Building to become demoable

As indie hackers, we value the lean process of building products, be it through prototyping, building fake front-stages, and of course MVPs. But often, as I talked about in a previous post, we also enjoy building for the sake of building. So it‘s always a challenge for us to balance between over-building and reaching out.

Still, the response to reaching out isn‘t always as clear as the teachings say, some might genuinely enjoy talking to you, others ghost you while most people in between don‘t want to commit just yet (which is understandable).

Of course, the focus should be on those who are 100% ready to talk with you, but most of us very well know how rare those might be especially in the early days of our products.

More than often, we want to give the people we reach out to an easy way in. Asking for a 4h meeting, or even 30min without any credentials is too much for many. So the next best thing for us is having a demo.

I want to iterate on why we think a demo is hitting a good spot.

Many projects never make it past the „weekend project“ phase. Sure, some may even have a pretty landing page but if you just dig a little deeper, you‘ll notice that it has an unfinished touch to it.

Then again, even if your product is just at that stage, that‘s usually not what attracts customers. Most of them will invest significant resources into adopting your product, thus, it should not seem like you‘ll abandon it in no time or once you‘re bored. And while making a demo doesn‘t take a lot of effort, it builds up trust with those interested parties, seeing your face and hearing your voice are social cues that many oversee when it comes to presenting their work.

So, even if your demo is just 1.5 minutes long, it can be dense with information. In fact, in my opinion, it‘s good to be a lot faster than what you’d be comfortable with. When you have caught the viewer‘s interest, they‘re gonna dig deeper any way. And if they‘re not interested, it‘s much more likely that your product is not a good fit rather than a lacking demo, which is good for filtering out the „worst“ contacts (even if you don‘t have a lot, to begin with). You‘ll need one anyway, so it‘s best to start early and improve over time.

Especially in the beginning, time is much better spent on working on your product instead of a pretty landing page. A good demo will offset a lacking landing page, as it does the job for it instead. It‘s also a good way to let your product „speak for itself“, with your help to fill in the gaps.

Moving away from the presentation, making a demo helped us to notice where our product was lacking context and coherence. Sure, your customers will not interact with your product like you‘ll do when building your demo, but I bet you‘ll find gaps and what doesn‘t work.

When I was recording the demo for Anzu, I noticed that some very important webhooks didn‘t get delivered. As they worked before, embedding our product into another context allowed us to notice a race condition that we easily fixed. Surely we didn‘t want our customers to notice it first.

If you want to check out our demo, you can do so at https://youtu.be/AyN1wsFMtfM