Show HN: We ungated our product (no signup)–is it a good idea?

[fredotan]

Users within our ICP were dropping off during or right after the signup process, never reaching that crucial “aha moment” where they truly see the value in our product. Typically, this moment happens when they’ve created an interactive demo they’re happy with.

We were like... "let's just do it". So, we decided to ungate our product—removing the signup step entirely at this stage of the user journey. Of course, users can still sign up if they want to continue using the product, but our aim was to reduce friction and align with the supposed future of product-led growth, where ungated experiences help users quickly grasp a product’s value.

We’re tracking key metrics—like increased engagement, faster time-to-value, and created demos—but it’s still early days, and the results are mixed. We’ve seen spikes in usage, but also some users creating “meaningless” demos, likely due to being overwhelmed by too many options.

I’m eager for your thoughts: - What do you think of this specific ungated experience? - Were you able to create your first interactive demo? - Any other ungated product you really like, and why?

Open to any feedback or discussions!

[usernamed7]

I checked out your website and twitter. If you really are "Delighting 20,000+ users around the world" (from your site) then I don't get why you're exploring this as a show HN. posting this feels like a growth hack from a product reaching for every growth hack.

One of the biggest obstacles to making the B2B sale is trust. The way you talk about your product and your customers (and the way you treat them in your product) is indicative of how trustworthy you are.

So from what I can see either you're lying in your website or you're lying to us here. There is a disconnect between what you project and what you do and for me, that's a major flag.

> align with the supposed future of product-led growth, where ungated experiences help users quickly grasp a product’s value.

"the supposed future of product-led growth"? It sounds like you have only an academic understanding of product.

[Hasu]

> never reaching that crucial “aha moment” where they truly see the value in our product.

> We’ve seen spikes in usage, but also some users creating “meaningless” demos, likely due to being overwhelmed by too many options.

It's not "too many options". It's the same problem as you had before. Your prospects don't know what they would use the product for, so they mess around and make something useless. If they had an idea, they would build that.

These people are not likely to be your customers, I wouldn't be focused on them as much as the people who are getting it and using it with intent.

[fredotan]

That makes sense as well. Honing down on the ones with intent!

[PaulHoule]

If I understand it right, it is generating a unique link for me that I'll be able to come back to for the next 24 hours.

I went into this with the motivation of giving you feedback, I didn't really have a demo in mind; I've had phases of my life where I practically lived in PowerPoint, I am not so sure what the difference is between a "demo" and a "slide deck"? It seems like one big thing is that this product is oriented towards embedding a CTA such as a link or an email capture form: I assume I make my Supademo and then I can point people to the URL to see it?

I had no patience for the guided walkthrough, particularly I didn't want to listen to any narration but maybe somebody else would.

I started messing with it and found the UI felt really refined sometimes, I like the dialog for creating hotspots. Then occasionally I'd find little annoying things. For instance I created a chapter and when I clicked on the text I wanted to edit it seems like the cursor would not move to where I clicked the mouse (on Firefox) Now I could type and navigate with the arrow keys when I was there but the improper cursor behavior left me unsure that this was going to work until I tried it.

I made a meaningless demo myself because I am just trying to get a sense of what this product is, I don't have a demo burning inside me to get out.

[tommiegannert]

The sidebar being modal and blocking clicks to dismiss it is weird.

Why is the most important text "don't know what to do?" part of the sidebar, and not the main view?

The first button I see (even though it's secondary) is Add Chrome extension. That's the wrong impression.

The next buttons are about me uploading things, which assumes I have already prepared myself for using your demo. Hurdles, obstacles. What kind of images/videos are you looking for? Why isn't there a gallery of pre-made images to give me an idea of what you're trying to make me do?

The sidebar doesn't help me decide what to do next. No button says "start here" (I still don't know what your site does.)

The guided interactive demo doesn't seem very interactive, and I still don't know what your site does. It does ask me to add a Chrome extension. Seems important to you.

If I'm vaguely interested in a site, of course I'll create meaningless demos. I just want to drag-n-drop things to see if this is something I should invest more time in or not. Uploading private images of unknown content is a huge hurdle.

Clicking on examples, and taking the first one... I think I understand you're making mobile mockups? Now I'm just thinking "oh, that looks complicated: if I can't even start with some gallery picture to play around with, I'm guessing the interactive parts will be really difficult to do myself." You haven't explained/shown that this complicated thing is actually easy with your tool. There ends my journey.

And, yes, stop the audio. Both the interactive guide/video and the Clippy.

[fredotan]

Thanks for the feedback. I like the idea of a gallery of pre-made images to start off with, in particular.

[karmakaze]

What is it? Seems like I could use a screen recorder and narrate instead?

[fredotan]

A platform for you to create interactive demos. The difference is that one can't interact with a screen recording + your narration other than just watching it.

[karmakaze]

I didn't pick up on that from the intro material. Might want to make that more obviously clear.

[davidt84]

For a product that claims to make it easy to create great demos, the demo is confusing and overwhelming.

[dgfitz]

I don't want to do a demo, and I don't want to sign up for an account. I wanted to go the homepage in order to try and understand what this product actually does. The URL from the link was: https://app.supademo.com/demo/LotsOfStuffHere

So I removed demo/LotsOfStuffHere and it took me to another login/signup page. Then I removed the app. at the beginning, and I get to the homepage.

The homepage says:

> The fastest way to create interactive product demos > Close deals faster, drive enablement and scale product onboarding with high-converting, AI-powered product demos.

this tells me very little. Is it just a screen-recorder app? The graphic is blurred out, immediately triggering the same neural pathways I experience when I hit a site with a paywall that shows a fuzzed-out page with a modal on top. So I closed the page.

When I typed this up, I re-opened the page and clicked on the modal, which seemed to try and demonstrate that this is something between a mouse/keyboard logger and an "action recorder" of sorts. I don't want either of these things on my computer.

[jhylee]

Some other things we've considered: - How do we create urgency to create and claim within a reasonable period (i.e. putting 24hr expiration dates on demos) - Is it better to throw the user into a "template" they can edit or start with a completely empty state? - Will folks even want an ungated experience, considering sales/marketing demos take multiple iterations / focused, high-fidelity work to craft/publish? - Will ungated lead to lower (but more qualified) signups? Or the opposite, considering we have a simple product and quick time-to-value?

Curious to learn from others who ungated their product, especially in PLG

[from-nibly]

All I hear is a bunch of growth hacking and 0 questions about your own product. One of the missing questions is "does anyone even want this?".

When I clicked the link I could not determine what I was even looking at. It looks like the ads that pop up when trying to download something from a sketchy website. The voice starts yelling at you about something. Idk what because I closed it immediately, embarrassed like I was in a library.

What value was I supposed get out of that?

Lowering time to value does not automatically mean that the value is unchanged.

[usernamed7]

> How do we create urgency to create and claim within a reasonable period

> Is it better to throw the user into a "template" they can edit or start with a completely empty state

> Will folks even want an ungated experience

> Will ungated lead to lower (but more qualified) signups

All the wrong questions to be asking. And any product that tries to "create urgency" is a hard no for me, and now that I know you think about your customers as marks and not as people, I will never signup and use your product.

You need to be asking more of "how can i create and demonstrate value for customers"

[fredotan]

Something went wrong with the URL I added. But if you want to try creating a demo from scratch, ungated: https://app.supademo.com/new

[addaon]

Hmm. Not sure what I'm looking at here. I tried clicking stuff. The first three buttons I saw (traffic light) did nothing. The fourth one made the rest of them go away with no obvious way to get them back? I don't have any video or images I want to share with a third party without understanding the consequences, and I'm sure as heck not installing an extension so... I guess we're done here?

[fredotan]

I understand the video & images part. Why not installing an extension from the Chrome Web Store?

[addaon]

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/15259/worst-cas...

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=chrome+exte...

It's not that I'll never install an extension (I currently use two, one ad blocker and one to filter Pinterest out of search results), but it's certainly not something I'm going to do casually.

[davidt84]

Add 'Supademo: AI interactive demos in seconds'?

It can:

Read and change all your data on all websites

[Mathnerd314]

I get that the demos are interactive but for me at least a 2 minute video would be more useful in explaining what the product actually does, unless you really think you can demo the software using itself. There is not much point in ungating when I don't even know what the product is. Signing up is not a big deal, it probably is just that users still had no idea what the product was and weren't comfortable creating an account. And it seems it still requires an investment because the chrome extension is the main use case and has to be installed.

Bookmarked it though, I might end up using it.

[kingnothing]

The "Get Started" link doesn't do anything on Firefox. Hard to say if it was a good or bad idea.

[apt-get]

Might be wise to make it more apparent that you need to close the right sidebar before you can do anything on-screen -- I tried clicking on the "Get Started" buttons, found them to be unresponsive / non-interactive, tried clicking on stuff on the side, and closed the page at first, thinking it wasn't tested on Firefox.

[fredotan]

Thank you. That's fair feedback. We'll look into that on Firefox.

[joshstrange]

Some feedback:

* Put an semi-opaque overlay over the left-hand side of the UI when the sidebar is open so that it's clear you can't click anything until you close the sidebar - https://cs.joshstrange.com/FS1Slw9R

* These buttons are confusing to me, 2 of them link elsewhere and 2 are for uploading. They should have different styles and have section labels or similar. Also I wouldn't put the Chrome/Figma plugins up so high, that's something you want to push later I would thing, right now you are trying to show off the product. https://cs.joshstrange.com/rXwrRHhr

* I watched the interactive demo (https://app.supademo.com/demo/clsaqfbgh0163pe10m1m1xska) - Too much is going on at the same time. I got lost trying to listen and read all the same time and there was no indicator of how long the demo was (you can see how long each step is). I'm not sure if you can configure this but I would recommend not going to the next "step" until the user clicks so they have time to read the popup and/or study/look at the UI itself before moving on

* It's important to note that I know nothing about your product, I wasn't sure if this was a powerpoint/slides-type product until I got to the demo and realized it's for demoing your website and/or for training. I'd highlight the types of things you can create with the product first and foremost (which might be done on your launch page, I clicked the link in this thread (https://app.supademo.com/new)

* I assume you are either only using or support using AI voices, some of your demos have _really_ bad "speakers" (like https://supademo.com/showcase/spotify).

* For some reason (Chrome, macOS) the first time I load any demo I get 1-2 seconds of the audio before it restarts. It doesn't happen on refresh, only on the first load - https://cs.joshstrange.com/fSpnFXH1

* If you pause a demo you can't click on the next arrow "->" in the popup to continue, you _must_ first unpause the demo, this is annoying. -- Ahh, I stand corrected, you _can_ move forward while paused, I was just on the last step but for some reason there is still a "->" button on the popup - https://cs.joshstrange.com/WnSrng7M

* If the popup is near the bottom-right corner your popup then it covers the buttons or gets in the way - https://cs.joshstrange.com/N5tnKsRt

[geuis]

Get rid of that voice asap. Guided tutorials are always an immediate turnoff to me, but when that voice came out of nowhere I immediately noped out.

[dsmurrell]

[flagged]

[fredotan]

Lol, "hotspot"

[bugtodiffer]

nuttin to show but Show HN