Tips on How to Ace a Product Demo, from Harry McCracken
Having just come off a media tour, here are 12 tips from Harry McCracken at Technologizer (not pictured) about how to ace a product demo.
Read the full, original post from Harry here: Twelve Ways to Ace a Product Demo–or at Least Avoid Flopping
1. Say what the product is. Early on, in a straightforward manner stripped of hype and buzzwords–both to make what follows clearer and to disabuse the audience of any misperceptions.
2. Don’t tell the audience that your product is going to change the world. Or even that it’s amazing. It probably won’t, and most likely isn’t. And by making inflated claims you ensure the product will fail to live up to them. Besides, truly amazing, world-changing products speak for themselves.
3. Demo fewer features, not more . In a venue such as DEMO that gives you little time to do your stuff, you should probably focus on a couple of features at most. Certainly no more than three. Make sure they’re both memorable and representative.
4. Don’t claim you have no direct competitors. You do. (They don’t have to be exactly the same as your product–in fact, if they were exactly the same it would be pretty darn confusing.) Claiming you have no competitors makes you look clueless, or full of misplaced hubris, or both.
5. Have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. Have several of them, actually. At both TechCrunch50 and DEMO, a meaningful percentage of the demos have failed–momentarily or completely. I’d try to eliminate potential points of failure. I’d introduce redundancy if possible. And I’d figure out what I’d do and say if the demo was an utter failure.
6. Be very, very careful about trying to be funny. I’ve seen demos that have made me laugh (intentionally so!), but I’ve seen ten times more that I thought were lame. And some of the ones that made me chuckle didn’t help me remember the product in question.
7. Mention how you plan to make money. Briefly, and at the end, but everybody is wondering, so you might as well get it out of the way.
8. Remember that fewer presenters are usually better. At DEMO, many of the demos involve multiple people, but the most memorable ones usually involve one person on stage. It probably reduces the chances of embarrassing screwups, too. The person who does the demo should probably be the most talented presenter in the company, whoever that person may be.
9. The most credible presentations are done by people who you can envision using the product. For some reason, amazingly few of the scads of presentations I’ve witnessed involving professional graphics software have been done by artists. More often, they’re done by people who would have trouble sketching out a stick figure. Similarly, music-related demos are best done by people who seem to love music, and game PCs should be demoed by people you can imagine playing games.
10. Make sure your audience can see the demo. Especially in a venue such as TechCrunch or DEMO, where it may be hard to read small onscreen type, and projection may be on the fuzzy side. It’s probably a good idea to avoid demos in which not being able to read the screen renders the demo unintelligible.
11. Practice. Practice. Practice. Take a break. And then practice some more. Lastly, practice. Other than having a truly great product, it’s the best way to ensure that your demo goes well.
12. Go to shows like TechCrunch and DEMO and take notes about the clichés you hear. Then avoid them when you do demos. (There’s a generic sameness to many of the demos at these conferences that makes it hard to tell one company from another.)
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