How to demo your product to users

Why demo-ing your MVP early is important

We all know why MVPs save you time and money but how exactly does it help you in your product development lifecycle? We'll talk about some of the advantages of MVP demo.

1. Validation and Investor Interest: Demonstrating your MVP early can help you validate your product idea and generate investor interest. By showing that you have a working prototype and real user feedback, you can demonstrate that your idea has merit and potential for success. This can make your pitch more compelling to investors and increase your chances of securing funding.
2. Real-world Feedback: One of the primary reasons to demo your MVP early is to gather real-world feedback. By showing your product to potential users or customers, you can gain valuable insights into how they perceive and interact with it. This feedback can help you identify usability issues, uncover features that are missing or unnecessary, and validate your product assumptions. The earlier you get this feedback, the sooner you can iterate and improve your product.
3. Iterative Development: Demonstrating your MVP early encourages an iterative development process. Instead of waiting until your product is "perfect," you can show it in its current state and then use the feedback you receive to make incremental improvements. This iterative approach allows you to course-correct quickly, ensuring that your product meets the needs of your target audience.

When are you ready?

So hopefully by now you are convinced that you should demo your MVP. But when should you do it? Michael Seibel from YC discusses this topic in YC's startup school. Ideally you should demo your product as soon as possible. Your goal here is to collect feedback especially in early the stages as this will validate your idea and make sure that you're not treading down a wrong path.

How do i demo my product?

The best way to demo your product is to get it into the hands of your user, for example, talk to your user and have them download your app in front of you. If your product provides value and solves a problem for your users, they will likely try it out willingly. If it takes you a lot of convincing to get them to try out your product, you might be targeting the wrong audience or the problem you are solving might not be a strong enough pain point for your users. If you're facing this, that's okay, these are strong indications that you might need to pivot your idea or rethink who your target audience is

Demo-ing your product virtually

It might be hard to gather your users together in a room which is why you could also hop on a call with your users to demo your product. Having a focused session where you demo your product to your users and answering their questions is a honestly one of the best ways to collect valuable feedback. There are plenty of products on the market that you can use to do this.

1. Zoom calls
2. Doing a huddle on guest slack channels
3. Call on Discord servers

Hosting your virtual call on aatlas.io

Alternatively, I'm working on a product to help founders collect feedback for their product. Here's how aatlas can help.

1. Create a virtual call
2. Share your event to your potential users
3. Get notified when someone expresses interest to join.
4. Leverage the existing traffic of aatlas
5. Share your screen and do a demo of your product
6. Get a video recording and transcript of your session (still in beta)

I'm currently working with a few other founders to demo their product to potential users. We have a couple of events lined up for this week so feel free to check them out at https://aatlas.io/events.

If you are interested in hosting your event, feel free to reach out to me or comment on this post and I will help onboard you.

Since we're still in early beta; we're limiting the number of events that are happening on our platform every week so please reach out at your earliest convenience.