[gnatman]

Surely real product with fake data is the answer. Fake data doesn’t necessarily mean “silly” data e.g. names like Larry Llama or myfaketestwebsite.com. There’s no reason why your real product running on sandboxed data should hurt your credibility.

[legitimate_key]

I thought this too initially - "just make the fake data look professional."

Where it broke down for me: investors with technical backgrounds would ask edge case questions ("show me how this handles 10K records" or "what does error handling look like with real load?"). The fake environment couldn't simulate that complexity authentically.

The other issue was muscle memory. When I'm demoing something I use daily, I'm fast and fluent. In a fake environment, I'd hesitate or click wrong because it's not my real workflow. Investors noticed.

Have you found ways around those issues?

[dtnewman]

> "show me how this handles 10K records"

Presumably the issue here is that you have customers with >10k records, but can't show them. Why not take their data and anonymize it, then put it under a fake customer?

> "what does error handling look like with real load?"*

I find it hard to believe that anyone is making an investment decision off of this question, but how would you demo this with a real customer anyway? Intentionally introduce a bug so that you can show them how errors are handled? Wouldn't the best course of action here be to just describe the error handling?