Test Your Demo on Five People Before You Publish It
August 31, 2026
Analytics tell you where people left. They cannot tell you why, and by the time you have enough data to guess, the demo has been live for a month underperforming.
Watching five people use it before publishing costs about an hour and finds most of what a month of data would have.
How to run it
- Send the link with no explanation, exactly as a real viewer receives it.
- Say nothing while they click, however uncomfortable that becomes.
- Watch their hands, not their face — hesitation before a click is the signal.
- Ask one question afterwards: what do you think this product does.
Why five, and who
Five is where the same problems start repeating. The first two find the obvious faults, and by the fifth you are hearing the same hesitation again, which is the sign to stop and fix rather than keep testing.
They do not need to be prospects. Anyone unfamiliar with your product will find the structural problems; only the wording of the value proposition needs a real buyer.
What to do with what you learn
The final question is the important one. If four out of five cannot say what the product does after clicking through, the problem is the premise, not any individual step.
That is a finding worth an hour of anyone’s time, and it is invisible in analytics — those people completed the demo and looked, statistically, like a success.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I test an interactive demo before publishing?
- Send the link to five people with no explanation, say nothing while they click, watch their hands rather than their faces, and afterwards ask one question: what do you think this product does. It takes about an hour.
- Why five people?
- Because that is where problems start repeating. The first two find the obvious faults and by the fifth you are hearing the same hesitation again, which means it is time to fix rather than keep gathering examples.
- Do demo testers need to be real prospects?
- Not for structural problems — anyone unfamiliar with your product will find those. You only need real buyers to test the wording of the value proposition, which is the one thing an outsider cannot judge for you.
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