My AI Tool Converts Docs Into Videos And Decks, Now Making $7K/Month

November 4th, 2026

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About
Business

Quanlai Li

Founder, ChatSlide.ai

$7K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

ChatSlide.ai

chatslide.ai

from San Francisco

started May 2023

$7,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

I'm Quanlai Li, founder of ChatSlide (chatslide.ai). ChatSlide turns a document, a link or a few lines of notes into a finished presentation, and from the same source into a narrated video with an AI avatar. Upload a PDF, pick a template, and a deck with speaker notes is ready in about two minutes, exported to PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF or MP4.

Our customers are teachers, students, consultants and doctors, plus paying teams in healthcare, education and government. More than 300,000 people have signed up, in 29 languages. Today we bring in around $7K/month, bootstrapped.

How do you come up with the idea for ChatSlide.ai?

I studied at Zhejiang University and UC Berkeley, then worked as an engineer at Robinhood, building workflow infrastructure used by 40+ internal teams. Every one of those teams spent hours a week turning the same documents into slides for the next meeting.

The aha moment came when GPT-4 shipped: going from source material to a structured story with visuals became something a model could do end to end. This idea had a pain I saw every week and buyers who already paid for slide tools, so I quit in 2023 to build it.

How did you launch ChatSlide.ai and get initial traction?

We launched publicly on Product Hunt in April 2024 and finished #1 Product of the Day. That brought the first wave of sign-ups and the first paying teams. People liked that it started from their own document rather than a blank prompt, and the most common request was "now present it for me", which later became our video feature.

The lesson: keep the free tier generous enough that people can finish a real project with it, and let the paid plans follow usage.

What was the growth strategy for ChatSlide.ai and how did you scale?

SEO and AI search have been the biggest channel. We wrote use-case pages for the people who actually search for this, such as teachers, doctors and consultants, and each page shows a real deck made from a real source. Over time ChatSlide started getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for AI presentation queries, which now brings us new sign-ups every day.

Why it worked: a page that answers one specific job ("turn a research paper into a lecture deck") converts far better than a generic "AI presentation maker" page, and AI assistants quote specific, factual pages.

The second lever is B2B. When a team evaluates ChatSlide, we stay on the account after the sale and fix whatever breaks in their actual workflow. If the PowerPoint export opens cleanly in their own template, they stay.

My recommendation: pick one narrow job your customer does every week, make that page and that workflow excellent, and measure where sign-ups really come from before spending on anything else.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building ChatSlide.ai?

Reliability matters more than generation. A deck with one broken slide is a deck the user cannot present, so most of our engineering went into evals, fallback across model providers and layout rules that hold up in every language.

Good decisions: staying bootstrapped, and staying close to paying customers after the sale. Timing helped too, since we started right as large models became good enough to do the whole job.

My top tip: ship against a paying customer's real workflow, not a demo. Our best features came from fixing what broke in a customer's actual week.

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