Listening to your users is not enough, you have to watch what they do: the Bunkr story

Bunkr was supposed to be the "PowerPoint killer". Founded in 2011, the French startup raised money, drew users from all over the world and reached 250,000 users a month. It was bought by Synthesio in 2017, worn out, without ever having found its market. Its co-founder, Edouard Petit, told us this story on 27 April 2021, during an episode of Startup Story.

At Bunkr, there was a feature table. Next to each feature, the number of users who had promised: "Do that, and I’ll use Bunkr every day." The team built the feature, announced it, and users loved it. Then they went back to PowerPoint.

Later, the large accounts took over: "I’ll pay whatever it takes, but you’re going to have to build it." Individuals on one side, companies on the other, each dictated their own list. Bunkr tried to serve both worlds. That is what sank it.

A tool built for themselves

In 2011, Edouard, Alexis and two friends are work-study students at a communications agency, where a large part of the job is making presentations. They build themselves a database of ideas that exports into a presentation. At Publicis, Edouard produces a presentation three minutes after a client brief.

Colleagues ask for access, some offer to pay ten euros a month. Edouard and Alexis give themselves a few months to find a technical partner. They find Jean-Christophe, quit their jobs and go to bootstrap the project in Rouen, since they cannot afford to live in Paris.

Bunkr promises to automate the creation of presentations, for about 8 euros a month. Every share on social media earns free months, and one sign-up in two shares. The messages, in English, announce that Bunkr will kill PowerPoint: sign-ups come in from all over the world.

The trap of what users say

Keeping users is harder than attracting them, because nobody makes a presentation every day. Edouard compares it with Canva: a social media manager makes one visual a day there, signed "made with Canva", which brings in other users. A presentation travels little, and the viral loop turns slowly.

To revive usage, the team asks users what they want. This is the time of the feature table.

“There was a real gap between ‘I’d love it if it could do that’ and, once you have it: ‘actually, I still do stuff in PowerPoint’.”

Users have been making presentations for five or ten years, and they describe what they would like based on what they know. Ask them if they want content that disappears: they will say no, they want it like on Instagram. Nobody would have asked for Snapchat.

After a funding round with Idinvest, in 2014 as Edouard remembers it, the team turns the approach around. It installs tools that show how users use the application, and asks them for the presentations they actually make at work. Two uses stand out. Many open PowerPoint without a template, like a notepad. And everyone remakes the same reports every week or every month, with the same data sources. From this, Bunkr builds a clean format, in the style of Medium: no font or colour to choose, a neat result straight away.

When the giants make the market free

At the time of the round, the market looks open. Microsoft and Apple are still at software you install, Google has just bought the technology that will become Google Slides, and Prezi runs on Flash, which Adobe is abandoning.

In the following months, the three giants launch their online version, almost free or bundled with their offers. Bunkr drops its paid model to move fast and reaches 250,000 users a month, none of whom pay. In front of American investors, who know Prezi and its 15 million users, the comparison does not hold.

The B2B pivot, and exhaustion

That leaves the reports. Bunkr builds an API so that software publishers can output their customers' data as a presentation rather than as a PDF, and starts tests with large groups. A customer who pays 20,000 or 30,000 euros demands their feature, down to their company's font. The roadmap changes master, and the consumer application keeps running alongside.

The product team, hired to build the presentation tool of tomorrow, now has to deliver micro-features for a few customers. Edouard speaks of “a misalignment”: part of the team leaves. The founders have been carrying the project since 2011. “We were worn out.” Synthesio, introduced by their investor and already a partner, buys Bunkr in 2017.

Watch rather than ask

Looking back, Edouard points to the trap of a product born from your own use: you cannot stop answering your own need to look at other people's. Today he would aim for a niche ready to pay 10, 20 or 30 euros a month, even if that means reaching only a small part of the market, and then he would widen it.

The two moves that pushed Bunkr forward can be reused as they are. Observe what users do in your product, not what they say about it. And ask them what they already produce without you: at Bunkr, their real presentations; for you, the spreadsheet or the document they remake every week. A promise of use costs nothing, a real file shows what actually gets done. The Customer interviews guide brings together the sheets and questions for these conversations.

Edouard applied the lesson with Magma, launched with Joris, Bunkr's first employee, on student recruitment in higher education. A first version built in two weeks, put in front of real customers, who took it. The money for what came next only arrived afterwards.

The full interview, with questions from the audience: