I spent $100K of my own money to demo a product that didn't exist

Last May I spent 100k of my own money as a gold sponsor at SaaStr to pitch vaporware.

The agentic support platform we were building wasn't ready. Honestly still isn't finished. Demoed it anyway.

Here's the story.

Why I did it

100k is a lot to spend on something that doesn't exist yet, and I didn't go there to sell.

I went to find out whether anyone actually wants this before we burn another 6 months building it. We were a year into a rebuild funded entirely by a flat business, working off 50 customer calls and my own conviction, and conviction is a hell of a drug when you're the one paying for it.

The other reason was to let Zendesk, Salesforce, Pylon and Plain know we exist. They still probably don't know or give a shit that we exist, but it was fun anyways lol.

What we did there

We ran a "No SaaS" campaign, which is a straight lift of Benioff's "No Software" from 1999, 26 years later, pointed at per seat pricing instead of on-prem.

Panda mascots. Sign holders at Gate 15 so you saw it before you got in the building. Hawaiian shirts on the whole team. A videographer following it around.

It was loud and slightly ridiculous and it worked. At a conference where every booth is a dark blue backdrop with the word "agentic" on it, being the weird one is a distribution strategy.

The number

125 ICP-fit demos over 3 days.

Not badge scans. Not 4,000 people who walked past the booth. 125 conversations with b2b saas companies in the range we sell to, where someone sat down and watched the product.

Of those, we're now closing $50k mrr or so, with cohorts locked for fall and winter. I think we've validated it but you never know.

The thing I didn't expect

The 100k bought us a deadline.

When you've told 125 companies what you're building and a good chunk of them want in asap, you can't quietly let it slip. There's no version of the next 6 months where the date moves, because 125 people have it in their calendar and several of them will email you about it.

Best forcing function we've ever had. I'd have said before this that internal deadlines work if the team is good, and I now think that's mostly untrue for anything more than a quarter out. Deadlines work when someone outside the building is waiting.

Would I do it again

Doing it again in Sept at Customer Success Summit. 60k as the headliner. Same play except this time the product is real, which is a strange thing to be nervous about after the version where it wasn't.

What I'd tell someone considering it: demoing something unfinished is only defensible if you're honest in the room about what's built and what isn't. We were. Every demo included a version of "this part works, this part is 8 weeks out." Nobody was annoyed. A few people were relieved, because they've sat through enough polished demos of things that also don't work and don't say so.

The line is between showing people where you're going and letting them believe you're already there. One is a roadmap conversation. The other is how you get a refund request and a reputation.

What it didn't fix

125 demos is a spike, not a channel. It's the single best 3 days we've had and it isn't repeatable weekly, which means the whole thing sits on top of a conference calendar and a LinkedIn motion and not much else yet.

100% confident the product competes with the goliaths. Distribution is what keeps me up at night.

Gonna be a fun few years though. Lets see.