A founder has eleven demo requests this week. Four are competitors, two are students, three are companies far too small to pay, one is a serious prospect and one is a person who will never reply again.
All eleven are in the calendar, and the product work that was supposed to happen this week did not.
Publish enough to deflect the easy ones
Pricing, what the product does, who it is for, what it integrates with and what it does not do. A substantial share of demo requests exist only because the website did not answer a question.
Record a walkthrough
Ten minutes showing the product doing the thing it does. Many prospects prefer it to a call, it works at any hour and it lets the ones who want a conversation arrive already informed.
Example conversations
These scripts use information a startup might publish. Your answers should come from your own pages.
Prospect: Can I see a demo? Assistant: There is a recorded walkthrough on the product page showing the main workflow, which is the fastest way to see it. If you would like a live session, could you tell me what you are trying to solve, roughly how many people would use it and what your timeline looks like? The founder runs these personally so it helps to know what to focus on.
Prospect: How much is it? Assistant: The pricing page shows the plans and what each includes, including where the limits sit. If your situation is unusual the team can discuss it. Could you tell me roughly how many users you have in mind?
Prospect: Does it work with our system? Assistant: The integrations page lists what is supported and how each connection works, along with the documentation. If what you use is not listed, I can pass the details to the team so they can tell you honestly whether it is possible.
Qualify on three things
What problem they are solving, roughly what size they are and when they need to decide. Three questions filter the calendar without being obstructive.
Say what a demo is for
Not a product tour, but a conversation about their situation. Prospects who know that arrive with questions rather than expecting a presentation.
Publish pricing
Founders avoid it fearing it deters people, and it deters exactly the people who would have consumed a call and not bought.
Be honest about stage
A prospect who needs something you do not yet do should know before the call. Founders who say so build relationships that convert later, and the ones who oversell get a customer who churns in month three and tells people why.
Protect the calendar deliberately
Blocks of time for demos, not whenever someone books. A founder whose week is fragmented by eight calls builds nothing.
Capture at any hour
Prospects look at night and at weekends, and a captured, qualified request is worth more than a calendar slot chosen blind, which is the approach in qualifying demo requests before they reach sales.
Other enquiries reach the same inbox
Investors and partners arrive through the same form, as covered in investor and partnership enquiries reaching startup websites, and the wider load is described in founders who answer every message themselves.
Getting started
Publish pricing, a recorded walkthrough and what the product does not do, then qualify demo requests at any hour, which is the shift described in from FAQ to sale, answer-driven selling with AI. SpideyChat for startups answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.