The good, the bad and the ugly of showcasing your expertise with demo products
A story about failure and success of geeks building cool demo projects to convince customers that they can build a real one
Imagine you start an innovative service product within your IT outsourcing company. Let’s say you want to build data-driven apps for wearable platforms, or any other trendy stuff. You train some of your developers to write apps for Android Wear and Apple Watch, and hire a data scientist. Then you ask your salespeople to look for some customers interested in your services — and after some time they get back with no customer. This happens mainly because of two reasons:
- Even though there is lot of buzz around technologies you focus on, in fact all of this is a hype: many people talk about it — but only few actually build some real products.
- Those few who build or want to start building them ask about your experience, but there’s nothing to show: you have no experience at this point and, therefore, you can’t get projects to gain experience — the classic Chicken and Egg problem.
“Why don’t we create some demo products and present them to the market?” is probably one of the most obvious strategies in this case and many companies go exactly this way. We did this dozens of times, and we can tell you exactly what works and what doesn’t.
The innovation no one cares about
After the Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 a lot of people from the Fintech industry started taking risk management seriously. Following this trend, a number of software products focused on risk management were introduced to the market. We were lucky enough to participate in several quite interesting projects as an engineering vendor. It was fun, challenging and profitable. And we wanted more like this.
The problem was NDA.
We did some research and approached other people who were creating products we could contribute to. But how could we convince them that our understanding of the matter was deep enough to significantly help grow their business?
Of course, we decided to build a demo product: a small open source library that implemented one of the innovative math methods to calculate differentials on GPU. Trust me, it was a pretty innovative thing for the Fintech industry several years ago.
The good thing about this library was that it was innovative and sophisticated enough to prove that we understand the matter. But the bad thing was that no one actually used it in practice and it was too niche for most Fintech people to care about. And the ugly: you have to be a PhD in maths or physics to understand what it is all about.
So, we built an innovative and sophisticated thing and no one cared about it.
Marketing eating the product
Wearables are trending. Probably every single mobile developer in the world looks for a chance to develop an app for a freshly launched wearable platform. So did we back in 2013 when Google introduced Google Glass. The problem was we didn’t have one at hand back then and could hardly understand how it works. But we decided to try.
Learning how to develop for Glass without having one was rather easy. The harder part was to decide what to develop. We brainstormed some 20+ ideas and chose the one about extreme sports: paintball, mountain biking, parkour. You know: gamification, geolocation and stuff.
This time we knew that we have to communicate our work to the market, so we created a promo site for our demo product even before we started developing an actual app. In fact, we never finished the app — by the time we got to development, we finally managed to get the device and found that most of the features we imagined to be cool are simply not feasible on Google Glass (mainly because of its hardware limitations). But the site was already built, so we chose to launch at least this one.
The good thing was that we received a bunch of awards for the website itself and the thing was definitely eye-catching. The bad thing, though, was that we never built the app because of Google Glass limitations. And honestly speaking it was more about digital marketing than about technology. The ugly: not everybody understood what Google Glass Experiment was all about (Tip: it is about user experience that can be achieved with wearable devices in general, not Google Glass itself).
Even though this Google Glass project was not successful in a way we expected it to be (generating hundreds of leads wanting us to create products for wearable platforms), it has definitely promoted our company to the market and gave us much better understanding of how to build this kind of demos.
Crossing trends
Apple Watch was long time wanted by the market. When Apple announced it last autumn and then published the SDK for general public, we already knew what to do. This time we decided to create a demo product that solves a certain real-life problem. After brainstorming we chose to build an unofficial remote control app for the most trendy car in the world: Tesla.
This time we chose not to invest too much into promotion, but write a blog post and open source the code.
The good thing: a few days after publishing we found ourselves famous. More than 200K people have watched our screencast on YouTube. We made it to the world’s most popular media and got great attention from potential customers. The bad: it happened before Apple Watch was launched and we weren’t able to publish the app to AppStore. The ugly thing was that Tesla has nothing to do with it because of their policy not to outsource things related to security of their cars.
At this point the Tesla app project is the most successful demo product we ever did. The key success factor was crossing trendy technology (Apple Watch) with a popular consumer brand (Tesla).
Summary
Demo products work if you build them properly. Let your geeks produce ideas but validate them against the market. Keep your customer and goals in mind. Remember to promote your products the right way.
Finally, don’t be afraid to experiment and fail: the amount of experience you will get while trying is definitely worth it. After all, only those who do nothing never fail.
