Evening, CEO!
The SaaS demo.
It’s that terrifying moment where you have to prove your magic cloud software isn’t just a bunch of broken buttons.
You could record a 20-minute video, which exactly zero people will ever finish.
(My own attention span, for instance, is that of a gnat that just drank an espresso.)
Or, you can do the live, 1-on-1 demo.
This is where you talk until your mouth is bone-dry and pray for that magic “Aha! moment.”
It works! The customer gets it.
The problem? It doesn’t scale. You only have one mouth.
1. The CEO Who Hauled Fish
Today, let’s talk about Joseph Lee.
Before he solved this, he spent 8 years... delivering fish.
In a pickup truck.
This is not a metaphor. He was the CEO of a B2B seafood marketplace, and he was literally the guy driving a beat-up Ford F-150 to restaurants.
This is what’s called a “heavy” business. It’s the definition of trading time for money.
Anyway, Joseph grew this fish business to $3 million.
Then 2020 arrived and, like a cartoon anvil, squashed the entire restaurant industry.
95% of his revenue? Gone. Vanished. Poof.
In a desperate scramble, he tried to pivot the company into a SaaS platform for fish distributors.
And he immediately hit that demo wall.
His customers were... well, fish distributors. Not tech wizards.
Long videos didn’t work. The only thing that worked was getting them on a live call, sharing his screen, and walking them through it, click by painful click.
Only then would they have the “Aha! moment.”
But again: it doesn’t scale.
So Joseph had a thought. A really, really smart thought.
“What if I can productize this 1-on-1 ‘Aha moment’?”
2. Finding the “Scale” Button
In 2022, he left and built Supademo.
Here’s the magic trick: It is not a video.
You just turn on its plugin, click through your own product like you normally would...
...and Supademo instantly captures every step, auto-annotates it, and spits out a fully interactive guide.
It feels like a live demo, but it’s just a link.
He turned a service (his time) into a product (a link).
This, my friends, is LEVERAGE.
3. How to Actually Use the Lever
So how do you grow this new, leveraged thing?
Joseph used the product itself as the growth engine. This is the part that makes my brain hurt with joy.
Tactic 1: The Reddit Non-Pitch
Joseph went on Reddit. But he didn’t spam, “Hey, check out my new tool!”
He posted: “Hey, post your SaaS website. I will personally make a free interactive demo for you.”
This is galaxy-brain-level marketing.
He wasn’t pitching. He was delivering.
Hundreds of founders lined up. When they received their custom demo link, the “Aha! moment” happened to them.
The marketing was the product.
Tactic 2: The SEO Trojan Horse
Next, SEO.
He didn’t write “Best Demo Tools of 2024.” That’s what I would have done.
Instead, he found what people were really asking. Things like, “How do I export a PDF from Figma?”
Then he wrote a blog post with that exact title.
And the content of the post?
You guessed it. An embedded Supademo showing you exactly how to do it.
People came for the answer, got the value instantly, and saw the product in action all at once.
My brain just melted a little.
Tactic 3: The Unbundling
This was his masterpiece.
He “unbundled” his product.
He took one tiny feature—the screenshot editor—and just... gave it away. 100% free. No signup required.
This “Free Online Screenshot Editor” drove insane amounts of traffic.
At the bottom of the tool, a tiny link: “P.S. Like this? You might like Supademo for creating full product demos.”
The conversion rate from this free tool to a full signup?
11-12%.
The Final Word
Joseph’s story is about finding a lever.
He went from a 1-to-1 business (driving a truck) to a 1-to-N business (a software link).
He stopped trading his time for growth and started using his product for growth.
The product became its own salesperson, its own marketer, and its own “Aha! moment.”
It’s a reminder that the most powerful lever you have... is the product itself.
It’s the difference between handing someone a fish and building a machine that teleports fish directly into their kitchen.
Links:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jhylee
https://supademo.com/
https://saasclub.io/podcast/supademo-joseph-lee-443
https://www.founderoo.co/posts/joseph-lee
https://www.founderoo.co/posts/joseph-lee-and-supademos-story-of-6-figures-in-under-a-year
https://www.starterstory.com/stories/supademo
