Idea Validation: Market demand, Product
Video Demo
Simulate a working product through a recorded video walkthrough
How: Create the illusion of a working product and record a "real life" scenario using it. Use that video as part of your landing page or marketing message. The video is your minimum viable product that can help validate market demand.
Why: A real-life walkthrough clearly demonstrates how the product can help customers, eventually leading to why they would want to pay for it.
Validating a problem nobody knows they have
What do you do when you want feedback from customers on what really matters when you’re solving a problem most people don’t know they have? In this case, you can’t get an answer asking an expert or polling a focus group.
When users have a hard time understanding your product or service when it is explained to them, creating a staged video demo of your future experience might the right choice. Especially when what your product will be doing different is to provide a seamless customer experience (although complicated under the surface), it can be near impossible to demonstrate the working software in prototype form in real life.
Showing a perfect and seamless run of the end experience in a video can be the answer that will persuade customers and investors.
Making the video
Dropbox’s famous demo was a carefully scripted screen recording. Today that kind of footage is far cheaper to produce. AI builders such as Lovable or Figma Make can generate the screens you need to show, Loom records a walkthrough in one take, and Descript lets you edit by editing the transcript. AI video tools can add narration or generate scenes of the product in use.
Because anyone can now produce a slick video, polish alone persuades less than it used to. Spend your effort on the story: the problem, the moment the product makes it go away, and a clear call to action you can measure, such as a sign-up, a pre-order or a request for a demo. Only show what you intend to build, and be careful that generated footage does not promise something you cannot deliver.
Popular tools
The tools below will help you with the Video Demo play.
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Loom
Record a quick screen and camera walkthrough of a prototype and share it with a link.
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Descript
Edit video by editing the transcript, which makes it fast to cut and re-cut a demo.
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Synthesia
Produce a narrated explainer with AI presenters and voice-over, without filming.
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Lovable
Generate the screens you need to show from a prompt, so the demo shows a believable product.
Real life Video Demo examples
Dropbox
By demonstrating Dropbox’s intended functionality through a 3-minute explainer video, sign-ups increased from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight – in absence of a real product.
Airtable
Using an animated product demo video to showcase the different use cases of their product. This approach helped them attract a broad audience and provided specific information to viewers who watched the video for longer durations
Grammerly
Grammarly is known for their prolific advertising on YouTube, using video ads extensively. Their most viewed videos, which have garnered hundreds of millions of views, effectively introduce the product and showcase its features through screen captures and real-life examples.
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Get your deck!Related plays
- 15 ways to test your minimum viable product by Christopher Bank
- How DropBox Started As A Minimal Viable Product by Eric Ries
- The Real Startup book - Video Smoke test by Tristan Kromer, et. al.