Leaving an antiquated industry to grow an AI-native platform to a 7-figure ARR
While building tools for food distribution, Joseph Lee was constantly frustrated by how hard it was to explain his tool to a non-technical customer base. So he built a tool to solve the problem — and marketed it to a more tech-savvy audience.
Today, Supademo is bringing in a mid-7-figure ARR.
Here's Joseph on how he did it. 👇
From seafood to AI-native demo automation
I’m a serial founder who’s been building projects and businesses since the age of 15.
I’m currently the founder and CEO of Supademo, an AI-native demo automation platform. Our platform helps thousands of companies create engaging, interactive product demos for onboarding, sales, marketing, or training.
We're currently mid-7-figures in ARR, with thousands of paying customers and 100k+ founders, marketers, CSMs, and salespeople leveraging our platform.
We’ve been growing really quickly — about 3x so far this year and 8x in 2024.
Before Supademo, I built and scaled Freshline.io, an e-commerce and operations platform for perishables, and Coastline Market, a predictive seafood marketplace, to 7-figure revenues.
Born out of personal frustration
Supademo was born out of personal frustration. Having been a founder in a traditional, antiquated industry — food distribution — I always struggled to explain our product and features to a tech-nascent audience.
With our marketing lingo being ineffective, I experimented with slide decks and videos, only to realize how resource-intensive they were to create, edit, and maintain. Not only that, I noticed that prospects would seldom watch more than 2 minutes of a video monologue. And it was a constant struggle to keep these videos updated with the pace of our product and design changes.
I figured there had to be a better way. So after leaving my last startup, I began ideating and exploring, through which I met my co-founder, Koushik. Together, we began building Supademo, and the rest is history!
You'll learn faster by doing than by analyzing
Supademo is built on
NextJS
React + TypeScript
Node
PlanetScaleDB
AWS
And on the AI side, we use our own proprietary agentic AI flows alongside tooling like:
OpenAI
ElevenLabs
Claude
Gemini
Building the initial product took a lot of trial and error. We began with a simple screenshot-based product, starting with a really narrow ICP and wedge. From there, we began experimenting with adding guided workflows, videos, HTML steps, and more — eventually landing on what is Supademo today.
I think the key lesson here is to get moving ASAP. No amount of planning, business-plan writing, or strategy will prepare you for the lessons that come with real customer interactions.
IMO, you’re always going to learn faster by doing vs. analyzing, especially in the early days.
Supademo's four pillars of growth
We’re a product-led, freemium SaaS platform with a self-serve motion.
Most of our revenue growth comes from virality and word-of-mouth generated by our free plan, alongside expansion from teams adding seats, demos, and advanced features like personalization and analytics.
As far as user growth, we've leveraged:
Product craftsmanship — clamping down on feature creep and making the core experience delightful and intuitive regardless of their technical competency. Bias for shipping quickly at established weekly intervals.
Lean, product-led experimentation — leveraging our product via ungated experiences, free tools, demo-led SEO, and forced activation during onboarding.
SEO and Content:
Programmatic TOFU SEO (piggybacking on common product search terms by creating interactive tutorials), MOFU SEO (target search terms for “{product} demo” by creating pages), and comparison pages.
Using LinkedIn thought leadership to build a founder/brand moat — going from 10k to >500k impressions per quarter.
Product-led virality
Made Supademo fully ungated — the ultimate exercise of “try before you buy.”
Free Tools: making subsets of our existing product accessible to adjacent users without creating anything new (i.e., free online screenshot editor).
Implementing a reverse trial with full Scale plan access without signup needed.
Rapidly A/B testing watermarks on Supademos, free tools, trigger moments to drive product-led virality.
Tactics to 5x ARR
This year, our goal was to 5x ARR, and we're not quite there yet. To do that we've been trying to do two other things:
Graduate from founder-led spray-and-pray growth tactics to hypothesis and experiment-driven growth tactics — and establish at least two consistent, repeatable growth channels.
Improve product stickiness via expansion (organizational land-and-expand or external virality) by A/B testing, using automated ABM, product-led horizontal seat expansion, and surfacing lateral use cases.
Founder-led distribution with a caveat
Founder-led distribution has been a superpower — sharing raw learnings consistently built trust and created compounding demand.
The one caveat here is that building in public is great, but you should be tailoring your approach for your unique use case and stage.
For instance, X, Product Hunt, Reddit, and Indie Hackers are great channels to build in public if you have an early prototype and want to get feedback and iterate. The same may not apply on LinkedIn, where expectations of quality might be heightened due to the presence of more mature, established companies.
The key here is to deeply understand where your ICP at your stage of venture/idea resides, and tailor the “Build in Public” strategy accordingly based on your needs.
Don’t confuse motion with progress
Here's my advice: Don’t confuse motion with progress.
Get relentless about why you’re doing things. Instead of over-indexing or spending time planning and analyzing, get into the habit of obsessing over selling products or building products — and nothing else.
Ship quickly to put the product in front of real users — measuring only a few core, compounding KPIs. If there’s no painful workaround today, it’s probably not a real problem; find lived friction, show value fast, and let distribution amplify what already works.
What's next?
We’re doubling down on personalization-at-scale and agentic AI—tailoring demos by segment or account with zero extra work, and turning engagement into revenue signals. The goal is to make “show, don’t tell” the default way software is sold, onboarded, and supported.
You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit supademo.com!
Leave a Comment
Love this. As someone trying to leave a legacy industry to build an AI-native product for a blue-collar market, this really hits home. The “don’t confuse motion with progress” line is gold — it’s way too easy to get stuck planning instead of shipping. Thanks for the reminder to keep the focus on solving lived friction.
I really liked this story, especially the part about not confusing motion with progress.
It’s easy to stay busy fixing or tweaking things, but it's not always clear whether it’s real progress.
How do you personally measure whether you’re making real progress rather than just staying in motion? Do you set up metrics to do so?
And since you mentioned building in public, how do you decide what to share and when?
Love this story, man. The “you’ll learn faster by doing than analyzing” line hit hard — that’s been my exact experience too.
Incredible insights 👏 — really resonated with your “learn faster by doing” mindset.
I love how Supademo blended product-led virality with freemium experimentation — especially the “try before you buy” approach and reverse trials. That’s exactly the kind of motion many early-stage SaaS builders (like me with BusinessAdBooster) aim to achieve.
The focus on personalization-at-scale with agentic AI is spot on — feels like the next evolution of interactive SaaS experiences. 🚀
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It's wild how fast things move — shipping Draflit in 24 hrs.
Given that Supademo automates interactive demos for onboarding and sales, how do they balance making the product simple enough for non-technical users while still offering advanced customization for power users?
How long did it take to get to $20K MRR?
How about $40K MRR?
Really inspiring to see how solving a real problem led to such strong growth. Looking forward to seeing what’s next for Supademo!
Personally I find that quite fascinating because, for example, I honestly can’t wrap my head around how someone could successfully market a website builder today. Personally, I rely a lot on SEO, and it feels overwhelming — so much content to produce, endless backlinks to secure, and the constant challenge of outperforming thousands of existing players.
The downside of this mindset is that I end up restricting myself to small projects with very limited revenue potential.
Just finished! Learned a lot from it. 😊
This is such an inspiring journey—leaving behind a traditional industry isn’t easy, but it clearly paid off. I really like how you emphasized building an AI‑native platform instead of just adding AI as an afterthought. That mindset shift is what separates true disruptors from incremental players.
I’ve been working on projects in the streaming and entertainment space, and I see a similar pattern: users want ad‑free, no‑sign‑up, offline‑friendly apps that feel modern and efficient. For example, Cinema apk is designed with that same principle of simplicity and user‑first design. It’s exciting to see how AI and user‑centric thinking are reshaping industries across the board.
Really interesting journey, especially how Supademo was born from such a clear personal pain point. Curious to know, at what point did you feel you’d reached PMF? Was it a specific customer milestone, or more of a gradual shift in user behaviour and inbound interest?
Also, out of all the growth tactics you’ve tested this year, which one surprised you most in terms of impact?
And lastly, have you found that interactive content converts better than traditional written guides, or is the benefit mainly in engagement and brand recall?
Thanks for the insights!
Story looks really amazing. These kind of stories really fasciinates and are more of motivation
Did you check the faceseek on google?
Really inspiring story! I love seeing how people can reinvent themselves by embracing technology and new ways of thinking. It reminds me of how platforms like Snapchat keep evolving, turning creativity and connection into real growth opportunities. Thanks for sharing such an honest look into your journey!
Love how you framed “don’t confuse motion with progress.” Most founders drown in activity and mistake it for traction — you nailed that difference. Curious though: how do you personally decide which metrics are worth obsessing over at each growth stage?
There’s a similar app called FaceSeek — I’ve been really impressed by it! It uses AI face recognition and works surprisingly well.
Good article.
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This is gold. Especially the part about clamping down on feature creep, it’s so easy to lose product quality chasing every request. The reverse trial idea is clever too, feels like a smart middle ground between virality and monetization.
How did you decide which features to ungate early on without cannibalizing upgrades?
Great sharing, it's an exciting story. Thank you for sharing
Sometimes you've just got to leave the industries behind that aren't willing to change
Really cool
This is really cool, I love how people are reframing building AI agents to curtail their own native products, it's not an easy feat... thanks for the tips about producthunt and X, they really are the superpowers in terms of utilizing your reach.
That’s a bold and inspiring move — shifting from a traditional industry to build an AI-native platform hitting 7-figure ARR shows real vision. It highlights how embracing AI early and solving real problems with smart automation or data-driven tools can create huge opportunities fast
That’s huge — congrats! 🚀 Leaving an old-school industry and scaling an AI-native platform to 7-figure ARR is no small feat. The shift takes guts and vision. Curious — what was the biggest spike moment that really accelerated your growth?
Love this story, man. The “you’ll learn faster by doing than analyzing” line hit hard — that’s been my exact experience too.
Crazy how Supademo nailed virality by making demos ungated; that kind of simple product insight is gold. Also respect the honesty around founder-led growth — it’s powerful early on, but yeah, you eventually have to systemize it.
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Really cool story, Joseph. Love how you turned frustration into something that actually solves a real problem. The part about “learning faster by doing” really hits. I’m building a small web utility myself, and that mindset makes a huge difference.
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