Regardless of how you feel about Oracle, they're masters of the enterprise sales process, yet we were sales engineers there and even we were struggling to demo SaaS products to customers effectively. Day in and out we delivered product demos to prospects, but we didn’t have a great response when the prospect wanted to get hands on with the product. We then hit the phones and spoke to 200+ SaaS companies and learned that this is a widespread problem. Typically, SaaS companies are limited to the following options: share an unguided sandbox that requires setup and training, provide a trial (which isn’t feasible for many integration-heavy products), or send over a video or slide deck.
We looped in a college friend, Chris, as our third co-founder and while we were co-quarantined in Colorado, hacked together an MVP of our sharable demo platform. Our objective was to turn anything that runs in the browser into a deterministic, replayable web app that performs as close to the real experience as possible. We explored this from multiple technical fronts, including: A) serializing network requests by developing basically a cache.match() with fuzzy matching on the edge, B) serializing the DOM state by hacking CSS, patching Web APIs, inlining values, etc. We were lucky enough to get some amazing early customers who were patient with us during this early experimental phase. In the end, we are happy with our approach that balances ease of creation, broad application support, and maintains the integrity of the application’s experience. We allow any non-technical person to create these shareable demos in a matter of minutes through a Chrome extension and our web app.
With this method, teams can create a replication of their app that looks and feels like the real thing, but can easily be shared with prospects without worrying about overwriting data in the environment or juggling access credentials. Because our solution relies on serializing the DOM state, it is framework and language agnostic and can be implemented without involving engineering teams.
We also added tools like guides and user analytics to allow teams to create step-by-step walkthroughs within the app and track user engagement with the tour. So far we’re seeing these interactive product demos shared as a followup after a live product demo, embedded on their marketing site or sent in outbound messaging. We’ve seen some promising early results with customers reporting a 4x increase in booked meetings when including interactive demos in their outbound emails.
If you want to see how it looks for a generic product, check out https://demo.navattic.com/, and if you want to try it out on your own product, start here: www.navattic.com/onboard/plan.
We would like your feedback on all of the above, are happy to answer questions, and look forward to hearing about your experiences and ideas. We’ll be hanging around in the comments - fire away HN!
by Andrey
Azimov