Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by choyle 1916 days ago
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.