D/01
Something that works
Not screens. Buttons do what they say, records change, and what you do in one part shows up in another. If a tenant reports a repair in the app, it appears in the office view while you are still holding the phone.
What you get
A working system, not a slide about one.
Small enough to build before you have committed to anything, real enough to disagree with.
D/02
Your brand, measured
Colours, typefaces and tone taken from your own site rather than approximated. Where the brand has an accessibility problem — gold text that fails contrast, say — the demo fixes it and says so, instead of copying the fault.
D/03
Your workflow, in your words
Built around how the work actually runs, using the vocabulary your team uses. Generic software demos die on the first screen because nobody recognises anything on it.
D/04
Fictional data, labelled
Every record is invented, and the demo says so on every screen. No real customer, property or transaction appears, and nothing is presented as your live data.
D/05
One link, no account
It opens on a phone, in a meeting, with no password and no install. Anyone you forward it to gets their own copy to play with, so nobody can break it for anyone else.
D/06
Honest about what is not real
Where a demo shows a connection to a system you already own, it is marked as simulated until that integration has actually been confirmed. A demo that quietly implies a live connection is a promise you will be held to later.
How it happens
From a conversation to something you can click.
- A conversation
- Half an hour on what is not working. No specification required — most people describe a problem, not a system, and that is the right starting point.
- Research
- Your public material, the systems you are moving to, the rules your industry is working under this year. The demo should know your business well enough to be worth arguing with.
- The build
- Days, not months. Enough of the product to make a decision against — the screens that carry the argument, working, rather than all of them, sketched.
- A walkthrough
- Twenty minutes, following one real piece of work end to end. You keep the link afterwards and can show it to whoever else needs convincing.
- Then, and only then, a price
- Discovery and a fixed scope come after you have seen something. Quoting before that is guessing with a number attached.
A recent one
An operations layer for a London letting agent.
Described without naming them, because whether they are looking at new software is their business to share, not ours.
A managing agent moving onto a new CRM wanted to know what could be done about the work that falls between systems: the chase nobody owns, the contractor who has gone quiet, the landlord decision that has been sitting unanswered for three days.
The demo is a full operations view over an invented portfolio of eighteen homes — outstanding work, a repair followed through eleven steps, follow-up queues whose rules can be switched off in front of you, compliance dates, team workload — plus a branded tenant and landlord app where reporting a repair lands in the office view immediately, and approving a quote moves the job along.
It also says plainly what it cannot promise: the CRM integration is drawn as a proposal and marked simulated, with the six questions that have to be put to the software vendor before anyone claims it will work.
NOTEBuilt as a sales demo, not a delivered system. Every record in it is fictional, and the client’s own link is unlisted rather than published here.
Terms
What a demo is, and is not.
- Free, and yours to keep the link to. There is no charge for it and no obligation after it.
- Not a prototype you have paid for, and not the foundation of the eventual build — the real system is engineered properly, with tests, permissions and a server behind it.
- Not a commitment on either side. If it shows the idea is wrong, that is a good outcome arrived at cheaply.
- Unlisted, not public. It is kept out of search results, and the link is given to you rather than published.
- Built with fictional data only. Nothing of yours is uploaded, connected or copied to make one.
If you would rather see the idea before the demo, the example projects describe the shapes of system we build, and how we work covers what happens after you decide to go ahead.