🤫 Show, Don't Tell #11 - Let the darkness guide your prospects

Read Time: 3.9 minutes

Welcome to our 11th edition of Show, Don't Tell. A newsletter to help you build REMARKABLE interactive demos...3 tips at a time.

This week we'll:

Creating the perfect "off-ramp"
Setting expectations with some magic
Using darkness to guide your prospects

Let's get after it...

Supported By:

We are Navattic fanatics.

We had the idea for this newsletter after hundreds of hours spent building Navattic demos for our past companies and current clients. We love making remarkable interactive demos, and want to share helpful tips and examples so you can too.

A huge thanks to Navattic for helping make this a reality. If you want to create a better experience for your buyers, go check them out.

They have a free plan you can start using today!

→ Try Navattic

Tip #1 - Give Them an Early Exit

We've all been victims of the endless demo, or worse…you have the “ah-hah” moment with no way off the tour.

Enter Mixpanel.

About five steps into their tour, they do something unexpected. They stop the tour.

They take a pause and ask if you want to try their free version or continue with the tour.

This is brilliant because:

It respects the prospect's time and attention span
It offers a natural conversion point at peak interest
It gives control back to the viewer (and people love control)

Remember when we talked about Vertice's "not ready for a demo yet?" in Edition #5? This dual CTA flips it so you can get into the product for real.

DemoDash Pro Tip: Place your off-ramp at a natural "wow moment" in the demo.

→ Check out Mixpanel's off-ramp

Tip #2 - Set Expectations w/ Your CTA

Visier just raised the bar for the Nav Bar. And we’re definitely stealing this idea.

Their main navigation includes a "Take a tour" button, but here's the cool part: when you hover over it, a beautiful effect appears saying "2 min & self-guided."

This is cool because:

It immediately addresses the biggest objection: "How much time will this take?"
It removes the fear of getting trapped in a sales conversation
It creates a moment of delight before the demo even begins

Remember when we praised Guru in Edition #7 for their sticky "Book a Demo" bar? Visier shows us that sometimes the best conversion happens before the demo even starts.

→ Check out this delightful CTA

Tip #3 - Focus Their Attention

It sucks to say out loud, but UI will make or break a demo. If everything is cluttered, prospects have a hard time falling in love with your product.

Ramp is a great example of how to keep things in focus.

Instead of showing their entire interface at once, they use a subtle darkening effect around the extra stuff (called the Backdrop feature). Now, your eyes go exactly where they want you to look.

This matters because:

It eliminates the "where am I supposed to look?" experience
It creates a natural progression through complex screens
It lets you highlight the value without redesigning your UI

When building your next demo, remember that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is tell prospects where NOT to look.

→ See where NOT to look

Never start another storyboard from scratch 🪄

One of the most important (and often overlooked) steps in creating an interactive demo is building a storyboard.

It's the blueprint for your demo — where you determine what you're going to show and say, before you start building. At DemoDash, we never start a demo without one.

And Navattic has gone and created an AI-powered tool to create a kick-a$$ storyboard in seconds. All it needs is a landing page.

→ Try the new Storyboard Generator

Don’t have time to build remarkable Navattic demos? We do.

DemoDash is an agency 100% focused on making interactive demos your top product marketing asset. We’ll map your story, build your tours, and help you measure the impact.

→ Learn more at demodash.agency

So that’s it. Our 11th edition of Show, Don’t Tell.

3 useful tips to help you build remarkable interactive demos.

Tune in next Tuesday for more advice from DemoDash.

P.S.

If you know anyone else who would love these tips, please consider sending them this edition so they can subscribe 🙏

Jason and Eric
Say hi on LinkedIn!

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