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This awesome tweet got our Friday off to a perfect start:

@clevenole @dwhalen5 I use @haikudeck and think its the best thing since pizza delivery.

— Heather (@LaVieBoheme73) May 3, 2013

Maybe the sunshine was making us feel a little giddy, but we thought, wow, wouldn’t it be AMAZING if we tracked Heather down and DELIVERED A PIZZA to her?

This brainstorm quickly gathered momentum around the office, so we did a little Twitter recon to discover that Heather was attending a conference in Boston and that she was planning a happy hour meetup at a downtown brewery. Perfect!

Lisa, our awesome customer evangelist, made all the arrangements. She called the brewery, then she researched a nearby pizza place that had gotten great reviews on Yelp. She placed the order. Everything appeared to be falling into place. At the appointed time, we watched our Twitter feed with anticipation.

Unfortunately, our surprise didn’t quite work out as planned. The pizza guy showed up to a packed bar, and the person Lisa had made the arrangements with was nowhere to be found. Heather was on a tour of the brewery. We called the brewery, but were told no outside food was allowed. By the time we got a manager to agree to hold Heather’s pizzas for her in the kitchen, the delivery guy had left–with the pizzas {cue sad trombone}.

The moral of this story? Surprises are tricky to pull off, especially when you’re working across time zones with people you’ve never met before. Our little pizza stunt was THISCLOSE to being off-the-hook amazing, to totally wowing one of our fans with something unexpected and memorable. But even though it fell flat, our heart was (and is) in the right place.

So maybe cross-country pizza was pushing it, but we do promise to wow you with the things we can control–we are here to answer your questions, help you troubleshoot, and fix things that aren’t working for you.

New Haiku Deck Customer Support Page

We invite you to take a look at our newly revamped Support page, where you can submit a help request in a flash, post a feature request, or share your favorite tips and tricks. We know customer support can be incredibly frustrating–when the person you explained everything to disappears and you have to start over, when you’re told conflicting information, when nobody answers the phone (or the tweet, or the email). Although we’re not perfect, we really do make support a priority–so if you need help, we’re here for you!

P.S. Heather, thanks again for being a good sport about the mix-up—we owe you a pizza!

Trilogy, Madrona Venture Group, Founders Co-op, and Angels Back Early Leader in Mobile Productivity

Series A Funding Announced

SEATTLE, WA–(April 3, 2013) – Haiku Deck, a Seattle-based company that aims to transform presentation creation and sharing, announced today that it has secured $3 million in Series A funding. The investment was led by Trilogy Partnership with participation from Madrona Venture Group, Founders Co-op, tech entrepreneur Sarah Leary, and other angel investors.

Haiku Deck launched its iPad app to broad acclaim in August 2012 and has ranked #1 in productivity in 36 markets around the world. Last month Haiku Deck released version 2.0, with a powerful new set of business-focused features and functionality.

“We’ve gone from zero to half a million customers in just a few months, so it’s clear that Haiku Deck’s simple, fun approach to creating beautiful presentations is resonating,” said co-founder and CEO, Adam Tratt. “As mobile devices continue to change the way people work, we see a huge opportunity in helping everyone create the kind of presentation that used to require a design professional.”

Sample Haiku Deck chart illustrating iPad penetration by industry (source: Citrix)

Haiku Deck, hailed as the Instagram for Pitch Decks by Mashable, is gaining traction as a powerful, time-saving tool for traditional presentations and new formats including tablet-centric pitch decks, creative communication pieces, and rich content for blogs. Its innovative Creative Commons image search addresses a common pain point of finding and properly attributing free, high-quality images.

The funding will allow Haiku Deck to expand its lead in mobile-first presentation tools by growing the team, expanding to other platforms, and developing a premium offering.

“We believe Haiku Deck is well positioned to disrupt an industry that’s seen surprisingly little innovation in the past two decades,” said Yuval Neeman, Partner at Trilogy. “The consumer response and product reviews have been extraordinary, and we’re excited about the potential for this next phase of growth.” Haiku Deck received seed funding from Madrona Venture Group and angels after completing the TechStars program in Seattle.

Haiku Deck has been embraced by business leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, realtors, salespeople, marketers, and creative thinkers worldwide. Recent examples from the Haiku Deck Gallery include:

Tomorrow Ready CIO, by John Sheridan, Chief Technology Officer of Australia

Elon Musk Quotes from #SXSWI, by Karen Budell, Chief Content Officer, Imagine

Not Your Typical Graduate Job, by Andy Parker, founder of Incredibli

5 Sales Prospecting Techniques You Probably Never Tried, but Should, by Ago Cluytens

Teaching Frameworks for Creative Collaboration, presented at Educon 2.5

Visual Storytelling, by Ken Shelton

About Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck makes it simple and fun to create and share flawlessly beautiful presentations. Headquartered in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, Haiku Deck is a privately held company with the backing of prominent investors including Trilogy Partnership, Madrona Venture Group, Founder’s Co-op, and Techstars. The Seattle-based startup was founded by Adam Tratt and Kevin Leneway. For additional information and company images, visit www.haikudeck.com/newsroom.

Media Contact

Nicole Brunet

408-761-1803

media@haikudeck.com

After many weeks of hard work and at least 8 times that many afternoon trips to the neighborhood coffee shop, Haiku Deck 2.0 is now available in iTunes!

Yes, we’ve released updates in the past, but this is a big one, and it’s packed with all kinds of awesome new stuff! It’s like Christmas, New Year’s, and a disco-ball dance party all in one.

What’s New In Haiku Deck 2.0

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

For all the details, read more about:

• Making the best-looking charts and graphs you’ve ever seen, using only your fingertips
• Creating numbered and bulleted lists
• Cropping and repositioning images, right from the app
• The new streamlined publishing and sharing flow
• Cool new features you can access from the Main screen

But really, what we MOST want you to do is download or update Haiku Deck 2.0 TODAY, try it out, send us your feedback, rate and review it, tell your friends about it, and set your story free!

Love,

Team Haiku Deck

You’ve always been able to import charts and graphs into Haiku Deck, but one of the most exciting features of our new version is the ability to create your own, right in the app. Like everything we do, we worked hard to make it simple, beautiful, and fun. That’s right…fun! No linked spreadsheets, no fussy formatting, no complicated formulas–just magical drag-to-edit and tap controls. Seriously, it’s actually fun.

Here’s a Haiku Deck that includes all three kinds of charts you can create: bar charts, pie charts, and stat charts.

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

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One of the most magical features of Haiku Deck is the built-in image search, which puts millions of beautiful, free (yes, free!), high-quality presentation images at your fingertips. And of course, you can also snap or import your own photos for a personal touch. Our palette of 14 professionally designed text layouts make it easy to position your header and subheader lines so that your text doesn’t cover up the graffiti tag or vintage Phillies ball cap that perfectly illustrates your point, but sometimes you just need more…control. We hear you loud and clear.

Haiku Deck 2.0 is packed with fantastic new features, but one of the most useful ones is the ability to crop and reposition your images, right from the app.

Resizing Presentation Images

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We remain big believers in limiting the amount of text in your presentations and focusing on one idea per slide, but we’ve heard from many of you that sometimes you need just a bit more to work with. And so….to expand the possibilities for presentation ideas and inspiration, Haiku Deck 2.0 includes the ability to add simple, beautiful bulleted or numbered lists, like this one.

Sample Bulleted List

True to form, we’ve designed these new layouts to help you keep your message focused and bring your ideas to life with beautiful imagery, if you choose.

Click “more” for a step-by-step how-to.

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Note: For getting-started Haiku Deck help, be sure to check out the Haiku Deck Tutorial and How the App and Website Work Together.

It’s been truly amazing to see thousands and thousands of beautiful Haiku Decks published since we launched last summer, but we also know that the vast majority have never actually been published, and remain trapped on iPads all around the globe–beautiful stories yet to be set free. We know there are a number of good reasons for this:

1. You started decks but didn’t finish them. (That’s ok, we kinda got sucked into Downton Abbey, too.)

2. You’re sharing your decks directly from your iPads. That’s definitely the slickest way to do it, so well done–but there are still great benefits to publishing your decks to the Haiku Deck website.

3. You’re concerned about privacy, and who will see your decks online. Even though you’ve always been able to control your privacy settings from the Haiku Deck website, it’s an extra step, and it’s not straightforward enough. We get it.

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If you’ve already mastered charts and graphs, resized your images, learned how make lists, and tried out the new, streamlined publishing flow, here are a few cool new features of Haiku Deck 2.0 that you can access from the Main screen.

Copy Decks

Haiku Deck already saves business users so much time that Walt Mossberg once commented the app would raise the national GDP, but pitches and presentations can now be easily modified for a new client, event, or meeting. Just tap and hold to copy a whole deck. (John James and Greg Bamford: This one’s for you!)

Copy a deck with a long press

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Haiku Deck fans, we’ll keep this one short and sweet. We think you’re amazing. SO amazing that we’ve dropped the prices of our premium themes so you can treat yourself to a little something something. More details in our special Valentine for you:

Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad

Haiku Deck Premium Theme Special

Remember, you can purchase premium themes (at our special Valentine’s Day prices) right from the app. Simply start a new deck or open an existing deck, pull down the THEME handle at the top, and tap any theme with the green $ in the corner. Then tap BUY or BUY THEME PACK.

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Note: This post has been updated to reflect the new publishing flow in Haiku Deck 2.0, which affects how you view your deck online to create Notes. If you haven’t updated your app, please be sure to do that here.

As a Haiku Deck user, you’re already on the leading edge of awesomeness. But we all know there’s always a way to be thatmuchmore awesome, so we want to be sure you know about a quick way to take your Haiku Decks to the next level of awesome: add Notes to the web view of your deck.

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t quite fit what you want to say on a Haiku Deck slide, or if you’d like to try a ridiculously easy way to incorporate best practices into your presentations, trust us–you will love this.

3 Reasons to Add Notes to Your Haiku Deck

1. Add Helpful Detail: Haiku Deck focuses your message by limiting the text on each slide, but if more detail or supplemental resources would add value, Notes gives you a place to do it. Here’s an example of a great Haiku Deck made exponentially more awesome with Notes (props to Bill Risser of Phoenix):

Click to view the full Haiku Deck with Notes (and pick up some great Facebook tips, too)

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