“I am a non-technical founder who sounds, on camera, like a non-technical founder. DemoRiff made my product look like it came out of a company with a marketing department. We closed our seed on that demo.”
The demo was doing the selling whether they liked it or not
Foldr's first homepage had a fifteen-minute unlisted video in which Sofia Benali walks through the product, apologises twice for the test data, and says “um” approximately once every nine seconds. It was, by her own description, “the single worst representation of eighteen months of work.”
It was also the main thing investors and early customers watched before deciding whether to take a call.
“At seed stage you are asking people to believe a story about a company that does not exist yet,” Benali says. “Everything they can see is evidence. If the demo looks like it was made in a hurry, that is evidence.”
An afternoon, and a brand defined in ten minutes
Benali re-recorded the walkthrough in one take, talking exactly the way she does on customer calls. The cut came back at four minutes, with the hesitations removed and the pacing fixed. She replaced her own audio with a studio voice for the first version, then later cloned her own so the narration stayed hers.
The brand kit took ten minutes: two colours, a logo, a typeface. “I had been putting off the branding conversation for a year because it felt like a thing you needed a designer for. It turns out that for video you need four decisions, and making them badly is still better than making them eleven different ways.”
The interactive tour went on the site alongside the video, which Benali credits with a specific behaviour: “Investors look at 11pm. They are not going to book a call to understand what you do. They will click through a tour.”
“At seed stage, everything they can see is evidence. If the demo looks like it was made in a hurry, that is evidence.”
Sofia Benali · Co-founder & CEO, Foldr
Documentation they never had time to write
The unexpected benefit was the written guides. Every recording also produced a help article, which meant Foldr had documentation from the day they had their first customer — something Benali says saved them from “the support hole every seed company falls into around customer eight.”