What separates a demo, a trick and a scam?
When you demo a product – you are essentially selling your proof-of-concept and MVP. Generally, it’s incomplete to its ideal state, which means you are selling an idealistic dream. How can you be sure you aren’t just selling snake oil to your audience?
Selling snake oil: any kind of worthless product, service, or idea sold with hype and false promises. Lacking actual value/substance.
My dilemma
Around my 28th hackathon mark, I often wondered if I was selling snake oil whenever I pitched in hackathons. In pitching, you need to sell your product to whoever the audience is. And in doing so you must first sell the product to yourself – you need to believe in it and its potential.
Often with the incomplete and scrappy nature of a hackathon MVP, you focus on what’s working and hand-wave the non-working parts. You present the single-working flow while avoiding many other practical use-cases.
However, when I reflected on how few projects I continued working on post-hack, I pondered if I was simply deceiving myself on how much I truly believed in a project and what it could/would do next. Was I simply talking-up the few working features of our project and hiding the parts that didn’t work?
This dilemma persisted and I continued to struggle with it. I hold myself to high-integrity as I know that deceiving others requires deceiving oneself (which sucks).
Rick Borovoy’s wisdom bomb
In Jan 2023, MIT held a MIT Sloan Product Management Hackathon sponsored by Google. I managed to get in, but had to drop-out when I couldn’t secure an MIT guest email.
Not-so-subtle-flex: Towards the problem of unsustainable online consumption – I advised the team I was with on an idea for a chrome extension to discourage purchases, they won 3rd. So +1 to my product sense confidence 🤠
Back to point, Rick Borovoy, a group PM at Google, gave a delightful lecture at that hackathon. That lecture resolved my qualms and helped me settle my kettle.
Here’s my summary and takeaways of that lecture.
Demo School v2
What makes a demo?
Sample #1: Single strong usecase supported by tech
- Lexus Hoverboard - YouTube
- They used maglev tech, and then removed the narrow constraints.
What characteristics make a good demo?
- Sample: Single strong usecase supported by tech
- That is specifically chosen to be unrepresentative of what the tech is currently capable of.
- An awesome demo: picks the part that is working best, and makes that the core of the demo.
- The cover story i. Makes the narrow focus on the specific use case seem natural ii. E.g. you focus on skatepark venue, it seemed to cover most paths at it 1) Took focus away from track embedded there
- Nonchalance i. Sells the cover story ii. Moves away from showmanship model
Other examples: Thinking Tags 1996
- The sample:
- Tech that inspires a face-to-face conversation between two people by giving them a sense of what they have in common
- Brought a moment of delight
- The cover story:
- Events are excellent cover stories - timing and location specifics chosen to enable the demo use case feel like a natural part of the agenda
- E.g. the place they did it, had natural infra-red light interfering with the detection
- Hence, they shifted where the event was hosted (to media lab basement)
- Then ppl loved it, and wanted to do it at Nike, …etc
- They took the tech (infrared comm) and embedded it in a place that would work!
- Real robots
- Real communication
- Real dancing
- Not representative,
- Reality was that it was the only dance it could do
- Memory limitation
- He extracted the magic of the product and displayed that
- But if we tried, we would fail
Wait, isn’t that a trick or scam? The Difference
Here’s the difference
| Sample is | Sold as | Example | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demo | Real but not representative | Real but not representative | Moon landing was an amazing demo. Program after didn’t happen. Pit of activity after. Because, the entire apollo program was optimised around landing to the moon. i.e. can’t build space station, go to mars, etc… |
| Trick | Fake (and not representative) | Fake (and not representative) | David Copperfield makes the Statue of Liberty disappear |
| Scam | Fake (and not representative) | Real and representative | Elizabeth Holmes - Theranos |
Essentially, demo ethics and literacy assumes a shared understanding that a demo highlights a real, but not representative use case.
But if you’re asking for money, it’s good to be explicit: “This is a demo”.
Why build a demo?
It lets you
- Evaluate: compelling enough to explore further?
- Bootstrap resources: show progress in order to get resources to build
- Cut through: the noise
Summary
- Pick an amazing sample: focus on the most jaw-dropping use case that your tech genuinely supports.
- Tell a cover story about solving your problem: who am I, what my problem is, how badly does it suck, now what if I could…
- Nonchalance: nice if it works, but some underselling.