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Offer personal demos to convert (and learn from) potential customers

Offer a personal demo to every single person who signs up to convert free users into paid customers.

Wyatt Jozwowski of Demio ($43,000/mo) believes this tactic played a big role in attracting more than 800 users. During their beta, he filled his calendar with these demos — not only establishing more personal relationships with his customers, but also learning a tremendous amount about what his customers did and didn't want, and what stopped them from using the platform. They continued their demos after launch and he says it's where they've gotten the majority of their customers.

Setting up scheduling with services like neatCal or Calendly can support this process. Also, check out services like Livestorm or Zoom for your demos.

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  1. 3

    This sounds like a nice idea.

    If a team is behind an app who could give personal demos let's say 15-25 min it might work which still is quite a lot in order to gain up to 800 users or less if they came as referrals also.

    But what suggestion do you have for one-man product where time is very limited , I would barely do 2-3 demos a day with no guarantee of conversion ?

    1. 3

      Have a look on genm, you might find someone there who can do the marketing and onboarding

    2. 2

      Yeah, it may not work for everyone — Jozwowski said his calendar was filled constantly. If you don't feel you have enough time, you could set up demos for a small subset of signups, either at random or with the highest leverage leads.

      1. 2

        It's probably also good to note that this is GB is best for very early stage companies.

  2. 2

    I wouldn't do demos for a product less than $150/month AFTER you get your first 100 customers. At first it's ok, you learn about your customers, learn about their struggles, after a while you'll find patterns that help you steer the product. However, once your leads increase organically, your demo requests go up, conversion rates remain the same... it won't help you anymore, you'll actually wasting your time instead of working on the product.

    Right now we don't do demo calls anymore, but we're doing occasionally integration/sales calls for potential enterprise customers that want to migrate from competitors. Anything less than that is time wasted. Without demos and better self on-boarding, the conversion rates actually increased and we have more time focusing on the product.

    1. 1

      Great feedback, thanks 🙌

  3. 2

    Yep, I am trying to do this as well, it helps me understand our customers needs and also makes it easier to justify product decisions.

    My biggest struggle right now is to find the right moment to do the "sale" at the end of the conversation, but I'm getting better at this.

    We use https://demodesk.com/ for our demo calls and can highly recommend it.

    1. 1

      Awesome, thanks — demodesk sounds great. And yeah, that "sale" moment can be tough 😣

  4. 2

    I found that at $95/m this was doable. Anything less than that and I don't have the time as a solo-founder.

    1. 1

      That makes sense. The minimum $/mo probably depends on the company, though — stage, product, market etc.

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