How to make a TikTok slideshow — and the next hundred

TikTok's photo mode turned the humble slideshow into one of the best-performing formats on the platform — especially for apps and software, where the message is an explanation, not a spectacle. Here is how to make one properly, and — more usefully — how to make the next hundred without doing it all by hand.

Making one slideshow by hand

1. Start from one idea. A slideshow is one thought broken into steps, not a photo dump. "Your receipts are everywhere; here is the fix" is one thought. "Ten features of our app" is ten thoughts and will perform like none of them.

2. Write the slides before you touch images. The classic structure:

• Slide 1 — the hook: name the specific frustration. This is the only slide most people see, so it earns most of your effort.
• Slides 2–4 — the turn: what changes, one step per slide, a line or two each.
• Last slide — the landing: what to do next, in plain words.

3. Keep text short and set it on a readable box. A line or two per slide. Text baked onto a busy photo without contrast is the most common amateur tell.

4. Pick images that carry mood, not information. The text explains; the image sets tone. Consistent visual style across slides reads as intentional.

5. Add sound. Photo-mode posts still have audio, and silent posts underperform. A calm licensed track is enough; you are not chasing a trend, you are avoiding silence.

6. Post it natively on TikTok as photo mode, on Instagram as a carousel. On platforms without carousels — YouTube, for one — the same slides work rendered as a short vertical video.

That is a perfectly good afternoon of work. Which is the problem.

The part that matters: the next hundred

One slideshow tells you almost nothing. The format rewards iteration — the same idea re-hooked, re-ordered, re-skinned — because nobody knows in advance which phrasing stops the scroll. The teams that win with slideshows are not better designers; they simply ship more variants.

That is a pipeline problem, not a design problem:

• Angles become templates. Write down the five problems your product solves. Every slideshow is one of them, re-expressed. (Reachira generates angle variations from your brand automatically.)
• Slides become data. Once the structure is fixed — hook, steps, landing — new variants are new text in old frames. The writing is the only creative act left, which is exactly where an AI writer earns its keep.
• Images become a library. A consistent set of themed photos reused across posts builds a recognisable feed and removes the daily "find a picture" chore. Reachira ships themed photo sets and rotates them so neighbouring posts do not repeat.
• Publishing becomes schedule. Native photo mode on TikTok, carousel on Instagram, rendered video where carousels do not exist — decided per platform by the scheduler (how publishing differs per platform), inside each platform's daily limits.

A hundred slideshows a month sounds absurd when each one is an afternoon. As a pipeline it is a settings page: pick the angles, pick the cadence, review the queue with your morning coffee.

Why slides beat video for explanations

A slideshow hands the clock to the reader. A video plays at one speed for everyone; a photo post waits. Fast readers flip through in ten seconds, slow readers sit on slide three until it makes sense — and both finish, which is the signal feeds reward most. For software this fit is almost unfair: an app's story is usually an explanation ("you have this problem; here is the shape of the fix"), and explanations read better than they watch. The same idea as a voiced video forces one pacing on everyone; as slides it meets each viewer at their own speed.

There is a second, quieter advantage: slideshows are text-first, and text is what you, a founder, are actually good at producing. No lighting, no delivery, no cutting — the craft is one good sentence per slide, which is a writing problem you can iterate on at your desk.

Writing slide text that survives a phone screen

The discipline that separates clean slideshows from noisy ones is almost entirely subtraction:

• One idea per slide. If a slide needs an "and", it is two slides.
• Title first, support under it. A short bold line the thumb-scroller catches, with at most a sentence of support below. If the title alone does not carry the slide, the support will not save it.
• Count characters, not words. Phone type is big; a title past roughly forty characters starts wrapping into a paragraph, and a support line past two sentences becomes homework.
• Break at sentence ends. Splitting one sentence across two slides feels like a stumble. Each slide should land on its own.
• Read the whole thing aloud once. If the flip-through does not sound like one person making one point, reorder until it does.

Mistakes to skip

• Walls of text on slide one. The hook is a sentence, not a paragraph. (Ironically, the wall-of-text video format works precisely because it is one screen read at the viewer's pace — but that is a different format with different rules.)
• Ten-slide epics. Completion rate falls off a cliff. Five tight slides beat ten loose ones.
• Identical reposts across accounts. Variations, yes; carbon copies, no — platforms treat mass duplicates as spam, and so do we.

Slideshows are the rare format where the cost of trying is nearly zero and the audience actively prefers the simple version. Make one by hand to learn the shape — then stop making them by hand.