We got a $60k tax penalty for a zero-revenue side project
In 2020, in the middle of COVID, a few friends and I decided that obviously the world needed another presentation tool. Our pain point was simple: we hated fighting with PowerPoint/Google Slides. We just wanted to write content and get nice slides without babysitting fonts, sizes, alignment, colors, and 19 different "Title + Subtitle" layouts that all somehow looked bad. So we built a prototype: a tiny click-together slide builder. Then we decided clicking was too slow and turned it into a full markdown-to-slides thing. Write markdown in, pretty slides out. Easy. Then, like every good side project, we started bolting on features: Image uploads, PDF generation via API, AI integration and more and more stuff nobody had actually asked for.... Somewhere in there, in peak "we're definitely the next unicorn" mode, we incorporated a US company through Stripe Atlas.
Why it failed
In 2020, in the middle of COVID, a few friends and I decided that obviously the world needed another presentation tool. Our pain point was simple: we hated fighting with PowerPoint/Google Slides. We just wanted to write content and get nice slides without babysitting fonts,
- Kind
- startup
- Status
- Shut down
- Inventor
- lukaslukas
- Ended
- 2025
- Source
- hackernews