Picture a prospect clicking into your demo for the first time. Your product might have a lot going on. So you add a tooltip explaining the thing you want them to focus on.
And then the rest of the screen just... stays there.
They're reading your copy and scanning the background at the same time. Divided attention means the copy lands softer than it should.
Okteto uses the backdrop feature more aggressively than most. When they want your attention on something, everything else goes dark. The beacon sits in the middle of what's left, and there's nowhere else to look.
It works because the contrast does the heavy lifting before reading a word of copy. You're removing all the noise from your demo.
We've seen this done well before. AlertMedia used shadows in Edition #55, and Thales layered a dimming effect with a beacon in Edition #62.
If you've been going light on the backdrop (or none at all), try doubling down. The less cognitive work the buyer has to do, the more they actually absorb.
There's a moment in most interactive demos where the illusion breaks. You're clicking along and then you hit a screen that's obviously static. Idk about you, but my brain goes "this is a simulation" and I check out a little.
Okteto has a step with a revolving recycle symbol and blinking dots. And it's not a GIF, either. It's an HTML capture of their actual product, doing what it does.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. A GIF on top of a screenshot signals that someone added motion to approximate the real thing. An HTML capture that happens to have motion in it signals that the real thing looks like this.
I find one feels like decoration and the other feels like a demo.
We've been fans of adding motion to demos for a while. Samsara's live GPS in Edition #38, Notion's AI typing effect in Edition #31, Dremio's animated text in Edition #48.
If there's a part of your product that naturally moves, don't simulate it. Capture it.
The end of a demo feels like the end of a session. You hit the last step, get a CTA, and if you want to see another tour, you're heading back to the demo center to pick something and wait for it to load.
Okteto built their flows so the last step of one demo leads directly into the first step of the next. You click through, and you're already inside the next tour.
It's a small thing. But the feeling is completely different. Instead of "I just finished a demo," it's "I'm still going." The interest carries over because the experience never actually stopped.
We've covered a lot of ways to chain demos together. Wise's six-pathway multiverse in Edition #10, Huzzle's persistent sidebar in Edition #43. Most of those solve the navigation problem by giving buyers a visible menu to choose from.
Okteto solves it differently: you don't choose what's next, you just choose if you want to keep going.
If you've got multiple demos and you know which order makes sense, wire them together at the end. Keep buyers in the flow state instead of making them figure it out.
Navattic just released a major update to their MCP server.
Now, not only can you get performance metrics or reminders to refresh your demos, you can actually build and edit demos directly from AI agents like Claude π€―
For example, say you want to build a new demo flow using an existing capture collection. Just type "Build a first draft demo using Captures from Marketing Conversion Demo"
Or say you want to refresh your existing demo with more benefit-focused messaging. Just type "Edit all of my existing step text to be more benefit versus feature-focused."
All it takes is simple natural language prompts, and you can let AI build and improve your demos for you.
A live, FREE coaching session to help you build better interactive demos (and make them your top marketing asset.)
In these 45-minute coaching sessions, Eric and Jason answer your questions about demo strategy, distribution, sales enablement, and any other challenges you're facing with interactive demos.
The next session is Wednesday, July 22nd at 12PM ET.