Pretend you just clicked "how it works," fully braced for the usual feature parade.
Instead, Safety Culture introduces you to Lindsay. And you spend the rest of the tour seeing the product through her day, not through a list of buttons.
Jason found this one and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because the second there's a name attached, the whole demo changes.
Our brains have a much easier time when you stop grading features and start following a person. And instead of thinking "How does this work?” it turns into "okay, what happens to Lindsay next?"
Because remember, humans are creatures who loves stories. And you can’t follow a story if there are no characters.
I remember when Kallidu built their whole demo around a character back in Edition #37. And nearly 40 episodes later… we’re still talking about it.
Demos with dark background AND dark modals look like somebody just forgot to turn the lights on.
That’s why we’re featuring Pylon's demos this week. They’ve got the same dark background, but they use a light-colored modal for contrast. They even run a bright purple outline around the active step, so your eye lands exactly where it's supposed to.
In psychology, there’s a principle called Figure-Ground Organization.
The brain organizes visual fields into a "foreground" (the primary focus) and "background". High contrast instantly brings an object into the foreground, while low contrast blends it into the background.
There’s also evolutionary hardwiring to think about. For centuries, survival relied on detecting predators or prey. So the human brain adapted to heavily prioritize differences and sudden transitions (changes in light, color, and movement) over flat, uniform environments.
It’s one of the easiest changes you can make to a demo. And based on how our brains work… it could be one of the biggest changes you make.
**Fun fact: Navattic shipped an update so you can now change the theme step by step. Now the mood can shift as the story does.
Click through a few of Remote's product pages and you start noticing the same thing on every one.
An interactive demo sitting right in the "how it works" spot. And it’s not just some pages… but all of them.
And maybe the most important part? They lead with it instead of letting it get buried underneath 7 scrolls and a wall of text.
They’ve intentionally made the demo the first real look at the product, before the feature-benefit breakdown even starts.
Somebody (their CMO or whoever runs demand) made a conscious call that every product page MUST have a demo, then built it into the template. So for them, it’s the standard.
We've been banging this drum for a while (Editions #47 and #48). Glad to see someone has made it into a policy.
Navattic just released a major update to their MCP server.
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 🤯
And now, Navattic has released a library of 16 ready-to-use skills, making it even easier to build on-brand demos, report on analytics, use demos as sales follow up, and more.
For example, let's say you want to update your demos to include messaging around a new feature. Instead of doing it manually, try combining these two skills 👇
Feature launch demo updater: Maps a shipped or changed feature to the exact demo steps that reference the outdated version, then drafts the fix.
Staleness triage: Ranks demos for refresh priority using traffic and staleness.
The Navattic MCP will then:
Look through demos by traffic and last updated date
Suggested Captures and text edits to those flows
Apply those edits directly into Navattic (after your approval)
All it takes is simple natural language prompts, and you can let AI build and improve your demos for you.
I created a short video testing one of the MCP skills, so you can see exactly what they're capable of 👇
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.