Detailed Notes
In this episode of the Building Better Developers podcast, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore how to demo your product in a way that not only impresses but also delivers actionable feedback. Learn how to prep, practice, present, and evolve your product using real-world insights from your audience.
🔍 Topics covered: • Gathering real product demo feedback • Balancing strengths vs. weaknesses in your demo • Using live and A/B demo strategies • Handling demo challenges and technical failures • Creating feedback loops from your audience
🎯 Whether you’re pitching a product, refining a prototype, or preparing for launch, this episode gives you the tools to make every demo count.
📩 Share your demo stories or questions: [email protected] 🌐 Visit us at: https://develpreneur.com
Follow Us on: * https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZOuFN_LhczvGyT2KSItH_g/featured * https://facebook.com/Develpreneur * https://x.com/develpreneur * http://linkedin.com/develpreneur
#productdemo #feedback #softwaredevelopment #startuptips #BuildingBetterDevelopers
Transcript Text
[Music] And let us look at let me do this little thing here where I'm actually sitting up straight a little bit more. I did I want to see if you see this. So there is a timer app. Do you see that? Nope, I don't see it. All right, hang on one second. Let me You probably don't need it there. Or are you going to use it for your own purposes? Well, I was trying to see because, you know, when we run long, I was just trying to see. Oh, it does pop up, doesn't it? Yep. I see that. I mean, you could put it there if you want, but Nah, I was just if if we could run it without seeing it, that would be cool, but if we see it, it's not. Yeah, because other I mean, we could do that and just we're going to know how often that we're like way off off the rails. Yeah. I mean, I've seen that I I several places there's conferences that where they've got like a little speaker clock down there and you'll watch and you'll see where it's like it's counting down and then it's likegative1 -2gative 30 minutes. It's like all right, dude. Let's see. So, uh back to the let's see. So, we did we did MVP and what was the other one? basically uh let's see something about budget uh how to build an app MVP without blowing your budget and then stop chasing your tail was the last two. That's right. Uh let's see. Identify areas of your need business that need improvement or off the rail. That was actually one that I knew we had another one there. So basically I think you had one the week before. Did we already do that one to grow with demo feedback? No, we didn't touch that one. So, let's see. Well, let's just do those aren't really the same, but we could do demo feedback. We'll do that one first and then maybe do um when you're off the rails. Am I off the rails? That'll be a good second one. Okay. Um, for this one, I'm going to be on mute when I'm not talking, unless I'm jumping in. Uh, because I got the dogs upstairs with me today, so I don't want them to distract us too much. All right. Well, yeah, just make sure you pop in when you need to. Wow, this is way too hot. I'm not going to drink that right now. I'm going to start with my water, though, first. Good good vintage year of water there. All right, let's go with how to grow with demo feedback with a little three a two. This just seems like a little bit. Sorry, it just feels like I'm like in a weird way looking at this one this time. It does feel like I'm looking down a little too much. Oh, I guess it is because wh Let's try this. Try to move it up a little more. There we go. That'll work because I like this better because I can sit and I'm sort of in a sit mode. And I can't. It's like it's not quite the same. Then it's like it's not quite perfect. So I love your face. I'm leaving like five minutes. Great. Now you got that on the internet. Jesus. All right. I'm not leaving in five minutes. I'm gonna be here a while. Three, two, one. 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 same thing also known as developneur. My name is Rob Broadhead also a founder of RB 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 uh 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 uh you know a roaming developer and a developer that I happen to be and things like that. A digital nomad as they call it. U no I did not you know 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 when 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 uh it's the 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 Malashsh. 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-size companies who have problems with their software. Either it's a website, homebuilt 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, it looks like we're just about past allergy season or at least tree season. Uh 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. Uh I'm done. Uh 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 we're going to get a little slip a little bit back into the technology world even though this is really I 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 because honestly that should be one of your primary reasons to do a demonst demonstration of your product. I mean, yes, in a lot of cases, it is to help uh 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 want to talk about today is let's focus a little bit on like a little bit of a 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 tof face or in front of your your customer with your product right there in them using it. That is the kind of thing that you know marketing companies spend lots of money to get. So make sure that you you you recognize that investment and the value of that time. Now, one of the first things I and there are a couple 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 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 you know 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 you're trying to get some feedback. You're trying to figure out how do I approach this? What really is the you 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 of the weaknesses. If you're 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's some level of we are uh at the mercy of whoever is 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 feed 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 some 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 any 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 floodgates may be open at that time. Uh before I pass it on to Mike 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 tenth time you've actually run through the c that demo is with a 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. Uh, 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 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 and maybe a little your experience with some of the demos in your 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 uh 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 it 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 isn't, 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 ready to 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&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 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 uh you know customer relationships uh for building software. The other thing that is interesting is as you're building these products uh 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 weren't commissioned 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't kind of get the users to play with it. Um, 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 6 months you're basically our beta testers because nothing works half the time. Don't do that. Be a little more concise. You know, 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, Rob, 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 cuz I have a Michael a Michael a mic that is 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 of agile development and scrum and things like that is that there are going to be particularly I 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 100% sure that's where you want to go. You don't really know this is how we're going to solve the problem. Maybe there's two or three ways to do it. six half doz and the other six half one half 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 mockup 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 then 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 of like, oh, we really need to address A, B, and C because that's what the customers want. We thought they just wanted 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 fe is this a good feature? Is it a bad feature?" Uh, is this a feature I 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 repric 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 gonna probably take you five or 10 minutes. It's going to take you 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 couple 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, something along 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 the goal of this a 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 of that space as possible. You should just both be saying, "Uh-huh. 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 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, you know, 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 could I guess you could put a link on your and make it part of your signature on your email. Uh 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 [email protected]." Don't tell them to shoot you an email at [email protected]. I know you know that, but just in case, you know, warning labels are there for a reason. Shoot us an email at infoddevelopelpreneur.com. Let us know 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 can 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, fourst 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 developer. You go to the Facebook page. We have a developer Facebook page. Obviously developer.com is your ma vast depot of content and all kinds of things that are technology. So you can uh 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 uh 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. Bonus material. Since you already did the extra credit, let's now you got to bonus it up too. Yeah. So along the lines, so if you don't feel comfortable recording your material, if you have scripted your demo, one of the other things to do is to stand in front of a mirror, especially if you're not good at public speaking or speaking in general in front of crowds, and talk to the mirror like you're talking to your audience. Watch your hand gestures. Watch how you're fidgeting. Watch where your eyes go. That will help you read the room as you're giving the demo. Now, grant your eyes may be down on the computer at certain times, but always make sure to look up, address your audience, and make sure you try to get them to participate within the demo. I'm going to go with that as my bonus material. Audience participation is by far one of the best things that you can do. Now, it can be difficult sometimes, particularly because it takes an extra level of skill to be able to run a demo, keep it on the rails, and have audience participation. Because as soon as you do that, soon as you have the audience participating, things can get very different very quick. And if you're not if you're not able to adapt, then you're going to see things go off the rails. And sometimes that's okay. But most of the times you want to be able particularly for a demo because it's yes, you want it memorable and entertaining and things like that. You also want to be able to demonstrate your product, your service, your application, whatever it happens to be. So don't, you know, don't lose sight of the actual goal of getting feedback and showing this thing off over people just had a really good time, but they can't remember what it was that you were selling because there's some value in that, but it's like they need to remember what you're selling and being say, "Wow, I enjoyed that time so well. I'm going to go enjoy that product so well." says that at the end of the day is one of the things we really want to get out of this and also get good at handling situations where you get in where the customer may get stuck on why is that blue and that has nothing to do with the application it's a cosmetic feature. Work on ways to keep it to the feature set. find ways to address the cosmetics in a way that lets them know they're heard, but can keep the conversation moving beyond just, hey, uh, I don't like the color changes. You could easily lose 30 minutes of a conversation over a button. Yes, very much work on your uh your force skills and the whole these are not the droids that you are looking for kinds of things is use your skills to you know direct people back on track. Uh a lot of times that's not with in those kind of situations it's really not that hard to just develop a habit of things like yeah that's a great idea I'm going to write that down and then you just move right along. So, it's like, hey, they're heard. They were you documented it. Cool. And you move right along. But be ready for that because those kinds of things will happen. You will be merrily going through your demo and somebody will suddenly want to get caught on, you know, that you spelled gray grey instead of g a y or something like that. And it's like, and it's doesn't matter who your audience is, you can get caught up on totally pointless things like that that waste everybody's time. Been there, done that too many times. Uh, extra bonus bonus bonus is if you want to get really good at this stuff, go take an improv class somewhere. If you can learn how to do improv comedy, you can learn how to like dance your way through demos. It's it's amazing the value that that will bring to you. Another value is us giving you some time to go do it. So, I'm going to wrap this one up. We will come back. Not done with this season. Got plenty of episodes left to go. But for now, we're going to give you a break. Thank you so much for your time and we will talk to you next time. [Music]
Transcript Segments
[Music]
And let us look at let me do this little
thing here where I'm actually sitting up
straight a little bit more. I did I want
to see if you see this. So there is a
timer
app. Do you see that? Nope, I don't see
it. All right, hang on one second. Let
me You probably don't need it there. Or
are you going to use it for your own
purposes? Well, I was trying to see
because, you know, when we run long, I
was just trying to see. Oh, it does pop
up, doesn't it? Yep. I see that. I mean,
you could put it there if you want, but
Nah, I was
just if if we could run it without
seeing it, that would be cool, but if we
see it, it's not. Yeah, because other I
mean, we could do that and just we're
going to know how often that we're like
way off off the rails. Yeah. I mean,
I've seen that I I several places
there's conferences that where they've
got like a little speaker clock down
there and you'll watch and you'll see
where it's like it's counting down and
then it's
likegative1
-2gative 30 minutes. It's like all
right,
dude. Let's see. So, uh back to the
let's see. So, we did
we did
MVP
and what was the other one? basically
uh let's see something about budget uh
how to build an app MVP without blowing
your budget and then stop chasing your
tail was the last two. That's right. Uh
let's see. Identify areas of your need
business that need improvement or off
the
rail. That was actually one that I knew
we had another one there. So basically
I think you had one the week before. Did
we already do that one
to grow with demo feedback? No, we
didn't touch that one. So, let's see.
Well, let's just do those aren't really
the same, but we could do demo feedback.
We'll do that one
first and then maybe do um when you're
off the rails. Am I off the
rails? That'll be a good second one.
Okay.
Um, for this one, I'm going to be on
mute when I'm not talking, unless I'm
jumping in. Uh, because I got the dogs
upstairs with me today, so I don't want
them to distract us too much. All right.
Well, yeah, just make sure you pop in
when you need to. Wow, this is way too
hot. I'm not going to drink that right
now. I'm going to start with my water,
though, first.
Good good vintage year of water there.
All
right, let's go with how to grow with
demo feedback with a little three a two.
This just seems like a little
bit. Sorry, it just feels like I'm like
in a weird way looking at this one this
time. It does feel like I'm looking down
a little too much. Oh, I guess it is
because wh Let's try this. Try to move
it up a little
more. There we go. That'll
work because I like this better because
I can sit and I'm sort of in a sit mode.
And I can't. It's like it's not quite
the same. Then it's like it's not quite
perfect. So I love your face. I'm
leaving like five minutes.
Great. Now you got that on the internet.
Jesus. All right. I'm not leaving in
five minutes. I'm gonna be here a while.
Three, two, one. 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 same
thing also known as developneur. My name
is Rob Broadhead also a founder of RB
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 uh 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 uh you know a roaming developer and
a developer that I happen to be and
things like that. A digital nomad as
they call it. U no I did not you know
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 when 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 uh it's the
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
Malashsh. 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-size
companies who have problems with their
software. Either it's a website,
homebuilt 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, it looks
like we're just about past allergy
season or at least tree season. Uh 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. Uh I'm done. Uh 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
we're going to get a little slip a
little bit back into the technology
world even though this is really I 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 because
honestly that should be one of your
primary reasons to do a demonst
demonstration of your product. I mean,
yes, in a lot of cases, it is to help uh
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 want
to talk about today is let's focus a
little bit on like a little bit of a
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 tof
face or in front of your your customer
with your product right there in them
using it. That is the kind of thing that
you know marketing companies spend lots
of money to get. So make sure that you
you you recognize that investment and
the value of that time. Now, one of the
first things I and there are a couple
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 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 you know
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 you're trying to get
some feedback. You're trying to figure
out how do I approach this? What really
is the you 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 of the weaknesses. If
you're 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's some level of we are uh at the
mercy of whoever is 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 feed
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 some 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 any 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 floodgates
may be open at that time. Uh before I
pass it on to Mike 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 tenth time you've
actually run through the c that demo is
with a 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. Uh,
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 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 and
maybe a little your experience with some
of the demos in your 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 uh 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 it 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 isn't, 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 ready to 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&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 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
uh you know customer relationships uh
for building software. The other thing
that is interesting is as you're
building these products uh 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 weren't
commissioned 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't kind of get
the users to play with it. Um, 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 6 months you're basically our beta
testers because nothing works half the
time. Don't do that. Be a little more
concise. You know, 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, Rob, 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 cuz I have a Michael a
Michael a mic that is 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 of agile
development and scrum and things like
that is that there are going to be
particularly I 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 100% sure that's where you want to
go. You don't really know this is how
we're going to solve the problem. Maybe
there's two or three ways to do it. six
half doz and the other six half one half
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
mockup 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 then 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 of
like, oh, we really need to address A,
B, and C because that's what the
customers want. We thought they just
wanted 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 fe is this a
good feature? Is it a bad feature?" Uh,
is this a feature I 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 repric
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 gonna probably take you
five or 10 minutes. It's going to take
you 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 couple
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, something along 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 the
goal of this a 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 of that space as possible. You
should just both be saying, "Uh-huh.
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 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, you know,
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 could I guess you
could put a link on your and make it
part of your signature on your email. Uh
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
[email protected]." Don't tell them to
shoot you an email at
[email protected]. I know you know
that, but just in case, you know,
warning labels are there for a reason.
Shoot us an email at
infoddevelopelpreneur.com. Let us know
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 can 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, fourst
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 developer. You go
to the Facebook page. We have a
developer Facebook page. Obviously
developer.com is your ma vast depot of
content and all kinds of things that are
technology. So you can uh 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 uh 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. Bonus material. Since you
already did the extra credit, let's now
you got to bonus it up too. Yeah.
So along the lines, so if you don't feel
comfortable recording your
material, if you have scripted your
demo, one of the other things to do is
to stand in front of a mirror,
especially if you're not good at public
speaking or speaking in general in front
of crowds, and talk to the mirror like
you're talking to your audience. Watch
your hand gestures. Watch how you're
fidgeting. Watch where your eyes go.
That will help you read the room as
you're giving the demo. Now, grant your
eyes may be down on the computer at
certain times, but always make sure to
look up, address your audience, and make
sure you try to get them to participate
within the
demo. I'm going to go with that as my
bonus material. Audience participation
is by far one of the best things that
you can do. Now, it can be difficult
sometimes, particularly because it takes
an extra level of skill to be able to
run a demo, keep it on the rails, and
have audience participation. Because as
soon as you do that, soon as you have
the audience
participating, things can get very
different very quick. And if you're not
if you're not able to adapt, then you're
going to see things go off the rails.
And sometimes that's
okay. But most of the times you want to
be able particularly for a demo because
it's yes, you want it memorable and
entertaining and things like that. You
also want to be able to demonstrate your
product, your service, your application,
whatever it happens to be. So don't, you
know, don't lose sight of the actual
goal of getting feedback and showing
this thing off over people just had a
really good time, but they can't
remember what it was that you were
selling because there's some value in
that, but it's like they need to
remember what you're selling and being
say, "Wow, I enjoyed that time so well.
I'm going to go enjoy that product so
well." says that at the end of the day
is one of the things we really want to
get out of this and also get good
at
handling situations where you get in
where the customer may get stuck on why
is that blue and that has nothing to do
with the application it's a cosmetic
feature. Work on ways to keep it to the
feature set. find ways to address the
cosmetics in a way that lets them know
they're heard, but can keep the
conversation moving beyond just, hey,
uh, I don't like the color changes. You
could easily lose 30 minutes of a
conversation over a button.
Yes, very much work on your uh your
force skills and the whole these are not
the droids that you are looking for
kinds of things is use your skills to
you know direct people back on track. Uh
a lot of times that's not with in those
kind of situations it's really not that
hard to just develop a habit of things
like yeah that's a great idea I'm going
to write that down and then you just
move right along. So, it's like, hey,
they're heard. They were you documented
it. Cool. And you move right along. But
be ready for that because those kinds of
things will happen. You will be merrily
going through your demo and somebody
will suddenly want to get caught on, you
know, that you spelled gray grey instead
of g a y or something like that. And
it's like, and it's doesn't matter who
your audience is, you can get caught up
on totally pointless things like that
that waste everybody's time. Been there,
done that too many times. Uh, extra
bonus bonus bonus is if you want to get
really good at this stuff, go take an
improv class somewhere. If you can learn
how to do improv comedy, you can learn
how to like dance your way through
demos. It's it's amazing the value that
that will bring to
you. Another value is us giving you some
time to go do it. So, I'm going to wrap
this one up. We will come back. Not done
with this season. Got plenty of episodes
left to go. But for now, we're going to
give you a break. Thank you so much for
your time and we will talk to you next
time.
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