your deck and insert the interactive slides where you want them. Ideally, this tool would be what you present from and would have a killer remote app that would allow the presenter to control the interactions and see details like who voted what. One limitation would be if you wanted to edit any of the original slides. This would require enabling an easy re-import or building all of the table stakes slide features (no thanks).

The beauty of this product is the viral growth model. You can’t use this product without showing it to other people (who could also be users). Who wouldn’t want to be the cool kid that has games and puzzles in their deck?

Over time, you could build the table stakes slide features and become the all in one tool if that felt necessary. My guess is that Google, Apple, or Microsoft would buy you before this ever happened.

GTM

While this tool could be used in meetings and corporate training, I think the greatest virality would be found from getting adoption from keynote presentations at large conferences. This could expose the product to hundreds or thousands of companies at once.

Partnering with conference organizers would be key. I know how much of a nightmare it is to organize everyone’s slide decks and get them into the right format, so maybe you could build the functionality that makes this easy for them to manage dozens of different presenters on the mainstage and automatically add the bumper slides they need.

This would naturally seed use into the corporate world in trainings or meetings.

Wireframes

Disclaimer: I am not a designer and have mad respect for true designers who could make this way better. Here’s my basic thinking on UX.

See existing presentations and upload a new slide deck

Add your interactions

Invite people to join your presentation

Let them play along

See results

If you end up building this, please let me know so I can be your most devoted beta tester.

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