A Checklist to Run Before Publishing a Product Demo
August 18, 2026
A demo goes out with a real email address in it, or unreadable on a phone, or pointing at a page that no longer exists. All of these are cheap to catch and expensive to discover from a customer.
This is the list, in the order worth running it.
Sensitive content — do this first
- Real names and email addresses, including in a browser tab title or an autocomplete dropdown.
- Your own account details in a corner: the logged-in user menu is the most commonly missed.
- Internal URLs and staging hostnames, especially if you turned on the address bar.
- Anything blurred — check it is genuinely blurred in the published version, not just in the editor.
- Other customers' data, which is the one with real consequences.
Legibility
- Open it on a phone. Not a simulator — an actual phone, held normally.
- Check every step with a table or form is zoomed enough to read.
- Read the captions at the size they render, not in the editor at full width.
- Check contrast on any text placed over a screenshot.
Behaviour
- Open it logged out, in a private window. The classic failure is a demo that only works while you are signed in.
- Click through every step, including the last one — end screens are where broken links live.
- Test the call to action. It is the point of the whole thing and it is frequently wrong.
- Check it loads on a slow connection, which is what a phone on mobile data actually is.
The ones people forget
- The social preview. Paste the link into a chat and look at the card that appears.
- The first frame, which becomes the thumbnail everywhere.
- Whether it still matches the product — obvious, and routinely skipped for a demo recorded three weeks ago.
- Who else can edit it, if it is going to be maintained by someone other than you.
Frequently asked questions
- What should you check before publishing a product demo?
- Sensitive content first -- real names, email addresses, your own account menu, internal URLs, and whether blurring survived publishing. Then legibility on a real phone, behaviour in a logged-out private window, and the social preview card.
- What is the most commonly missed problem in a published demo?
- The logged-in user menu in the corner, showing the creator's own name and email on every step. After that: a demo that only works while signed in, which is not noticed because the person testing it always is.
- Why check a demo on a real phone rather than a simulator?
- Because a simulator does not reproduce how it feels held at arm's length on a mobile connection. Text that is technically legible at a device resolution can still be unreadable in practice, and load time on real mobile data is a different number.
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