I've had this problem in literally every company I've been at. As a PM I'd be asked by my GM or CEO or Sales VP when they'll have a 'better demo environment' and I'd say, 'give me two engineers for several weeks' and they'd say 'no' and it would never happen.

This is sorely needed. Based on the problem alone, of all the companies I've seen in the W21 batch, this is where I'd place my bets.

Good luck!

Randy here. Thank you for the kind words! Engineering has bugs to fix and product to build and just doesn't have the time to spend on the demo environment.

Absolutely.

I'm curious about your pricing. $700/month looks like the right balance between weeding out the tiny/expensive to support customers and not constraining your market too much.

How'd you land on a seat-based model? This feels to me like the kind of thing that, even in a company with a 100+ person engineering team, might be worked on by just one or two people, probably in Sales Engineering. Maybe one other person to handle the analytics side. Are you thinking that in larger companies, people from multiple product teams would do the demo for their portion of the product?

I don't have a better answer, but this is the kind of thing whose pricing should track relative to customer revenue. The more deals they close (bc of Navattic, presumably), the more you should charge.

I'm sure you've thought about this quite a bit. Interested to learn what your thinking is, if you care to share.

Yeah definitely, a conversion or revenue-based pricing model is interesting to explore. We landed on per-seat as we've noticed expansion to individual sales reps so they can share personalized demos with prospects. That said, it's still something we're working on refining.

Very cool!

FYI, I would pay for this, but $8,400/yr. is a killer for a startup. You're leaving what might be a lot money on the table at the bottom that you could scoop up with graduated pricing. This might also protect you from competitors, because if you leave the low end open, you may get eaten by a copycat offering cheap/freemium. For example, Github vs. Gitlab and Mailchimp(freemium) vs. Constant Contact.

You've made something very cool that I think people will want, and this price point won't be crazy for enterprise folks. Great work!

Agreed, at $8,400/yr I feel like I might as well just pay my devs an implement something like introjs. Granted, not as powerful, but still.....

I did immediately think to myself that this was a needed product when I saw.

Definitely, thanks for the kind words and feedback here. Pricing is something we're still iterating on and a plan that's palatable for startups is in the future. Stay tuned!

the building blocks are all there, take something like inspectlet.com and introjs.com and you are probably close. but somebody has to build it. i see the value but the pricing looks like crazy to me. then again maybe for VC backed startups thats nothing.

Very cool! I was excited & shared this with everyone at my small SaaS company... then I saw your pricing. :( It's literally an order of magnitude out of our price range!

Thanks for the feedback. At this point we are targeting slightly larger SaaS companies, though we hope to bring this to a price point that's feasible for every SaaS company eventually!

Smart approach, imho.

Awesome! Very cool approach -- I've written a few little scripts that do something similar in fact in terms of serializing the DOM. Feedback:

We are actually working on a SaaS launch right now of a pretty bog-standard app. I was actually sold and ready to use Navattic from the landing page, but I was expecting a pricing model like Cypress.io, so I got some serious sticker shock. I feel your product is 80% of what we need, but we can get to 70% of what we need by just saving a few HTML pages and then using an off-the-shelf open source tour JS script (which is what we did in one case last week, and it took all of like 10 minutes). If we want a 100% interactive experience, it would again be just slightly more dev effort to create a new tenant in our demo database and sending the prospect an onboarding link, then just watching our existing analytics for usage. I guess this is all to say, I'd be okay with paying "pocket change" for a convenient platform with analytics for the same reason I like Cypress -- sure, I can set up an E2E dashboard with off-the-shelf FOSS libraries, but Cypress is more convenient at a reasonable cost -- but not $8k per year.

That said, I could see products with very broken multi-tenancy AND no automated provisioning finding this useful (and with deep pockets). I just wonder if are enough of these to be sustainable, since not only would they have to be broken in this way, but also the "fix" to multi-tenancy or automated provisioning would have to be a worse ROI, since these are typically already on "product roadmaps" anyway. Just my two cents, and I understand you might still be iterating on pricing. Regardless, a really cool product, congrats on the launch!

Thanks for the feedback! That makes total sense. Today we're working with slightly larger companies, but in the future we intend to roll out a pricing model that meets the needs of most SaaS companies. Thanks for sharing Cypress' model - it's an interesting one we'll explore we continue to think through pricing!

For a product that is meant to demo a product what is so sorely missing is a demo of your product. I do think, however, that I understand the concept and really like it. Props!

Pardon the second top-level comment, but I have a few questions about the product:

1. Have you considered making the guided-tour functionality available for developers to integrate into the live app? That way applications can guide the user through the process of getting started with real data in their real account.

2. What about applications that have different UI entry points for different kinds of users? Can you do a guided tour where the user starts at entry point A, goes through a couple of screens, then switches to entry point B and sees what that side of the app is like? Maybe we can get into more specifics privately; I don't want to make this thread about _my_ product.

3. Do you support dynamic, server-initiated page updates, e.g. sent via a WebSocket in the real app?

1. We do believe that this is a big opportunity, but it's quite a developed market (it's formally known as Digital Adoption Platforms). In order to compete in the space, there are a few more critical features that we need to develop. We would like to provide this for our customers so they can use the same guides throughout the early customer experience.

2. Yes. You can accomplish this by triggering guides to appear on pages matching certain patterns (such as url). You can also use guides to link between each other.

3. If that update results in an update to the UI, then it can be captured with DOM serialization.

> Because our solution relies on serializing the DOM state,

In addition to the benefits you mentioned, this also makes your interactive demos accessible with screen readers and other assistive technologies, or at least as accessible as the apps themselves. That makes them better than demo videos.

I also got a good laugh out of the fact that "Improve site accessibility" is one of the sample tasks in your meta-demo. Indeed, the popup dialog, which prompted me for my email and name, should be marked up as an ARIA dialog. I haven't checked out the actual Navattic app, so I don't know yet what accessibility improvements might be needed there.

You're completely correct. It's never too soon to think about accessibility, and this is high on my immediate road map!

Why have teams create a replication of their app, rather than have your product work off of a dummy data version or even a static version of the team's app? I'm not sure I understand the 2 reasons provided - "overwriting data in the environment" and "juggling access credentials"?

I love the website design, btw!

Good questions. Chris here. Before learning about the space through user interviews (and from Neil and Randy), I had the same thoughts!

For companies that want to build this internally, there's a couple of things to think of from an engineering perspective. A) Restore state: If users can manipulate data in the app, is there a "restore state" so that they don't modify the same data for other visitors. B) Privileges: you probably want special, more-restrictive privileges for users just experiencing a demo and not setting up a typical user account.

So you are correct, that setting up a static version of a team's app could solve these problems and that's exactly what we help facilitate! It's a trickier problem to implement internally than you might initially think (imagine calling "indeterministic" web APIs like Date.now() for a time-series chart or Math.random() for uuids.) Through our customer interviews, we found that it's difficult to win the engineering team's time for such a task.

Our no-code editor also allows you to update the overlays dynamically and easily update the (now) static demo to keep it up-to-date with your application.

[Nickelled](https://www.nickelled.com) have been doing this for years :)

This looks great! Is it possible to capture the demo environment once and then create multiple demo variants by editing ui text or data using a wysiwyg editor later? Since this is a static version?

Yes! Although the feature is pre-beta right now, we're excited to release it to our customers in 2 weeks. Our current customers have requested it to personalize demos for individual prospects / customer segments, or to update old dummy data in their account.

I think I'm being thick on this one - there is the first section with the guide overlay, and then a link to the full demo (hosted at demo.navattic.com). Does Navattic create both of these, or just the first section that walks the user through the product?

Off-topic: did you use a framework for the demo app? It's very nice looking!

We used Navattic to create both sections. We copied the application front end and added in a guided walkthrough using our demo creation platform.

We used Windmill Dashboard React (https://github.com/estevanmaito/windmill-dashboard-react) to create the sample app!

In your demo, I got to the point of "Click Metrics to continue...", and "Metrics" was unclickable: https://imgur.com/a/i5LWFaa

I'm using FireFox 86.0 on MacOS 11.2 (Apple M1 chip).

Thanks for the report! I'll fix this asap

Signed up to HN after many years browsing news here just to say this, is very, very cool. My startup could not afford to use it but my goodness your execution on this is brilliant. Good luck!

Thank you!

Cool! Bit out of my budget, but I can see this solving a pain point. I wonder what happens once the demo'ed app invokes canvas, WebGL or its own extensions?

We've taken different approaches to this in the past. Through serializing all network requests (from js bundles to api requests), you can reassemble an application on the client in the same way that it would typically appear. This allows you to use any browser tech like canvas / WebGL as normal. From a DOM serializing perspective, although less interactive, you can convert canvas elements into static images (.toDataURL()). This has proved to be good enough for most use cases so far, but we're continuing to experiment with new methods!

Cool product, but way above my bootstrapped SaaS budget.

Post it in facebook.com/groups/pitchback

Thanks for passing this along! We'll check it out.