Your QBR deck is probably already out of date | Startup to Follow
This startup stops the soul-crushing cycle of copying and pasting screenshots from dashboards into your presentations.
It’s the end of the quarter. You know what that means. Time to build “The Deck.” You open up 17 different tabs, log in to Salesforce, Looker, and a half-dozen other dashboards. For the next five hours, you become a human screenshot machine, meticulously copying, pasting, and annotating charts. You finally finish, hit send... and then someone on your team finds a mistake, or the data refreshes, and you have to do it all over again. It’s a special kind of hell.
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Let’s talk about Matik, a startup that’s automating this entire miserable process.
The Problem
Every business is obsessed with being “data-driven,” but the reality is that most of our data storytelling is powered by the most manual, error-prone technology in existence: the copy-paste. We pay brilliant, expensive people to spend hours every week acting like robotic scribes, ferrying images of data from a dashboard to a slide. It’s a colossal waste of time and talent, and it means that by the time you present your findings, the data is probably already stale.
The Solution
Matik is the magic plumbing that connects your live data sources directly to the places where you tell stories about that data—your presentations and documents. You create a template in Google Slides or Docs, and instead of pasting a static screenshot of a chart, you insert a “Matik” that’s linked to your data in Looker, Snowflake, Salesforce, or wherever it lives. Now, you can automatically generate a personalized, up-to-the-minute report for any customer, region, or time period with a single click.
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Why Matik Stands Out (The “It” Factor)
This isn’t just another automation tool; it was born from deep, personal pain. The founders, Nikola and Zak, lived this nightmare while leading teams at Lyft. They were surrounded by data but paralyzed by the manual work required to share it effectively. They built Matik to be the tool they wished they had. This founder-market fit is incredibly strong.
What makes Matik truly special is its focus on “narrative.” It’s not just about dumping charts into a slide; it’s about enabling teams to tell a consistent, data-backed story at scale. For example, their customer success teams can now auto-generate a personalized Quarterly Business Review (QBR) for every single client, something that was logistically impossible before. Big names like Notion and Glassdoor are already using it to save hundreds of hours per quarter, freeing up their teams to do actual analysis instead of arts and crafts in Google Slides.
The Market Opportunity
The market for this is, in a word, gigantic. Every SaaS company with a sales, customer success, or marketing team feels this pain. They are all drowning in data and desperate for better ways to communicate it. Matik is perfectly positioned to become the essential infrastructure for data-driven storytelling in any organization that’s tired of wasting its best minds on manual, repetitive work.
What do you think? Is this the end of the screenshot era? Reply to this email with your thoughts. And for more deep dives on startups you wish you knew about, head over to startuptofollow.com.
The founder-market fit angle is spot on. Building from actual pain points at Lyft gives them such a huge advantage over teams guessing at what CS/sales needs. What's interesting is how this exposes a gap between our 'data-driven' rhetoric and reality - we've built incredible data infrastructure but still rely on Stone Age presentation methods. The real unlock isn't just time savings, it's the ability to maintain data freshness at presentation scale. That QBR personalization use case is massive for enterprise SaaS retention strategies.
Love this concept! The part about being "paralyzed by manual work" really resonates - I've definitley been stuck in that screenshot-hell before. The focus on narrative vs just chart-dumping is key. I remember building a client deck last year and by the time we presented it, the data had already shifted. Would've saved us alot of akward backpedaling if we had somthing like Matik.