The Playbook

Make It Demo-able — When the Product Is the Ad

Some products don't need a marketing budget. They need a fifteen-second demonstration that makes people go "wait, what is that."

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Here's a question I want you to sit with about your product: can a stranger understand it in one glance? Because if they can, you might not need to describe your product at all. You just need to show it. The demo is the ad.

Squatty Potty is the ur-example and I'll never get tired of it. It's a toilet footstool. Try writing a paragraph of ad copy about that — it's awkward, it's a little embarrassing, people don't want to talk about it. So they didn't write the paragraph. They made "This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop," a video of a rainbow-defecating unicorn explaining the mechanism, spent around $500K on it, and got roughly 30 million views in a week — 140M+ total — with sales reportedly around 600% above projection. The product demonstrated was the entire pitch. Showing beat explaining, and it wasn't close.

This is a real principle, not a gimmick: design the product so it fits the distribution model you want, and if the product is visually obvious and demo-able, the demonstration carries the marketing a written pitch never could.

Look at how many first-customer wins were just... showing the thing to people. Apple demoed the Apple I board at the Homebrew Computer Club and walked out with a 50-unit order from the Byte Shop. Not a brochure. A live board on a table in front of the exact people who'd want it. Dropbox is maybe the purest software version — Drew Houston posted a simple explainer demo video to Hacker News, and the tech-savvy crowd who watched it drove the waitlist from around 5,000 toward 15,000. He didn't have a product they could touch yet. He had a video showing what it would do, and that was enough because the "aha" was visible.

QVC is basically a machine built on this principle, and Lori Greiner is its master. The pattern repeats with an almost eerie consistency: ReadeREST — a magnetic clip-on eyeglass holder — sold out in about five minutes. Signal Vault, an RFID-blocking card, sold roughly 4,800 units in eight minutes. Simply Fit Board sold out about three trailers. Why do these specific products crush on home shopping? Because they're demo-able, visually obvious, and impulse-priced. The host holds it up, twists it, clips it on, and the viewer instantly understands the benefit. There's nothing to read. The demonstration is the sale.

Now flip it around, because packaging can create demo-ability where it didn't exist. Wicked Good Cupcakes couldn't ship a normal cupcake — it'd arrive as a sad pile of crumbs. So they made the "cupcake in a jar." That single design choice made the product shippable, which unlocked the entire mail-order and e-commerce business; it grew toward a reported ~$40M cumulative. Copa Di Vino's whole business was the single-serve sealed wine cup — the packaging was the product and the demo. The founders didn't bolt marketing onto a thing. They designed the thing so it sold itself in the channel they wanted.

There's a subtler version of this in software, too. Carrd, the one-page site builder, put "Made with Carrd" on every free user's site. Every site a customer built was a live demo of Carrd, seen by that site's visitors. Hotmail did the identical move — "Get Your Free Email at Hotmail" at the bottom of every message — and hit 100,000 users in about three months. Gumroad had it baked in: every seller using Gumroad is, by using it, demonstrating it to their own buyers. The product's normal use is the advertisement. That's demo-ability turned into a growth loop.

So what do you actually do with this? A few questions I'd force myself to answer:

Can you show your product's core benefit in under fifteen seconds with no words? If yes, lean all the way into video and live demonstration and stop writing clever copy. If no, ask whether there's a packaging or framing change that would make it visible — the cupcake-in-a-jar move.

Does using your product create a visible artifact other people see? If not, can you add one — a "made with," a shareable output, a footer? That's how a demo becomes distribution.

Where do demo-able products get seen? QVC, TikTok, Reels, Hacker News for the technical stuff, a physical booth for the tactile stuff. Nightcap — a scrunchie that unfurls into a drink cover — went to roughly 175M views on TikTok because the reveal is inherently watchable, and did about $2.1M in sales the year after its airing.

The founders who win this way aren't better marketers. They just built or packaged something you get the instant you see it, and then they put it where people could see it. If your product needs a paragraph to explain, that's not necessarily a marketing problem. Sometimes it's a design note. Make it show-able first. The ad writes itself after that.

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