Think about where your buyers look when they're sizing up your product. Some of them start on your homepage. A lot of them don't.
They start on a review site. A G2 page, perhaps. Then an integration page for the tool they already use. And for a LOT of B2C products… a marketplace listing.
PitneyShip put a real Navattic demo right inside their Shopify App Store page. They could’ve put anything here: a screenshot, a recorded video. But instead, they chose a clickable tour that lives next to the install button.
Now a Shopify merchant can step inside the product before they ever leave the marketplace. Jason and I love this because:
The buyer is already in shopping mode. The demo helps them keep shopping without dragging them to another store.
It's proof the product works inside Shopify. The demo IS the integration story.
For B2B companies, we talk about putting demos on G2. This is the same instinct, but for someone who’s lifeblood is on the marketplace.
Pretend you're a buyer and you finally clicked the "Take a Tour" button.
What's the worst thing the next screen could do?
Probably what most gates do…slap you with a form, ask for your work email, your company size, your level of intent for a product you haven't seen yet.
Paycor's tour gate does something both Jasona and I appreciate. The custom welcome makes you feel like you're stepping INTO the product instead of getting carded at the door. The copy reads less like a form and more like a host saying “come on in.”
The first time I clicked through, I forgot I was at a gate at all (which is really the point, right?).
Last week we praised Birdie for giving buyers an off-ramp at the gate. Paycor's the other side of that same coin. Both companies treat the demo gate as brand real estate, not a tollbooth.
Have you ever watched an AI demo and it felt… awkward? The few screens that were actually just a screenshot. The "response" that was obviously canned. Or the pause where you can almost hear the marketing team going "and now THIS happens."
Vero AI's SOX walkthrough has a bit of magic to it. They built it so the demo basically runs itself.
You won’t know how they do it (unless you’re demo nerds, like us). They auto-advance steps with small, deliberate delays that make the product feel like it's thinking, processing, working in a real environment. There are probably 15 extra steps in there and you don't even notice them. You just watch the product do the thing.
The common move would've been a video on a loop. But they went the extra mile, which we appreciate.
If you’ve built multiple demos in Navattic, you’ve 100% experienced the challenge of managing multiple capture collections.
Like when you create a new demo and need to duplicate captures from one demo to the next. Or you waste time capturing screens that have already been captured!
NO MORE!
With Workspace Captures, you can now easily manage your screen captures at a Workspace level and re-use them across multiple demos.
So you can focus on getting the perfect screen capture every time and sleep easy knowing that you’ll never need to capture it again.
The easiest way to get started with this feature is to promote your existing Capture collections. Just follow the instructions in the image above, and you can add any existing collection of captures to your workspace collection.
If you are a Growth and Enterprise customer, this feature is now available in your workspace.
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, June 24th at 12PM ET.