It\u2019s already all a blur. 26 cities. 6 weeks. 2913 attendees. $160,000. 23 hotels, one Cambridge college, one British library, and a \u201cSoci\u00ebteit Het Meisjeshuis.\u201d (\u201cGesundheit!\u201d)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-01.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Somewhere, I don\u2019t know where, I\u2019m standing exhausted outside a hotel ballroom right after the umpteenth demo, and someone is giving me some ridiculous objection. \u201cWell, it\u2019s all good and fine what FogBugz does, but we won\u2019t use it, because we need PROJECT MANAGEMENT.\u201d<\/p>\n
Excuse me, SIR? Do you have some kind of SUDDEN AMNESIA? Traumatic HEAD INJURY maybe? Did you WATCH the demo?<\/p>\n
(I didn\u2019t really say that.)<\/p>\n
While I was trying to think of a nice<\/i> way to reply, another<\/i> potential customer, standing right there, says to the guy, \u201cWhy not try it out on a little project? Won\u2019t cost you anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
A bit flips. The guy suddenly stops shaking his head and starts nodding it. \u201cYeah, that\u2019s a good idea. I\u2019ll do that,\u201d he says, smiling. SOLD.<\/p>\n
WTF just happened.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-02.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
No matter how much I talk, I\u2019m just one person. And no matter how much I try to sell people on FogBugz, it\u2019s all coming from me, so that can only add up to a certain amount of credibility, and it just wasn\u2019t passing the credibility threshold for Mr. Amnesia. It wouldn\u2019t matter what I said. He was in \u201cI object!\u201d mode, groping around for some reason not to buy FogBugz, even if he couldn\u2019t come up with anything rational.<\/p>\n
The minute a second person\u2014his doppelganger! Same height! Same grey hair! Dressed just like him!\u2014said something, BLING! It was like triangulation. Oooooh! Now he\u2019s seeing it from two different angles. It\u2019s 3D. Must not be an optical illusion.<\/p>\n
Social proof<\/a>, Robert Cialdini<\/a> calls it. That gave me an idea. I knew from the registration forms that in every city, about 30% of the attendees were already using FogBugz. I started asking a question at the beginning of the demo: \u201cHow many people here use FogBugz?\u201d Hands go up. That\u2019s nice. Everybody looks around. Wow, <\/i>they think. People actually use this software. It\u2019s not just some downloadable piece of shareware some guy wrote in his basement. I started getting comments like, \u201cI didn\u2019t realize so many people in Austin were already using FogBugz!\u201d<\/p>\n The one thing you can say about the 26 public FogBugz demos that I just did is that the first one (Vancouver) was pretty weak, and the last one (Copenhagen) was much, much better, and it was pretty much continuous improvement along the way. If you ever have to do a public demo of your software, here are some of those things that I learned.<\/p>\n Biggest turnouts<\/strong><\/p>\n FogBugz World Tour<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good thing we did a survey to figure out where to go, because the number of attendees in each city was nothing like we expected. If you can only go to five cities, go to London, Toronto, Seattle, Austin, and Boston. Notice I didn\u2019t say San Francisco or Silicon Valley. Those were 12 and 13 on our list, respectively. I have no explanation for this, other than that the huge tech community in the valley has so many damn opportunities to go to tech demos that they find them boring. Shown at right are the 20 biggest turnouts we got for the FogBugz demo.<\/p>\n If you have any control whatsoever over the place where the demo is going to take place, here are three things you absolutely have to do.<\/p>\n Play upbeat music while you\u2019re waiting for everyone to arrive. The kind of popular, upbeat, Margaritaville music Americans love to listen to when they\u2019re on vacations in warm places. Give people name tags so they introduce themselves to one another and socialize while they\u2019re waiting. Crank up the music so they have to speak loudly. Loud music and loud conversation and a crowded room adds up to the sensation that this is the<\/i> hot event.<\/p>\n Cover the place in professionally-produced, high-quality logo stuff. We had brochures, pens, pads, and big FogBugz banners. Wall-to-wall kiwis.<\/p>\n With geeks, it\u2019s probably enough to put on a nice Banana Republic black jacket over your polo shirt or turtleneck. Do NOT, for the LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD, wear any clothing with writing on the outside. I know how much you love your JavaOne T-shirt, with the happy little waving tooth. Wear that to your wedding or something, not when you’re on stage. Lose the sneakers, too.<\/p>\n Set the screen to 800 x 600. Make everything as big as possible. If you\u2019re demoing an application that needs more than a half million pixels, go back home and redesign the app.<\/p>\n Lock the doors until the room is ready. Otherwise people will start wandering in an hour and a half before the demo is due to start watching you change out of your beloved t-shirt, running around taping cables down on the floor, and putting brochures on every chair. This makes you look like a gopher and removes some of the authority you\u2019re going to need to convince people to buy your software.<\/p>\n Bring someone with you to take care of mechanical details: passing out nametags, setting up microphones. The more people you have with you, the more legit you\u2019ll look.<\/p>\n The only interesting way to design a demo is to make it a story. You have a protagonist, and the protagonist has a problem, and they use the software, and they\u2026 almost<\/i> solve the problem, but not quite, and then everybody is in suspense, while you tell them some boring stuff that doesn\u2019t fit anywhere else, but they\u2019re still listening raptly because they\u2019re waiting to hear the resolution to the suspenseful story, and then (ah!) you solve the protagonists last<\/i> problem, and all is well. There is a reason people have been sitting around telling stories around campfires for the last million years or so: people like stories.<\/p>\n As you go along, be sure to accidentally bump into all the nice little \u201cfit and finish\u201d features of your product. Oh look, that column is halfway off screen. No problem. I\u2019ll just drag it over. (\u201cWha!\u201d the audience gasps, \u201cyou dragged a column in HTML?\u201d) Oh, look, this feature is supposed to be done by next Tuesday. I\u2019ll type \u201cnext tuesday\u201d in the due date box. (\u201cOMG!\u201d they squeal. You typed \u201cnext tuesday\u201d and it was replaced with \u201c11\/20\/2007\u201d). Those nice little touches you put so much hard work into are not the meat of the demo, so don\u2019t talk about them, just act nonchalant. What, doesn\u2019t every<\/i> web app let you resize and drag columns?<\/p>\n As you go through your speech, make sure you say all the important points two ways. People tend to daydream a bit. They may have missed your point the first time. They might not be native speakers\u2014maybe one of the words or expressions that you used is not in their vocabulary. Don\u2019t repeat the exact same sentence twice, which is annoying and pompous. Word it differently the second time.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not an experienced public speaker, watch a videotape of yourself. Have your colleagues give you brutal and honest feedback. You may be discover that you\u2019re doing really annoying things while you speak: fidgeting with a pen, scratching your nose (on the outside!), whatever.<\/p>\n Ever wonder what the difference is between sales and marketing?<\/p>\n The official definition is that marketing creates<\/i> demand, while sales fulfils<\/i> demand.<\/p>\n Giving demos is marketing, not sales.<\/p>\n You need both the pull of marketing and the push of sales to actually sell products. It\u2019s like trying to clean out the inside of an alligator with a rope: one guy has to pull on the rope from the back, the other guy has to feed the rope in the front. Following up means contacting people who came to the demo, finding out if they have questions, answering their objections, and doing a normal sales process. It doesn\u2019t mean being pushy or slimy. It\u2019s just recognizing that even the people who showed up and liked your product might go back to the office and have other things to work on, and weeks might pass and they might forget the warm fuzzy feeling they got from seeing your great thing, and they might never buy it unless you call them and ask for the sale.<\/p>\n I screwed up the sales part. I didn\u2019t really plan in advance for the dramatic increase in customer interest in FogBugz 6.0 that the world tour drummed up, so right now there aren\u2019t enough people at Fog Creek to follow up with every lead\u2026 we\u2019re struggling to keep our heads above water just answering incoming questions, which have roughly tripled since 6.0 shipped. We’re getting thousands of people making FogBugz trials, so while I was in Malm\u00f6, Babak and Michael put $65,000 worth of new servers on my credit card to handle the demand. This is what I always told myself would be \u201ca good problem to have,\u201d but it\u2019s a problem, nonetheless. As a bootstrapped company we didn\u2019t really have the luxury of hiring in advance of anticipated demand, but now that the demand has materialized, we gotta hire some more great people, stat. If you’re smart and get things done, please apply for a job at Fog Creek<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n\n
Picking cities<\/h2>\n
Booking the room<\/h2>\n
\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-03.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Get the nicest venue in town.<\/strong> Big, shiny, sparkly, modern, glass and marble and wood everywhere. Your prospective customers start out with no visual image to associate with your company. The demo is the one image that\u2019s going to stick in their head. It has to be nice. We weren\u2019t as careful about this as we should have been, and booked a couple of frightful old relics before we realized what a bad impression we were making. Before you try hotels, look for libraries, museums, and universities: many of went into debt building beautiful, modern lecture halls and now they\u2019re trying to rent them out to pay for all that nice blond wood paneling and the 265 built-in powered Bose speakers.<\/li>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-04.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Get a room that is exactly the right size.<\/strong> You\u2019d much rather have a packed room with a people standing in the back and the hotel staff rushing to set up a few more rows of chairs. This is far better than a half-empty room where the audience feels like maybe this isn\u2019t really the hottest tech event ever to hit Kitchener, Ontario. Most hotel rooms can be set up \u201ctheater style\u201d (just rows of chairs) or \u201cclassroom style\u201d (chairs and desks). They can fit in twice as many chairs theater style. That gives you plenty of flexibility after<\/i> you book the room to change the layout so the room feels full.<\/li>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-05.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Get a room with very high ceilings.<\/strong> You\u2019re going to be doing a demo on screen. Everyone has to be able to see it. Usually hotels have two kinds of rooms: smaller meeting rooms, with low ceilings, and ballrooms, with high ceilings. In the meeting rooms, it\u2019s impossible to put the screen high enough for everyone to see it. Don\u2019t trust the hotel on this. We were careful to ask every hotel if the screen was going to be visible throughout the room. They always told us it would. They were almost always lying. Just ask for the ceiling height of the room. They\u2019re not smart enough to lie about that.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nSetting the stage<\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-07.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Serve coffee. Coffee contains caffeine, which makes people cheerful. If you\u2019re lucky, they\u2019ll attribute their cheeriness to your software instead of the caffeine.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-08.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Dress exactly one level better than your audience. Too dressy, and you\u2019ll look like you think you\u2019re better than your customers. Not dressy enough, and the audience will get the feeling that you don\u2019t really care.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-10.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
Notice the lights shining on the screen? That\u2019ll be a problem. Find the guy who can turn them off. Sometimes there\u2019s no switch for those particular lights. Find the guy who will come with a ladder and unscrew them.<\/p>\nBlow them away<\/h2>\n
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A common, but boring, way to design a demo is to start by stating the problem, and then explaining how your magical software solves that problem. Another boring way to design a demo is with PowerPoint slides and lots of bullet points. An incredibly<\/em> boring way to design a demo is to talk about your company and how many employees you have and how many millions of kroner of revenue you make every year. Nobody cares.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-11.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
One of the stories from the FogBugz demo: Your boss asks you when you\u2019re going to ship, and you look at the EBS report and discover that you only have a 6% chance of making it on time, so you suggest ditching low priority features, and that doesn\u2019t go over very well, so you drill down to the individual developer\u2019s schedules and\u2026 (pause for long lecture on EBS algorithm) \u2026you realize that Milton needs some help making his estimates better, and Jane needs to give some of her work to Brandon, and then you can ship on time. Ta da!<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.joelonsoftware.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/16-12.jpg?w=730&ssl=1\")
As you do demos, pay close attention to what works, and what doesn\u2019t. Vary things a little bit every time\u2026 you might stumble on better ways of doing things. The first FogBugz demo in Vancouver started with two (lame) jokes. By the time I got to Copenhagen, I had stumbled on about ten jokes that made the whole audience laugh. I had better answers to questions. I even discovered better ways to do things in FogBugz. As time goes on, if you let the demo evolve, it\u2019ll get better and better. You can practice in front of a mirror or your colleagues, and indeed, you should, but that only gets you so far\u2026 there\u2019s nothing like a live audience to refine a demo. (By the way, that\u2019s why you still find Jerry Seinfeld showing up unannounced at little hole-in-the-wall comedy clubs in New York. He\u2019s testing material.)<\/p>\nFollow up<\/h2>\n