/notes/ ·
If I have to book a demo, I am not your customer
Two rules I keep coming back to. If your software scales on its own and I still have to contact a human to start using it, that step is waste. And if I have to pay for onboarding or sign twelve months up front, you are telling me you do not trust the product to hold me on its own.
I would rather hand the platform to a skeptic for free and let them try to break it. That is the best reference story there is, and it costs less than the sales call it replaces.
A few weeks ago I looked at the booking system one of our clients uses. Book a demo, and nothing else. No sandbox, no trial, no way in. The API was part of the product but the documentation was not public. So if I am a developer who wants the integration working this afternoon, I cannot, and the vendor never finds out I tried.
That gap matters more now than it did a year ago. It takes very little effort to put an MCP server in front of your product, and then your customers reach it through Claude or ChatGPT or whatever they already have open. The companies that get into that boat now are the ones that will still be here later.