I know Show HN rules want you to be extra nice to people, but this is indistinguishable in execution from a honeypot, so anyone uploading their company slides to some random service like this one will likely be fired on the spot for gross negligence.
I see your idea and I suppose there is value in it, but the problem of screen sharing is basically fictional compared to the real problem of someone just uploading company data (+ metadata!) to a random service some random person came up with.
Screen sharing only shares pixels and does so through parties that the economy considers trustworthy enough.
This is not going to work as the SaaS you seem to envision it to be.
It might work for a self-hosted internal service thing or a group of friends though.
___
Thinking about this, I suspect that at least one naive bored corporate guy browsing HN will have tried this out with a random pptx they had lying around on their work computer. The data is now.. somewhere.
The point about privacy has been made before and I see the value in it. But, users regularly share documents with third parties. In addition this was expected to be used primarily by non-business users (such as students) and in the future enhance privacy if people see value in it.
It doesn't work as a self-hosted service, because you need to be able to quickly share a link with other participants.
Sorry but it doesn't work with your current architecture, but it is in fact possible to have the same functionality even within a network/VPN/Tailnet, or with your own domain, like all self-hosted apps do.
Just a datapoint but Microsoft Teams (most commonly paired with users of Powerpoint) has an option to share and present just a slide deck where viewers can tag along the presenter or jump forward and back to view the rest of the deck independently from presenter.
But in quite a few cases presenter would want to control when information is presented/revealed to audience.
A related datapoint, which feels like a "know your tools" thing, but PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View and "Browsed by an Individual".
If you've got multiple monitors, just present to a different monitor, with or without Presenter View (which shows notes and such) and screen share only the monitor with the slides.
If you're on a single monitor (which ultrawides are making more somewhat common again), you can go to Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show and switch the Presentation Type to "Browsed by an Individual" which keeps the slide show windowed, but hides most controls and focuses just on the slides, then screen share only that window. At the moment PowerPoint still doesn't support Presenter View when running slides this way, possibly because it predates modern ultrawides and people didn't have the screen space before to have multiple such windows open side by side.
("Browsed by an Individual" is also stupidly hard to discover if you have never had reason to "Set Up Slide Show", a dialog somewhat more common in 90s PowerPoint because the flow sometimes was that you would need to "Set Up" before you could F5 launch it. I've seen so many company presentations presented with the full fat PPT normal/editing view window simply because no one knows to look for "Browsed by an Individual" to focus the slides.)
The (MS Teams) feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and the way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear they can press the “Live” button to sync up again, so then they end up interrupting the speaker to say they are lost, or multiple people will say they are not clear where they are…
“If you don't want people to be able to independently navigate through a PowerPoint file you're sharing, select Private view Hide objects button in the meeting controls.”
I do want people to independently navigate. But also, I'd like to bring them back to the current slide, or somehow highlighting the current slide, essentially making it easy for viewers not to get lost
In the past I have liked marp (https://marp.app/) for technical slides as you write in markdown, can use version control, etc. Powerpoint always felt odd as a developer.
To share public slides I've published to GitHub pages (https://github.com/robalexdev/marp-to-pages). I've seen professors use it for all their slides. But that doesn't synchronize slides, last I checked.
Did you explore client-side for the presentation, and just do the collaborative part use a backend? Your backend doesn't really need to know whats on the screen to draw, nor to sync the slides, in my unverified opinion.
Fwiw, having taught online for well over a decade, I keep (kept?) trying to put people on to the marvel of a virtual machine for this (minus the sharing this offers, I suppose)
Just have a VM that you tell Zoom or whatnot is the "window to present" Now you can do anything, slides and more, and also that thing can be the only publicly seen thing, your computer stays private.
Number 1 feature: live cursors. Yeah, it makes people go wow, but I hope it can be switched off. Nothing less useful than having random movement distracting people from whatever I'm presenting...
Side comment: i guess this is the october 2026 defaut font for Claude? (Vibe coded some landing pages prototypes very recently, always came with this exact fonts)
In a previous position, we used Adobe Connect a lot for online meetings, and the normal way of sharing presentations was to upload them to the room and control the presentation from there.
Webex has this as well, but I find that most people don't bother and just share their screen.
Interesting Idea for engagement. Although I think slides suck in general and often used for one way communication, especially suck for Software Development. A doc is much more preferable and a lot of collaborative docs like Google Doc exist.
The actual idea came to me back in University when I was presenting projects where I worked with other students. This way students can share a presentation only they can control.
It is an interesting solution that you developed with learnings from your personal experience. Appreciate that! Hope this finds its space in the market. Wish you the best!
I see your idea and I suppose there is value in it, but the problem of screen sharing is basically fictional compared to the real problem of someone just uploading company data (+ metadata!) to a random service some random person came up with.
Screen sharing only shares pixels and does so through parties that the economy considers trustworthy enough.
This is not going to work as the SaaS you seem to envision it to be. It might work for a self-hosted internal service thing or a group of friends though.
___
Thinking about this, I suspect that at least one naive bored corporate guy browsing HN will have tried this out with a random pptx they had lying around on their work computer. The data is now.. somewhere.
So this could be an actual honeypot.
It doesn't work as a self-hosted service, because you need to be able to quickly share a link with other participants.
It's not a honeypot.
Sorry but it doesn't work with your current architecture, but it is in fact possible to have the same functionality even within a network/VPN/Tailnet, or with your own domain, like all self-hosted apps do.
But in quite a few cases presenter would want to control when information is presented/revealed to audience.
If you've got multiple monitors, just present to a different monitor, with or without Presenter View (which shows notes and such) and screen share only the monitor with the slides.
If you're on a single monitor (which ultrawides are making more somewhat common again), you can go to Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show and switch the Presentation Type to "Browsed by an Individual" which keeps the slide show windowed, but hides most controls and focuses just on the slides, then screen share only that window. At the moment PowerPoint still doesn't support Presenter View when running slides this way, possibly because it predates modern ultrawides and people didn't have the screen space before to have multiple such windows open side by side.
("Browsed by an Individual" is also stupidly hard to discover if you have never had reason to "Set Up Slide Show", a dialog somewhat more common in 90s PowerPoint because the flow sometimes was that you would need to "Set Up" before you could F5 launch it. I've seen so many company presentations presented with the full fat PPT normal/editing view window simply because no one knows to look for "Browsed by an Individual" to focus the slides.)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/teams/meetings/share-sli...
In the past I have liked marp (https://marp.app/) for technical slides as you write in markdown, can use version control, etc. Powerpoint always felt odd as a developer.
To share public slides I've published to GitHub pages (https://github.com/robalexdev/marp-to-pages). I've seen professors use it for all their slides. But that doesn't synchronize slides, last I checked.
0: https://revealjs.com/multiplex/
1: https://quarto.org/docs/presentations/revealjs/
I wanted to first know if people would like something like this.
Just have a VM that you tell Zoom or whatnot is the "window to present" Now you can do anything, slides and more, and also that thing can be the only publicly seen thing, your computer stays private.
Webex has this as well, but I find that most people don't bother and just share their screen.
I wanted to see if anybody wants this too, and hopefully develop it into a business.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/present-from-...