How to Demo Your Product and Actually Get Useful Feedback

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Businesses, even though we are the Building Better Developers Podcast, and I happen to be one of the founders of SameThing, also known as Develop-a-Nor. My name is Rob Broadhead, also a founder of RV Consulting, where we help you build a better you, a better business. We sit down with you. We help walk through your business with you, help craft a custom recipe for success for you through simplification, integration, automation, even innovation. We have spent a lot of time on technology and we understand the investment, the size of investment and the headache an investment can be in technology. So we help you figure out how to leverage that properly, whether it is buying stuff off the shelf, whether it is building something, whether it's integrating your systems you already have. Sometimes it's shrinking the sprawl that you've got, or maybe just getting the right people in the right places, building a team to help you move technology forward, build yourself a technology roadmap, a plan that will help you today, six months from now, years from now so that you are able to keep up and worry more about your customers and less about your technology. Good thing, bad thing. I have no idea off the top of my head, but I will go back to something we mentioned in a prior one. Good thing. I have got some really cool accessories on my laptop as I'm moving into the road to be a roaming developer and a developer that I happen to be and things like that. A digital nomad, as they call it. No, I did not just create that word. That's been around for quite a while. Really cool. Lots of fun, new toys, all that goodness. Bad thing. That stuff is heavy. It's like now it's like, well, I just like worked on shrinking stuff down and simplifying and getting smaller and smaller. And now I'm sprawling my own technology out a little bit, but they are cool toys. So hey, it's a price you pay. The price you pay right now is absolutely zero. You are going to get a free introduction from Michael. Go for it. Hey, everyone. My name is Michael Mollage. I'm also one of the co-founders of developer, building better developers and this season building better businesses. And I'm also the founder of a company called Envision QA, where we work with small to mid-sized companies who have problems with their software. Whether it's a website, home-built applications, their current software stack isn't working for them. We come in and we will help you assess your current software stack, look at your business processes and help you improve or find better ways to use the software that you have, build something that works better for you or better yet, maybe even go out and find the right tool that you need and get rid of the crap that is slowing you down. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing. Looks like we're just about past allergy season or at least tree season. Most of my trees have finally came in today. I was walking to the dogs. I'm looking around. I'm like, Hey, all the trees are finally in. I'm done. Maybe another few days, but it's about over. The pond's bad side. Pond still has the ponds come from all the tree stuff, but it's not growing. It's just still there. So I still see it. But the light is at the end of the tunnel. It is going away. This episode, we're going to go into that. We're going to get a little slip a little bit back into the technology world, even though this is really, I'm going to talk about demos. And I think most people, if you're a developer, you think about a software demo, but there are product demos that have nothing to do with computers as well out there. And we're going to focus on how do you grow from feedback from a demo? Honestly, that should be one of your primary reasons to do a demonstration of your product. I mean, yes, a lot of cases it is to help stir interest and maybe get some people to buy your product. But there is also some level of gauging. What is the interest in your product? What are the things about your product that make it interesting or maybe even compelling for your customers? And that's what I talk about today is let's focus a little bit on like a little bit of maybe a road map or a checklist when you're doing a demo. How do you make sure that you get the most out of that? And particularly the most out of that very precious time you have face to face or in front of your customer with your product right there and them using it. That is the kind of thing that marketing companies spend lots of money to get. So make sure that you recognize that investment and the value of that time. And one of the first things and there are a couple of ways you can approach it. But one of the first things you need to do is look at either the strengths or the weaknesses of your product or at least the perceived strengths and weaknesses, because either you're either probably going to take the approach of I'm going to emphasize my strengths and I'm going to find out where is this product strong and where can I make it stronger and better? Or you're going to look at where are my weaknesses and where can I eliminate those weaknesses or make those a non-issue? There are arguments for both sides of that. And this is this is sort of a general just like build versus buy. There's always like, how do you become better? Do you become stronger in your strengths? Do you eliminate your weaknesses? Is it some somewhere in between? Now, however, your approach is you at least will go into this with some idea of there are certain things I want to address coming out of this, whether that is my strengths, my weaknesses or some point in between. And so in order to make sure your demo is effective, one of the first things you want to do is make sure that those areas are highlighted. So, for example, let's say that you have a software and application. And you know that your weaknesses are the reporting. You've got a lot. You've got a great user experience and generally do really good. But the reporting is an area that just has not gone well. You're very questioning of whether it's even valuable at all. And that's what you want to do. You're like, you know what? I'm not going to be able. My strengths are so good, I can't even I'm practically perfect. There's no way I'm going to get better there. So instead, I'm going to focus on my weaknesses. So what you want to do in your demo is you actually, in this case, you're going to want to sort of gloss over those those strengths in the demo, spend very little time in the things that bring value. Spend some time, though. You don't want them to be like, gosh, this is a horrible mess. You do want to show off some of those strengths. But you really want to spend some time and give time for feedback, in this case, on the reports in the area where you are you're trying to get some feedback. You're trying to figure out how do I approach this? What really is the the score or the happiness factor that this thing brings? Now, you can you can flip that. And if it is your strengths. Then by all means, feel free to gloss over all the weaknesses. If your reporting stinks, but you really want to enhance and worry about your user experience, don't even talk about reporting. You can do focused demos. And honestly, think about it when you do a demo, when somebody is selling a product to you or is demonstrating a product, there is almost always in the back of your mind this. I wonder what they're not showing me, especially if it's a flawless demo, which we'll talk about that in a second. It should always be a flawless demo. So we go in, even if it's not explicitly stated, we go into these things knowing that we're there's some level of smoke and mirrors, that there is some level of misdirection, that there is some level of we are at the mercy of whoever's driving the demo because they are showing us what they want to show us. Now, that is a key that I will. That's a warning thing is I think for if you're new in the demo world, if you haven't done a lot of demos, if you are not, if you go into it, just showing what you want to show them and you're just saying, hey, look, I did this cool thing. This is a cool application. And you don't expose some of those other pieces to them. You could very well end up in essentially a sort of confirmation bias of you had a demo, it went great. Nobody gave you any feedback. It's awesome. It's going to make us a billion dollars. And then you put it out there and realize that nobody likes all of the pieces that you didn't show. So you want to make sure that you're testing those other things as well, that you're getting some feedback because those may be key areas to address. Those also may be some blind spots. There may be some things there that you think they are better than they are. And those might actually be areas where you're going to get some really good feedback and conversation. And that is really the goal through all of these is that feedback and conversation. If you go through the whole demo and there's you get to the end and you say, are there any questions or comments or suggestions? And it is just, you know, crickets. There's nothing, nobody has, everybody's like, that's great. That's awesome. You screwed up. You did not do your demo right. Because there's always going to be something out there that somebody in the audience, even as an audience of one or two people that they're going to say, well, wait, what about this? And don't be afraid during your demo to actually call people out. If somebody makes a face, if somebody has some sort of a, a mannerism, or there's something in the way they're holding themselves or they clear their throat at a certain time or whatever it is, say, Hey, it seems like this thing bothered you a little bit, or that maybe you had some feedback. Would you like, would you like to share? Be free to, you know, extract some of that feedback as needed. And a lot of times it won't take too much. Once you can get them going and they realize that, no, you're very welcoming of even negative feedback, then a lot of times watch out, you may let the, the flood gates may be open at that time. Uh, for a passing on to my, I do want to go back to the perfect demo idea. When you demo a product, if your first time to actually run through the demo is in front of your customer, you failed. If the 10th time you've actually run through the cut, that demo is with the customer, you failed, you should run through it a lot, like dozens of times. You should have a nice solid script, possibly even memorize. If you can memorize one even better, depending on the application, that can be very easy. Sometimes that can be very difficult depending on the product. That can be very easy or very difficult. And then make sure as you're doing, you're building out that demo script that you're going to follow. Exactly. You're not going to go, Oh yeah, I'm going to go click over here because I just want to show off this thing that I haven't demoed. I hadn't thought about it yet. Or if there's feedback that somebody says, Hey, can you go there? Usually the best thing to do is talk around that and go, yeah, we'll get to that a little later, and then you can always do it after the demo, but don't disrupt your demo because the next thing you know, that's a, that's the one thing that's broken that now has gotten you off track and you're going to the rest of the demo is a train wreck. So make sure that you have really beaten the drum several times, many, many times for that, that you understand the script, that you could do it blindfold basically. Now leaving all of that out there, I'm going to throw this over to Michael. And what are your thoughts on a demo? Maybe a little your experience with some of the demos in your career. So I'm going to go back to my college experience when I had a software engineering class, our final project was to build like each team had their own specific product they had to build. Ours was a security app, a security system that essentially would capture a signal when like the door would open or like the signal would break. As you said, when you prepare for these demos, you go through, you have to train, you have to go through repeat repetitively to the point that you know, this in and out what's going to work, what's not going to work. And, you know, you never know what's going to happen. We get to the day of the presentation, our sensor burnt out. So we very quickly kept the entire demo intact, but we added a quick little, uh, button click or a hidden button click that the moment we moved the sensor, someone would click the mouse button and show that the sensor broke. Application work. The, the user experience of the demo, they got the full feel of what the product was supposed to do. Now, did we fess up that it was broken? No, we wanted the A, we didn't want the C, but when you're dealing with your customer though, that's one of those things that you need to bake into your demo. If a feature is, so if this is for a new customer, this is something you're building or in process of building, there will be features that will be incomplete, broken, not quite there yet, but you still need feedback from your customer at different phases of the development to know if you're on the right track, is this working, is this what the customer wants? But that's when you know the customer. You might be building an application or have an idea for an application that you've been working on and you're just not, you're getting close to where you bring it to market, but you're not sure how it's going to be received. There are a couple other ways to demo a product or an application without a customer. What you can do is you can go look for meetups. You could go look for conferences and go talk about your product. If it is a solution to their needs, or it is a way to represent how the technology is being used. You can demo the application to a bunch of developers and say, you know, this is this feature, it was built with this. You're kind of talking about the mechanics of it, not the product itself, but you're getting a different type of feedback from the Q and A because people may be like, well, why didn't you do it with this? Or, Hey, that's a cool idea. So you could, yes, you have to watch out for that confirmation bias, but these are ways where you can test your application or test your ideas for your application outside of the typical customer, you know, customer relationships for building software. The other thing that is interesting is as you're building these products, or if you have multiple products and you're just, you get it done, you're ready to sell it. You want to get it out there. Another way to kind of demo your product is to do like trade shows or conferences, get a booth somewhere, sit down. You have different customers walking by. You can do different pitches. You can figure out, Oh, what do you do? And then there you are. You can kind of do some market research while demoing your product and see which pitches work. That's kind of a form of AB testing, but an AB demo, because not every demo in that situation will be scripted, will be the same. You may show one particular feature. You may go through the whole product end to end, but these are ways to improve the feedback for your application. Because if you are developing an application that does not have a set customer, you want commission to write this, you have this grand idea and you're trying to build something to sell. At some point you got to get this out in front of the people you're trying to sell it to, you can't sell something if it's in a vacuum. So to get that feedback, you have to start going out and asking for people. Now, when you get something workable or feature set enough, you could put things out there in like, Hey, here is a free trial. Here is a trial piece where you get a certain feature of the application. You can kind of get the users to play with it. Don't be like windows where here's a brand new operating system. We're going to give it to all of our customers. And for the first six months, you're basically our beta testers because nothing works half the time. Don't do that. Be a little more concise. Reach out to different user groups, communities, social networking, look for ways to do demos and try to get feedback, but don't always stick to one particular customer because one customer may not be your only customer. What are your thoughts on that Rod? Since you're I have background noise and just had to mute and it was like, Oh, now it's gotten tossed to me, but luckily the background noise has gone away. And if it, and actually it probably won't be that bad anyways, because I have a Michael, a Michael, a Mike that has very directional and a Michael that can sometimes be a little directional as well. Um, see, this is what happens when I drink decaf instead of caffeinated tea. I do want to go back to the AB test testing idea, because there is one of the things that particularly in the world of agile development and scrum and things like that is that there are going to be particularly, I've found that there's approaches that you will take that you need to make a decision, essentially, where it's just, you're not really, you're not a hundred percent sure. That's where you want to go. You don't really know this, how we're going to solve the problem. Maybe there's two or three ways to do it. Six half does, and the other six half one after that one can't even speak. Right. Um, that it's, it's one of these things where you, you really need some feedback and what you can do. And it's since a lot of times it's something that's like, yes, you can do like a little, you know, figma mock-up or something like that, but sometimes it really helps to have the data there. And so one of the things you can do is you can actually say, we're going to go for like, say one screen, we're going to take the first direction. And for another screen, that's very similar. We're going to take a different direction. And so that's going to allow you that actually within the demo that you can say, well, here's two different things. And maybe they're doing roughly the same thing, but what you can do is you can really put those in front of the customer and either just listen to their feedback and figure out if they like one and they don't like the other, or you can explicitly call it out even and say, Hey, we can do it like this, or we can do it like that. Do you have preferences? And usually that's going to help or say, you know, what do you like about this one, what do you like about that one or dislike things like that? You can essentially work a level of AB testing into your demos. Michael has a great example is if you go to like a trade show or something, the best thing about that is it's like demo, demo, demo, demo, demo. You can actually crank through a lot of demos in a very short period of time. So maybe what you do with that is you don't have one demo script. You have three demo scripts, maybe. And then what you can do is you can tweak each of them, go out, do the demos, see where you get the best response or the most feedback. And then maybe, especially if it's a couple of days of a conference, go back that night, three more sets where you're just like working towards that new one and then go do it again, repeat, rinse and repeat. And that a lot of times will allow you to really like hone in what your, your message is, what your pitch is, what your product is, and also to get back the things that you want to like, Oh, we really need to address A, B and C because that's what the customers want. We thought they just want us to solve C, but there's these two other problems. We actually can solve for them. And then suddenly you've got a much better product. Now, this could see, this could be a lot of work demos, take time demos, take intentionality, they take you sitting there and going, okay, this is what I've got and I really want to like show it off for a customer in some way, form or fashion, because I'm showing it off in a way that I want explicit feedback. I want to know, is this a good fee? Is this a good feature? Is it a bad feature? Uh, is this a feature side? I should include sometimes you're even trying to figure out what is the value of this feature, because maybe you're in the point of now we're into, we're going to try to reprice this and maybe we're going to figure out, would you pay once for this? Is this something you pay a subscription for? You know, some of those kinds of things, you can work through those or get an idea of it, feedback, and sometimes even direct feedback, direct answers. If you do the demo correctly, that's where the challenge comes in. This week's challenge is it's going to be, it's not one of these is going to probably take you five or 10 minutes. It's going to take a little more than that. And I want to swing it back to the business point of view, because it really is back to sort of what we talked about a couple of episodes back, we talked about elevator pitches and things like that. What I'd like you to do is think about your business. What would be a demo of your business? And this is essentially what is your sales pitch? What is it you offer? What is your distinguishing characteristics amongst whoever else does this? And then maybe even like, what are the weaknesses? What are some things that you're like, well, we do this, but it's offset by us doing these other good things, you know, some on that lines. So whatever your business is, the challenge is to essentially work your way through. What would a demo of my business look like? This isn't like an elevator pitch. I'm not going to do this in two minutes. This is something where if I've got somebody that's sitting down with me for 15 to 30 minutes, what do I want to say? How do I want that to go? Now there is, yeah, you're going to have to change the goal of this little bit, because a lot of times if you've got a customer in front of you for 15 to 30 minutes, what you really want to do is get them talking and just get them, take up as much to that space as possible. You should just boast to be saying, uh-huh, great, awesome, and taking notes the whole time. Now this is more, you've got say, you know, 15 minutes for a demo, and then you want that next 15 to 30 minutes for them to just be giving you feedback. That is the challenge is how are you going to do that? What are your features? What are your strengths? What are, and this is something, honestly, most of us, if you've done this right, if you've got a business, you should be able to crank through a lot of this stuff very quickly. You should have an idea of like, what is your avatar? Who is your ideal customer? What is the competition like? What are your, what are the key value up propositions of your, your application, things like that, or your product. But overall, how do you take that? How do you turn that into a full pitch? And you don't need to create slides and stuff like that. I think really just bullet pointing it in a sense, like making sure that you've gone through again and go through that exercise of what is it that I am producing and what is the value to others. For extra credit, record yourself doing it. Because it, because doing these demos, especially if you have not done them before, you recording yourself doing it, even the first few times you will pick up on some bad habits you have. And then you also can pick up on visuals that you're either doing wrong or need to improve on to make sure that the customer can follow along with your demo. That is particularly if you're going to have a presentation or anything like that. That is a huge extra credit thing to do. And it's very valuable to you. Actually, if you go in and record yourself, it may be something that you do it good enough, you're like, okay, I'm going to throw it on YouTube or something like that, or on my website. It has, it has value then that you have a, an evergreen sales pitch, essentially that you could throw out there to people. You can, I guess you could put a link on your and make it part of your signature on your email. I've seen people that have had things like that, where it's just basically like come here, learn more about my product, my site, stuff like that. A good example would be when you say, Hey, shoot me an email at info at develop a newer.com. Don't tell them to shoot you an email and info at developer nor.com. I know you know that, but just in case, you know, it's warning labels are there for a reason shoot us an email at info at developer nor.com. There's no, what you think, where are you at? What I would love to hear. Like what are some of your demo stories? The good ones, the bad, the ugly, all of these in between. Also feedback can be re we get feedback from anywhere you listen to a podcast. You can leave us feedback there. You can leave us notes, uh, do the little, you know, five star review, four star review, whatever it is, negative star review. We just want feedback. Love to hear from you suggestions, comments, jokes. Doesn't matter. We are, we just love to hear from you guys. And we want to take that and we want to make a better podcast as we go forward and you are who we're serving. So you will help us do that best. Uh, you can also reach us out on X we're at developing or you go to Facebook page. You have a developer Facebook page, obviously developer nor.com is your mat vast depot of content and all kinds of things that are technology. So you can see our evolution over the years, all the different technologies that we've touched, the different examples, the different tutorials, the mentoring sessions, uh, the, the nuggets, I don't know, dozens and dozens, hundreds of nuggets of over the year of some of those tools no longer exist. Some have actually grown to become very popular and widely used tools. That being said, go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to building better developers, the developer nor podcast. You can subscribe on Apple podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts. We are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.