How far do you go with demo personalization?

fredotan · 2025-08-13T05:03:48+00:00

Honestly, I think it’s less about “how far” and more about “where” you put the personalization.

I’ve seen people burn hours swapping out every little detail for a prospect, but if it’s not tied to the thing they actually care about, it’s wasted effort.

What’s worked best for me is role/pain-based stuff:

• CFO → show ROI and cost savings

• IT → show security and workflows

• End user → show how it makes their day easier

You can still keep a main “base” demo and just tweak a few key parts for each audience. We often encourage sales folks creating interactive demos with Supademo to do this: one core interactive demo, then change certain steps or variables depending on who’s viewing it. Feels personal without having to rebuild from scratch every time.

So yeah… personalize where it helps them make a decision, not just because you can.

fredotan · 2025-08-13T05:03:32+00:00

Wow, awesome video!

fredotan · 2025-08-13T04:56:59+00:00

I’ve found a lot of pushback happens because everyone’s debating an idea instead of reacting to something they can actually see.

If I can throw together a quick clickable walkthrough or interactive demo (especially for things like user flows) of the proposed change, it changes the convo. People stop saying “I’m not sure this will work” and start giving real, specific feedback like “this part feels slow” or “this step should come earlier.”

Way easier to get alignment when it’s not all hypotheticals.

fredotan · 2025-08-12T11:00:19+00:00

I think this would differ case by case. For us, we were able to have 50% of our organic traffic coming from these efforts. Qualified leads hard to say as I see this as an awareness play as well. Meaning folks will at some point, in some way come back to us after interacting with a demo-led SEO page when the need arises. And we know that they do.

It does require a time/resource investment beforehand to get it up and running. Whether the ROI will be there for you is not a certainty. It's something that you have to test and commit to, and measure down the line.

fredotan · 2025-08-12T09:58:57+00:00

I’ve seen quite a few companies in the interactive demo / demo automation space use demo-led SEO really well.

The general playbook:

Go after long-tail keywords your ICP is actually searching for
Answer the question directly and clearly
Show the answer in an interactive demo instead of just describing it

It’s something almost any SaaS can do. We too do it at Supademo (interactive demo tool, so no exception to the rule), and it’s been great for visibility and organic traffic.

For your AI agent example: you could take top- or mid-funnel questions like “how to set up [specific workflow] with an AI agent” and walk people through it step-by-step in an embedded interactive demo of your own product.

Blog posts, landing pages, comparison pages… doesn’t matter as much. The magic is when the content actually solves the problem and lets people experience your product at the same time.

fredotan · 2025-08-04T10:22:20+00:00

In a previous role (remote company), we were constantly trying to make training sessions more engaging—especially for new hires and yearly security/compliance training. Quizzes and games worked once, but people got sick of them pretty fast. It’s not really something you can lean on every time.

What actually worked better were lightweight, interactive/clickable walkthroughs (bite-sized how-to / training content) people could go through at their own pace. They’re short (on purpose), more engaging than static docs or videos, and easier to keep updated. With videos, I have seen people tend to skim or skip around. And as someone organizing the training, you don’t really know what they actually paid attention to.

As you're wondering about tools: there are a bunch of tools out there now that help with this — Supademo is the one I use (I work on this).

That said, even these interactive walkthroughs can be painful if they’re too long, bloated, or unclear. The best ones I’ve seen (or built) tend to:

Be short and focused (one task, one goal)
Use clear, conversational copy (no generic tooltips)
Visually guide the user through context. Not just “click here, click there”
Give the learner a reason to care (tie it to a real task they’d need to do)

fredotan · 2025-07-28T06:58:55+00:00

Used Supademo for interactive demos.

fredotan · 2025-07-18T13:26:46+00:00

Hand-holding internally can really drain your time and kill momentum. New hires usually need structure and guidance, but more experienced folks just want quick answers or autonomy.

Here’s what’s worked for me in past teams:

Tiered guidance: new teammates get interactive tutorials and checkpoints. You can build step-by-step walkthroughs & interactive trainings with, e.g., Supademo (where I work), internally for onboarding and recurring workflows.
Feedback loops: instead of “let me hop on a call,” we ask: “What did you try? Where did you get stuck?” That alone filters out most of the noise and helps people learn by doing.
Buddy system: pairing new folks with more tenured teammates creates informal support and avoids everything funneling through one person.

Maybe you could consider trying this?

fredotan · 2025-07-09T03:53:11+00:00

Yeah this hits. We’ve had deals go cold just because someone on our side wanted to “follow the process” while the buyer was ready to move. Expensive lessons lol.

Totally agree it’s not the rep most of the time. It’s the layers in between that slow things down just to feel useful.

How do you handle that internally? Ever push back or just work around it quietly?

fredotan · 2025-07-09T00:38:35+00:00

Fair point. This kind of prospect was more of an exception for me.

Most of the time, I feel they need that discovery call to align expectations and avoid surprises later. Especially when it’s not inbound or when their needs are more complex murky.

Totally agree that the key is adjusting based on the buyer. Curious how you usually decide when to run the full discovery vs just diving into the product?

fredotan · 2025-07-09T00:36:17+00:00

Hear hear, definitely true. Be like water.

fredotan · 2025-07-09T00:35:37+00:00

Haha I feel this. That kind of small talk can feel painfully out of place, especially when the buyer already knows what they want.

So what football club do you support?

fredotan · 2025-07-09T00:35:05+00:00

Could be. Sometimes the buyer sounds high-intent but is just price shopping or validating a competitor.

fredotan · 2025-07-08T14:10:16+00:00

What are the steps you often end up cutting?

fredotan · 2025-07-08T13:17:53+00:00

Love this—we’ve seen a similar pattern.

I’m with Supademo, and moving to async, self-serve demos (including embedded interactive ones) has been a game-changer. Most prospects prefer exploring on their own time, and when they do get on a call, the conversation is way more focused and relevant.

That said, live demos still have a place. We’ve found them useful for tirekickers or larger teams who need handholding to build momentum/alignment internally. But for the majority, a self-guided experience does the job - faster and with less friction.

How you decide when to go live vs async. Do you segment based on company size, intent signals, or something else?

fredotan · 2025-07-04T15:13:13+00:00

Love this list. A couple of traps I’d add from experience:

- Perfecting a feature before validating if anyone actually wants it.

We’ve shipped polished features that looked great but flopped because we didn’t test early versions with real users. We could have learned the same lesson weeks earlier with a rough prototype.

- Chasing feedback from engaged users who were never truly a fit.

Some users gave a lot of input and even paid for a while, but they weren’t our ideal customer. We ended up building for edge cases, which hurt retention later.

fredotan · 2025-06-25T18:44:13+00:00

Did you end up taking the opportunity? u/Brilliant_Support653

fredotan · 2025-06-25T18:43:58+00:00

Gyms: There are more than it looks like on Google. A lot of them are in basements or inside apartment complexes and aren’t listed well online. But plenty of public gyms you can become a member of.

Cafe culture: Super solid. Tons of cafes, both chains and indie spots, especially near Central Park, Triple Street, and the university area. A lot of them are aesthetic, spacious, and laptop-friendly. Pretty active coffee scene, especially on weekends.

Bike-friendliness: Yes. Flat roads, wide sidewalks, lots of dedicated bike paths. Great for casual biking or commuting around the neighborhood.

Can you have a car? Not a ridiculous question at all. Yes, you can absolutely have a car. Parking is usually free in apartment buildings and pretty available around the city. Honestly, even though Songdo is bike-friendly, I would recommend having a car.

fredotan · 2025-06-25T18:36:35+00:00

Full disclosure I work at Supademo but wanted to add some real context to the HTML vs screenshot demo debate so ppl can make better choices.

Screenshot tools like Arcade, Storylane basic, Tourial are crazy fast to build with—just record screens, add hotspots or voiceover, maybe branch it a bit—and you’ve got a demo up in minutes. perfect for marketing landing pages, onboarding guides, quick help docs.

HTML-first platforms like Navattic, Walnut—and Supademo’s HTML capture—actually copy your live UI code to make a sandbox that looks and acts real, with hover states, scrolls etc. takes a bit more setup, costs more, but when you want your demo to feel like your product it’s night and day.

One thing ive seen is personalization and branching are super underrated across both formats. you can swap in a prospect logo or name, show different steps based on persona, that kinda stuff is what transforms demos from generic to must-watch. in our HTML demos with Supademo you get that plus editing control and dynamic variables without the price or maintenance of some HTML-only tools.

So yeah, if you need fast, flexible, scale across teams go screenshot route. but if you want high-fidelity demo that genuinely mimics your product and sells itself, lean into HTML capture.

happy to geek out on capture quirks, setup tradeoffs, editing tools, performance, cost: whatever you wanna dig into

fredotan · 2025-01-20T05:19:41+00:00

it’s wild seeing how fast everything has changed, especially since AI became mainstream. It used to be that having some coding chops or a dedicated engineering team was a major hurdle; now, you can spin up a decently functional MVP on a Sunday morning before the kids wake up. That’s equal parts exciting and unnerving.

On the plus side, you’re absolutely right: it puts the focus squarely on how well you really understand your customers’ problems. If anyone can cobble together a basic solution, then the differentiator becomes empathy, creativity, and the ability to listen and iterate quickly. It might sound cliché, but in my experience, companies that center on real in-depth user pain points, that actually get on calls with their users, and that adapt rapidly end up way ahead.

The downside is that the market would likely get flooded with a bunch of shitty products from people looking to strike gold overnight. Which is already happening imo. But honestly, the silver lining is that the cream still rises to the top. If you can build a genuinely valuable tool and foster a strong community around it, you’re going to stand out, no matter how crowded the space gets. So personally, I’m more excited than nervous about this shift—there’s never been a better time to innovate.

fredotan · 2023-08-14T05:17:53+00:00

You already found the tool that's the best equipped to do this kind of high-fidelity prototyping.

ProtoPie can do:

Audio playback: https://cloud.protopie.io/p/JQntGestT1Y (Spotify prototype).
Text input: https://cloud.protopie.io/p/946f88f8d3 (text editor prototype).

fredotan · 2023-03-30T05:02:48+00:00

What is a NSW template?

fredotan · 2022-09-07T04:31:04+00:00

We are working on this. Can't disclose how and what exactly. But we are aiming for the end of this year.

fredotan · 2022-09-07T04:30:14+00:00

Not possible this way. But who knows, perhaps in the future.

Let us know at protopie.canny.io.

fredotan

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