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Nice suggestion about a side project.

However, only a terrible boss thinks their reports get paid to do what they want.

Interesting. What if it's costly? Do you do a POC or any other internal sign-offs?

This is super interesting. I posted this thread - could we interview you about this for our article? Just 10 mins. I'm at harry[at]embeddable.com.

I think that's a really useful thought exercise. FYI I posted this thread - could we interview you about this for our article? Just 10 mins. I'm at harry[at]embeddable.com.

Good point, title's ambiguous. I meant external.

This sounds like a super interesting insight, but I'm not sure I've fully understood - any chance you could provide an example?

It's the requests for follow-up questions that can make building and maintaining your own version tricky.

Excited about this!

I think this looks really awesome. Love the design. I would put the comments higher up on the landing page (definitely above the list of features / installation guide etc).

Ooh. That's super nice.

[I worked on the landing page] pier25, that's really great feedback, much appreciated. Will see what we can do to answer the questions you've mentioned.

If you have any examples of pages you particularly like to hand, I'd love to take a look.

Totally agree

Interestingly, I don't miss or crave my phone at all when I don't have it on me. But I do find myself searching for excuses to check it when I do.

I've heard that, in Switzerland, you can buy Bitcoin at train station ticket machines.

It totally depends on the company.

If you know you won't be profitable for a while and require outside investment, then you need a longer runway as it can take a long time to raise money.

If things are going well, but you've built your business on a channel you have no control over, like facebook (and one change to their algorithm / one even cyclical change in costs can screw you - this happened to a 'previously' successful side project I created) then it's best to save as much as you can - at least if you want to / think you can find another channel.

If you're working on a startup and aren't planning on raising money, then sometimes a shorter runway is a good thing - i.e. you don't want to dedicate yourself to 'the wrong' project for years.

If you've found a growth machine and output currently equals 2*input, there's not much point saving money huge amounts today. Best to continue investing.

Sure there are tons of other scenarios.

Just to jump in, this is really great information (not just for posting on HN, but for writing articles / sharing lessons learned, in general) - many thanks for taking the time.

Yeh we have it hooked up to Mixpanel so we know exactly where people drop off.

As for its effectiveness, this is always a bit tricky for SaaS, not least because the consideration stage tends to be quite long and people flick between devices, which makes attribution a bit of a nightmare. We’ve done some pretty obvious stuff, like comparing our sign up rates before and after adding the demo / recording whether people who sign up have done it etc, which is useful to know - though not always accurate.

More anecdotally, we spend a lot of time speaking with users and visitors and the demo comes up surprisingly frequently (including how we made it, which is why we wrote the post!) - it’s been a pretty quick, straight forward way of showcase Trevor’s interface.

Shortly, we’ll be adding several new steps that demo features that are commonly used by our existing customers.

Any thoughts about what else we might do / how others measure success?