Every time Anthropic or OpenAI release something, my feed fills up with the same headline: “AI company kills off another industry.” I’ve written about this before. Most recently it was data visualization; before that, design; and before that, presentations.
Presentations happen to be my field. I’m building Plainline, an AI tool that builds presentations. When Claude started making documents and slides right in the chat, my first thought was: “That makes sense.” My second was: “Plainline probably won’t become a big product.”
To be honest, they do a lot of things better. Claude builds presentations with the best models on the market, while I have to watch the cost of every request.
But a good presentation doesn’t need the world’s most powerful model. Simpler models can structure ideas into slides, write clear text and avoid clutter, as long as there’s a well-thought-out product around them. That’s what I’m building with Plainline.
When people ask me, “Why build a presentation tool if Claude can already do it?”, I want to ask back: “Why did Anthropic build one?” AI presentation builders already existed by then. If one product made all the others pointless, the industry would have stopped at the very first one.
It didn’t, because everyone is doing the same thing: trying to make something better and more interesting, each in their own way. And no one knows in advance where they’ll succeed. You only find out along the way.
I’m not trying to build a product for millions. A few hundred people who like Plainline as it is (simple, unpretentious, focused on clear text) is more than enough for me. For Anthropic, a few hundred users is a rounding error. For me, it’s a perfectly good living.
You know the gray slice in market share pie charts? The one labeled “Other,” where everyone who didn’t make the top gets lumped together? That’s where I am. And I’m fine with that.
That slice doesn’t disappear when a giant enters the market. Figma won the design-tool market, but Sketch lives on with a loyal user base of its own. Notion has grown huge, yet Obsidian, built by a small team, keeps thriving alongside it. Basecamp has stayed a small, profitable company for years, surrounded by giant task trackers. The market leader takes a big share, but never the whole market, and certainly not the people who want something different from what everyone else uses.
And here small players have an advantage that big companies don’t. At Anthropic, the presentation tool is built by one team inside a huge organization. For them, it’s one feature out of a hundred, a way to keep people from leaving the chat. For me, Plainline is the whole product.
So the answer to “why” is simple. It’s the same reason Anthropic does it, and Google and Microsoft did before them. I’m building what I can, as well as I can, and we’ll see where I end up. Most likely in that “Other” slice.
