Send them the working thing, in a form that opens with one click and needs nothing from them: no install, no account, no instructions to read first. Give it a short path through the parts that matter, put the context beside it rather than in a separate email, and make sure you can see what they did with it. Most prototypes are never really tried, not because people aren’t interested, but because trying them is more work than they have time for.
Why do so many demos go unopened?
Because building a prototype got easy and sharing one didn’t. With AI doing the heavy lifting, a working version of an idea can exist by the end of the afternoon. Then it sits on a laptop. The usual ways of getting it in front of someone each lose most of the people you send it to.
- A link to localhost, or a deploy that needs a login, works for exactly one person: you.
- A screen recording shows what you wanted them to see, which is not the same as letting them find out for themselves. Nobody has ever been convinced by a video they skipped through at double speed.
- A slide deck with screenshots turns a working product back into a promise.
- A live call gets the best reaction, and costs a diary slot for every single viewer.
Every one of those asks the other person to do some work, or to take your word for it. The point of a prototype is that they don’t have to.
What does a good share look like?
I think of it as four things, and they’re the same whether you’re showing an investor, a customer or your own board.
- One link, per person. It opens straight into the product, on their phone or their laptop, with nothing to set up.
- A short guided path. Three to five steps through the parts that make the case, with a sentence on each. They can leave the path whenever they like; most won’t need to.
- The context next to the demo. What it is, who it’s for, what you want from them. If that lives in a separate PDF, it doesn’t get read.
- A way back to you. A comment, a question, a “yes, let’s talk”, right where they are when they decide.
A demo nobody opens is a pitch nobody heard. Make trying it the easiest thing they do all day.
Should the demo use real data?
No. Use realistic, made-up data, and say so on the screen. It protects whoever’s data it would have been, it means you can share the link without a second thought, and it lets you shape the data to show the moment that matters: the alert that fires, the forecast that dips, the decision the product makes for you. Every screen on my own case studies is drawn like that, for the same reasons.
How do you know whether it landed?
You watch, not ask. The most useful thing a shared demo can give you is a record of what each person did: whether they opened it, how far through the path they got, which part held them, and what they came back to. Someone who opened it twice and went straight back to the pricing step is a different conversation from someone who never got past the first screen.
This is also where people fool themselves. A polite “looks great” by email tells you almost nothing. Two minutes on one screen, then a question about it, tells you a great deal. Follow up on what they did, not on what you hoped they did.
What do I use?
I co-founded a product for exactly this, so take this part with that in mind. Roomi puts a working demo in a pitch room: the live product, a guided tour through it, and the pages and files that go with it, behind a link for each person. You see who opened it, what held them, and what they said back. It exists because I kept building prototypes that deserved better than a screen recording.
What if it isn’t ready?
It’s more ready than you think, as long as the path you show is solid. A prototype only has to work along the route you guide people down. Make that route reliable, keep everything off it out of the way, and tell people plainly that it’s early. People forgive a rough edge in a real product far more readily than they forgive being asked to imagine one.