Joseph Lee: 11:07
I mean, when you’re first starting off, I think, you have to be a megaphone, right? You can’t be afraid of putting yourself out there. So for me, it was, you know, how do I leverage my network? How do I leverage people I know within my founder network to at least give this a shot or refer people that it can be a good fit for. And, how do I, again, going back to like PLG, how do I add value before asking for anything in return? Right?
So for me, it was, how do I go on forums? How do I go on Reddit threads? How do I go to different discussions being had where people are actively talking about a problem or, you know, posting about pitfalls with the way they record videos or the way they create demos and the pain points that they’re having and actually, going out and creating demos for them or offering to create demos that they could use in production. So, a tacit example of that is on Reddit. I would actually create these posts where I would say, hey, drop in your product URL or product name. I’ll go ahead and sign up for your tool. I’ll learn the ropes and figure out what it does. And I’m going to, I’m going to create a ten click Supademo for you that you can start using. Or if you want to edit it, you can just sign up quickly on our free plan, click duplicate and just make the changes you need to make and start using it.
So I think by putting our product out there without actually asking for them to sign up or asking them to pay and doing the work for them, I think we were able to build a layer of trust. And implicitly other people in the thread would see that as we were posting the demos, in line, and commenting on their company name, the demo links, they were like, whoa, this is really cool. I get it. I can envision my own use cases. So that, doing things like that on LinkedIn, obviously building in public on places like indie hackers or Producthunt, that’s something we did from day one.
And even, yeah, like responding to product updates is another thing we did where I would like profile and pick out my dream customers, say a drop form, sign up for their email updates. And as they release new products or features, I would respond to the product update email and say, this is a really cool update. I don’t think the screenshot cuts it. I don’t think the text cuts it. I don’t think people understand exactly why this is valuable or how it fits into their workflow. Here is a Supademo of the feature I created for you. Feel free to use it. And you know, at a minimum, even if they didn’t become customers, it would get them impressed enough to at least have a conversation.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:55
There’s a couple of really key things I want to highlight there, Joseph, which is, I think, instructive across many different, many different aspects of the business. One, you create value in advance for people, right? I mean, who’s going to be like, yeah, no, don’t spend extra time and create a full demo of my product. And that can be done for any business, right? How do you create value in advance? By giving them some aspect of the service that’s valuable to them and they can experience it. Which we’ll talk about.
I forgot the term you used, in one of the interviews I was watching, but it was basically you put people in the highest plan to start and then, we’ll talk about that in a second. But so one, value in advance and two, a no brainer offer, right? A no brainer offer is like, let me build it for you. You don’t have to pay anything. And here it is. You know what I mean? So that gets me to the pricing aspect. But that leads into what I was going to say, which is you’ve talked about you’ll tell me what the term was, where you put someone on the highest level of the product for free.
Joseph Lee: 15:05
Reverse. It’s called the reverse trial.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:06
Thank you. Reverse trial. Yes. Talk about that for a second. And why and how you decided, okay, we need to do the reverse trial.
Joseph Lee: 15:14
Yeah. I think for us, it’s just being confident in our product craftsmanship. We want to show the best features and the best of our product, regardless of what type of customer they are. Because I think first impressions really matter, right? People are really, really busy. Attention is really hard, especially now in our AI-first era. It’s really hard to get and it’s harder to retain. So what that means in principle for us is you want to put your best foot first, right? You want to give people the full profile of your capabilities and what you can do. And then from there on, let people self-select into the tiers, the plans, the seeds, the features, functionality that they are interested in. Right.
There’s no harm in giving people more. And, then not using everything. Maybe they only use 30%, 40% of it, but there’s no harm in showing people more as long as you do it in a progressive disclosure way where you’re not inundating and, you know, overloading them with two information, right? But that’s more of an onboarding practice. And then, you know, if you, if you do that and let people experience value and find the things that matter to them that solve their problems, they’re obviously going to be far more likely to convert.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:37
Well, it’s interesting because we’re looking at the page here and we’ll talk about how you came up with the pricing. I asked Jotform the same thing. Like, how do you decide what features to include in the free version? Because free costs you money as a company, you know? But what’s interesting about what you said is it gets people experiencing features in the beginning. And then when it goes away, there’s like a loss, there’s a pain. They’re like, oh, I experienced, I’m looking at your page here. There’s a starter, scale, growth, enterprise and the scale of someone’s like using the Supademo AI, and then they get pushed back on the free, like, oh no, I need that AI par. Right.
And so I’m sure there’s reasons why you have certain things on the scale. I mean, they do cost you actual dollars and cents, but when people experience it like, oh, I don’t want to go back to the old version, you know, which is smart. So talk about how you came up with what’s included in the starter. I’m sure this went through iterations over the years. and how you came up with kind of the starter version and on from there.
Joseph Lee: 17:42
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s still an iteration. I think pricing is more of an art than a science, right? And especially now, I think, companies need to be more flexible and more iterative when it comes to like changing pricing. I think the frequency of pricing changes is happening at a faster rate in the industry than before. For us, when we think about the starter tier, we actually make it pretty feature packed. And the idea here is we don’t want our free plan to be looked at as a cost center for us. Yes, there is infrastructure cost. Yes, there’s hosting costs.
But when you think about the nature of our business and demos, it is the defining channel that has helped us grow because people find out about Supademo and learn about use cases, and get inspired by seeing other demos out into the wild. Whether someone is sharing a link with them that they get to try out with, whether they see it on a website hero page where they can learn about a product without reading, or they get to use it in onboarding. So I think it’s been our biggest viral flywheel and the thing that has really helped us grow. So we see this as almost like a marketing asset rather than a call center. So that’s why we allow people to create a decent chunk of content and also get access to a bunch of different tools, without having to pay, because we do want to service the type of indie hackers and early stage folks that can graduate into becoming, you know, loyal customers down the line.
And obviously from there, we have different features and functionality that we think are more like power user oriented or individual prosumer oriented versus like team oriented, you know, things like comments or, having more use case specific functionality, having, you know, pre bundled number of seats, or having just like, you know, tooling that is a little bit more pertinent to like revenue functions that are a little bit more specific to sophisticated or more, I guess later stage companies, I would say.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 20:01
When we look at this Joseph here of starting on scale, I’m curious, you know, a lot of people will buy for like 1 or 2 features, right? I mean, there’s, you have a lot of, there’s like 20 plus premium features here. So I’m sure people geek out on maybe 1 or 2. What would you say is the most popular 1 or 2 in the scale version? That’s like, you know what, I need to upgrade because I need this. I mean, I’m again, I’m sure it’s different for different companies, but just anecdotally, what are 1 or 2 that are kind of popular? People have said, hey, I need to get the scale version because of these, this feature or that.
Joseph Lee: 20:41
Yeah, I would say the ones that were listed up at the top, Supademo AI and Supademo MCP are the two big ones. So AI being our full suite of kind of AI assisted features. So being able to clone your own voice and overlay it on top of your product so that you never have to record your voice, but you have demos that sound exactly like you. You can obviously use our AI actors as well. You can translate a single demo into 50 plus languages, so you can build once and serve customers globally without having to rebuild the thing. You can obviously use AI to audit your demos. You can use AI to do all sorts of things like personalization and customization.
And the MCP is powerful in the sense that anything you can do on Supademo, you can actually do through natural language prompts. So you just connect through our MCP to Claud, ChatGPT, Cursor what have you. And you literally just type, you’re like, hey, take this demo and make all of my hotspots red. And then after that, you know, update my text hotspot text to be value oriented based on these PDFs and in our website. And then finally generate a voice over that, you know, sounds like me and is a variation of the hotspot text.
You can just type that and it will actually go ahead and make all those changes without you actually having to go line by line and make those adjustments yourself. So it’s really our demo platform is becoming more headless and programmable and I guess scalable as you need to make changes.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:16
We were talking before we hit record that this was born as a SaaS, but then kind of moved to AI powered and then agentic capabilities. Can you just talk about what that means exactly? It was born as a typical Saas and then maybe talk about moving to AI powered, what that looked like, and then we can go to agentic.
Joseph Lee: 22:38
Yeah, I think it’s a prime example of like a company needing to iterate and kind of, move quickly to align with the times. Right? When we first launched the company in 2023, I think that was like the very early genesis of ChatGPT. And AI was pretty bad at the time. So our value prop was all about how do we create a platform where people can create clickable interactive product demos, that drive learning by doing right, that you can share as a link or embed anywhere online. So it had no AI, right? But it was a faster way to do things and kind of the SaaS era.
From there obviously, as AI tooling got more sophisticated, we started adding in features that amplified the value of what we were already delivering. So AI could now help us make the demos faster. It could help us overlay voiceovers, it could help us translate them. It could help people audit to help them figure out whether this demo is good or bad. So it was overlaying functionality that helped them refine, optimize, and make their demos more effective.
And then now in the agentic side, on the internal side, it’s all about, you know, how do we help people create the demos faster? How do we let people maintain the demos automatically? As you know, their product is changing and their workflows are changing, so they never have to redo anything. How do we let them personalize it just with natural language prompts and analyze what’s working, what’s not working? And then on the AI demo side, how do we actually build agents that do a lot of that work for you of demoing your product, running qualification, running discovery so that you’re getting served leads that are coming onto our site that already understand what you do and whether they’re a fit or not. So that when you do have that sales conversation, you’re talking to people that are qualified, and not going to waste your time.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:40
Talk about the evolution of hiring for a second because you grew pretty quickly. I mean, within a year, I think you were over $1 million, which is very quick. and then obviously growth from there. What does the hire, like what types of individuals were you hiring for and now that you’re like, okay, we’re shifting to a genetic and AI powered,. What did those positions look like for you as a company?
Joseph Lee: 25:09
Yeah, I mean, we’ve made our fair share of mistakes. so, I wouldn’t say it’s been smooth sailing across the board. I think the biggest thing that I personally optimize for are people that are like player coaches. So people that want to help others win and can help create that blueprint and the strategy, but can actually get their hands dirty and like do the work themselves. Because the scope of work and the type of work that happens at our company just changes by the quarter or even by the month, right?
I think the market is evolving and changing. And I think playbooks and blueprints are being uprooted, all of the time. So you need people that are willing to get their hands dirty and are willing to kind of drink from a fire hose to figure out like what’s going to work in the next three months and not just base it based on their, I guess, experience or past precedent. Hard people to find. But I think, if you can, if you can find them, they’re going to be the recipe for you to continue to grow.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:18
And then now what positions, type of positions are you hiring for?
Joseph Lee: 26:23
We’re not actively hiring two to many roles. We’re like extremely capital efficient. We’re very profitable. We have a small, nimble team. And I think we can do more with less nowadays. So yeah, obviously if there’s an exceptional person that comes along who, is a great engineer, who’s a builder and in that regard, or maybe we have an operator that can, you know, work across the stack in sales or growth or revenue or, product, then yeah, we’re gonna hire them off, right away. But I think, if we’re not actively going out trying to hire people because I don’t think it’s necessarily headcount that helps you scale anymore.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:04
You know, which kind of, in the beginning, I would say you’re bootstrapped-ish, right? And talk about the decision, but you did take on capital, but you didn’t spend it. Talk about the decision early on and what you were thinking.
Joseph Lee: 27:19
Well, I was broke. I was broke when I started the company, so I had to feed myself. That was one factor. But I think, from the get go, we were pretty frugal. And I think it’s important to build a company that way because I think if you end up raising too much money, you can get complacent, you can get comfortable and you lose a little bit of that hunger that got you to your success. And I think in some regards, like me coming from an immigrant family without a lot, has helped me be hungry and be super frugal and super resourceful and gritty. And I think that’s carried over to, you know, the type of company that we’re building today.
I think the biggest mistakes that founders probably make when it comes to fundraising is, they treat it as a natural milestone and stepping stone that they should get to, and they don’t deliberately think about maybe some of the trade offs or the consequences that can accrue when you raise money. Right. so I almost like treat it like the example I use is a lot of founders naively, think about raising like they think about law school after college. It’s like the natural next thing to do, you go to elementary school, you go to middle school, you go to high school, you go to college and you don’t really know what to do so you go to law school, right? Not to paint every lawyer in that picture, but, in the same way people just like to raise money because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. That is what is celebrated in the media.
So you gotta raise a pre-seed round. And then after that, you have to raise a seed round and then a series A and then a, series B, and then you end up with this inflated preference stack. And, you no longer can build maybe the type of company you wanted to build all along, but you need to go for a home run and not a base hit. And anything but a $100 million exit is going to be an abject failure. And in our current state of affairs, it’s getting harder and harder to build a breakout company with the level of change and a level of competition that’s accrued.
So for me, it’s all about as a founder, how do we build a type of company where we have optionality when it comes to building different types of companies? Maybe we go for the home run, maybe we go for a $30 million exit, maybe we continue running this thing. At least we’ve put ourselves in a position where we do have the chance to choose. and we’re not pigeonholed into going down a very specific path.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:01
You mentioned kind of the traditional route or what people do next. I feel like, you know, when I was doing some research, I was reading and this could be accurate. It could not be. But you dropped out your last year of college. Was that a hard decision? And I’m just curious if it was hard to go to your family who, like, maybe is traditional, maybe not, I don’t know, to say, hey, by the way, like I’ve almost done here and now I’m dropping out.
Joseph Lee: 30:34
It was not a hard decision. And I would say it was because I was naive. I didn’t think about the consequences. I didn’t really think beyond the fact that, hey, I have a great opportunity in front of me. And the worst case is that I fail and I’ve learned a whole ton and I can go back to school. And that’s really how I thought about it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:55
Was this the focus on Freshline at the time?
Joseph Lee: 30:58
Yes. It was called Coastline Market at the time, but we pivoted into Freshline. But, yeah, it was like a no brainer decision for me. My parents and my family have always been very supportive of me just doing what I wanted to do and what I was passionate about. So they didn’t really think twice about letting me live my life. And that’s like the beauty of being young, right? And starting companies when you’re young and that being an advantage is you don’t have a mortgage, you don’t have a family of your own. and you’re not thinking about all the what ifs and the consequences. You just, you’re just doing right. And you kind of need a little bit of that, like blind optimism when you’re starting a company. Obviously, you can’t be too naive and jump into just like a bad opportunity space or a bad market. So you need a little bit of like pragmatism and optimism, but, yeah, at the time I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:59
Was there like an inciting incident? Meaning like, oh, we got a customer or there was something that caused you to be like, you know what, I’m just going to go all in because like, you know, you could have been like, oh, I’m going to take part time classes or something and finish. But there. Was there something that, no, I’m just going to go all in on this.
Joseph Lee: 32:15
Yeah. We got into a program called the Next 36 back in Canada. Great program. Basically it takes 36 young entrepreneurs from Canada, gives them like mentorship and a little bit of funding to like get them going. And the idea is, hey, let’s stop this like precedence of like Canadians being happy finishing fourth place and like, make sure they have higher ambitions, by surrounding them with people that are not that different from them that have built great companies, billion dollar companies, $100 million companies, investors, operators, folks that have like walked the walk so that you realize, hey, like I’m not too different from them. I could do what they’re, what they’re doing. Right? And getting them started early on that journey.
So we got into that program. I think that was kind of the catalyst and I was at like the seafood expo in Boston. And we were walking the show floor. We skipped class, and we like printed out a bunch of brochures and were handing them out to folks walking the expo. The biggest seafood expo at the time in our company was like an online marketplace for seafood connecting fishermen, seafood companies to restaurants. So that’s the context.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:30
True farm to table like.
Joseph Lee: 33:32
Exactly. Yeah, boat to plate is what we played there. Yeah. And, you know, we got no customers at the show. But when I was in line at the airport security, I was like talking to my co-founder on the phone about coastline market and like what we were doing takeaways from the expo, when the guy tapped me on the shoulder from behind me and he was like, whoa, like, I heard you talking about your like marketplace. That’s exactly what I’m looking for. I own like seafood companies and a series of scallop farms in northern New Brunswick. Like, how do I sign up? And so that’s how I got our first customer and then I’d say that was the catalyst to saying, okay, let’s just go for this thing.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:14
That’s so random that going to the full seafood show, like immediately wasn’t successful, but like someone behind you at the airport.
Joseph Lee: 34:23
He had come from the seafood expo.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:25
Oh, he was okay.
Joseph Lee: 34:26
So yeah. Yeah, but he is, but I didn’t meet him at the show. I met him at the airport security line.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:31
Yeah. No. It’s validation. Someone’s like, let’s do this. And it’s going to pay, you know.
Joseph Lee: 34:35
Yeah. I think he was trying to be nice. He saw that we were to like, you know, 19, 20 year old kids. And he was like, you know, let’s help these guys out.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:44
Yeah, in part, but like, he’s got real businesses to run. So I’m sure it served a need. Yeah. I’m curious, you know, Joseph, you’ve learned a lot from Freshline to Supademo. I’m curious what your tech stack looks like? What software and tools do you like to use internally to run the company?,
Joseph Lee: 35:02
Well, first of all, we’re extremely AI-pilled or AI native. So, everyone on our team uses both a Claude subscription as well as an OpenAI subscription. We rotate the recurse as well. We also have multiple agents that are embedded into Slack or into our current workflows that help like do a lot of jobs and again, deliver impact beyond like our employee headcount, tech stack on the, on the company wise or like the code side. I mean, that changes all the time, but right now we’re like, we use tailwind, we use react, Next.js. It’s our core infrastructure. AWS for hosting, GTM sales related stuff. We rotate through different things all the time.
But we also have dog food or products. Like we force people to use Supademo across the board, you know, use Supademo whenever you need to take screenshots, use Supademo whenever you need to create product demos or walkthroughs or illustrations. If you need to create loom-like videos with talking heads use Supademo, we have all that functionality all in one. So we dogfood our product extensively.
.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:08
So what are some surprising use cases? I’m going to pull up a couple just so we can walk through how people are actually using it. One specifically is Light Speed. But are there any surprising use cases like I’m sure when Slack came out with Slack, they were like, people are going to embed agentic, you know, agents inside to use it. How are people using Supademo in a surprising way?
Joseph Lee: 36:30
I think one interesting way people have used it, and we’ve actually tailored some of our roadmap to better fit some of those requests is a lot of people are using it for internal products. So like internal in-app experiences. So, I think what we learned is, a lot of people wanted to use it to show people getting onboarding.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:57
Training type of stuff?
Joseph Lee: 36:58
Kind of yeah, inside of the product. So whenever, like a new user signed up, they wanted them to be able to see like a ten click showcase of like the core product functionality. And for each product, they wanted to actually use like a Supademo embedded or overlaid on top of their product, showing them why that specific thing mattered. And I think what we saw is from talking to a lot of these people, they hated the traditional product tours, you know, you have like the WalkMe’s, the Pendo’s, the traditional tours. They just found it really clunky to set those up and create. And they were constantly breaking apart and flaky because their code would change or their ID would change or it would pop up when the user didn’t want it. Right.
So they started using Supademos that were like self triggered by the user, overlaid on top of the app. And to show you what that means, if you actually go back to our home page and like to that main page, in the last tab of that demo hub, you can click any of these and you can actually see what we created. It should maybe have an ad blocker on. Oh, there we go. Yeah. So these can be triggered inside.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:15
Because I use all these apps.
Joseph Lee: 38:18
You can trigger these inside of your app. And like a customer could click it and basically overlaid on top of their app, they could click through specific workflows, and learn about why your product matters. So a lot of people are using this to replace their product tours. And obviously we built some modules and widgets and things to help us make it easier for them to create these at scale.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 38:44
Yeah. Let’s talk about Lightspeed. How does Lightspeed use Supademo?
Joseph Lee: 38:51
Well, they use it across the organization. So I think that’s an interesting use case. Even with us for a couple of years, they started using it for instructional design. So for training, for onboarding, that’s kind of where it started. And now it’s, you know, grown to be used across many different use cases.
You can watch the video there up at the top to hear about what they were doing before and what they’re doing now, but they use it in marketing, they use it in sales enablement, they use it in sales as a whole and obviously instructional design is like a big core part of what they do and they save a whole ton of time doing it as well.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:29
Yeah. People can check out supademo.com/customers and kind of get a feel for the type of company using Supademo. And just, again, a lot of this stuff is really just interesting to see how people are delivering a better experience either for staff or for customers. Right. And I think that in itself, just to learn from is super valuable, right? What are people doing for more friction, you know, frictionless experience for people. You know.
First of all, just have one last question. Before I ask, I want to just encourage people. They could check out Supademo.com to learn more. The last question is just some of your favorite resources. It could be groups you’re a part of or have been a part of or heard are good. It could be mentors either distant. You’re like, oh, these are books or podcasts are my favorite. Or it could be actual personal mentors that you have helped you. So any of your favorite resources from groups to, you know, just to mentors to actual mentors.
Joseph Lee: 40:40
Yeah. When it comes to like mentorship, I think, I personally prefer like learning from operators, and people that have done kind of what I’m doing and are like a 1 or 2 steps away. I think those are the moments where you’re going to get to learn the most, and it’s the most tactical and implementable. Sometimes I think we overly fixate on like mentors that actually haven’t built anything material or haven’t been in your shoes. And they’re great from a motivational standpoint. But like, realistically, what am I going to learn from Satya Nadella that I can implement into my company? Right? Not as much. Great guy, but if we’re just like too many steps removed.
So, when it comes to those people, I just like talk to and connect with founders in my network that kind of fit my persona and fit the type of company I’m building. And I’m in a lot of like group chats with them. I’m in a group chat with Melissa. Newsletter-wise, I think, folks like Kyle Poyar do a really good job. I think he has the Growth Unhinged newsletter and that’s all about like tactical things that people are doing now and today that are like working and not working.
But I think, you as a founder, it’s your job to be like, absorbing content from as many different places as possible. Like X, on LinkedIn, Reddit, and other companies. And then you got to then distill that. You got to save that into what actually matters for your company and, and instruct your employees on what to do. But if you don’t have a good foundation of like information and sources you’re drawing from, you’re going to have outdated, stale ideas. I don’t know if that answered your question.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:30
Yeah. Are there any favorite podcasts or books that you’ve kind of, that have helped you in the journey?
Joseph Lee: 42:38
Oh, man. Honestly, just like X and LinkedIn, I think it’s just like looking at.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 42:43
What are you searching for?
Joseph Lee: 42:45
Just, I follow people, I follow people. I don’t have any names that I can think of right now. But just as I find people that have interesting takes. I just follow them or I like to connect with them and then they just, you know, get populated with my timeline. And I find helpful snippets, whenever I do find helpful snippets, I’d like to add them to a list to kind of draw back on.
But newsletters. Yeah. Like Kyle is one, I think the First Round also has an interesting one. The First Round is a good one, but I wouldn’t say I have like a tried and true one that I keep going back to. I just like to look at a bunch of different things and I see down to what actually matters.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:22
Yeah. Well, Joseph, first of all, thank you. Everyone check out Supademo.com to learn more and we’ll see everyone next time. And Joseph, thanks so much.
Joseph Lee: 43:32
Beautiful. Thanks for having me.
