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by SvenAl 1923 days ago
Thanks for the feedback. I agree a demo would be more useful. We might provide a more comprehensive platform overview in a video format. Operating a hosted demo requires us to maintain it and manage it. People tend to post all sorts of things in those types of environments, and if it’s a shared install base, other users might see content that is not appropriate. We need to find a good balance here, it just something we haven’t had time to get around to. On the overview video - I’ll see what I can do, it’s a good suggestion, thank you!
4 comments

You could do a periodic reset / relaunch of the app so the demo starts from a clean slate after few hours / days.

I understand you sell support / hosted package. If you say you can't support a demo install, that would send a wrong message.

It’s something we’ll definitely look at we just haven’t gotten to it yet. We thought of doing periodic resets, but that tends not to provide the best experience. We’re thinking of having per-user instances, forcing users to create an account, but then delete the accounts on a periodic basis. This way, rather than having a single shared account we believe would work better. It’s just there’s a lot of things on our roadmap and we didn’t think this one being so important. Clearly we were wrong.
For an alternate take, as a developer I really don't have a problem with downloading and running it myself. If I were seriously evaluating it, I would 1) have to do that anyway, and 2) a hosted demo wouldn't be sufficient.

Not offering the demo may be a problem for tourists who aren't seriously considering this, but probably not for parties that are in the process of looking for something like this for a real use case.

That was my starting point when I was thinking about this. However it seems there’s a lot of users who just don’t want to do that initial investment, so having a demo would potentially help in converting them.
What about resetting it every day and put a warning that others can also use the demo/mess up the CMS?

Thats kinda what I’m used to seeing anyway :)

Thats one possibility, sure. We'll evaluate the best approach when we get to setting it up. Thanks for your suggestion, appreciate it!
If you can't be bothered to provide a demo of your product why should I bother setting it up myself?
We found developers, who are our target audience, want to test the setup, as that's part of the product experience and they get to learn the stack and the requirements. We are an open-source product, we don't have a SaaS offering, so we don't have a way yet to spin up demos or trial accounts for every user. You can view the product in our overview video without installing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOGJKHXntiU