What a demo may claim when the product is not finished
Can a product that does not work yet still have a demo that is worth running and not misleading?
Started · Updated
Every product on this site now has something runnable, which immediately raises the problem the requirement was hiding: two of them cannot honestly demonstrate the thing they are for. Veyra has never run a generation model. SPRIVO’s analysis is a pose model over video and cannot run on a marketing page.
The easy answers are both bad. Skipping the demo makes the product look abandoned; faking one claims a capability that does not exist. The third option is to find the part that is genuinely true and show only that.
For Veyra, that turned out to be its stencil processing — real, working, pure code, which now runs in the browser on a drawing the page renders. For SPRIVO, nothing could honestly run, so the demo computes nothing at all and says so: the visitor steps through the stages the app performs and ends on a screen captured from the real app. Both carry a label that is not allowed to say "Playable".
What we learned
Findings so far.
- 01
An unfinished product usually has one finished part. Finding it is more useful than simulating the unfinished whole.
- 02
A demo that refuses to fake anything can still be the most convincing thing on a page, because the visitor can tell the difference.
- 03
Labels only work as a set. "Playable" means nothing unless "Guided demo" is used honestly on the page next to it, which is why the catalogue is grouped by kind rather than listed flat.
- 04
Open question: whether a guided walkthrough holds attention as well as a playable one, or whether it is tolerated only because the rest of the set earns it.