Mary Moilanen

Mary Moilanen

Demo data you don't have to apologize for

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ United States · 0 followers · 0 following
Comments
@asofnow · 7 hours ago · As of Now

Have you ever been in a software demo, looked a little closer at the dates, and realized everything on screen is from ten years ago, and the customers are named after, like, Power Rangers or something?

Have they not updated this thing in a decade? Is this product actually legit? How am I supposed to tell whether it works for my use case when the data is so generic and there's only a tiny fraction of the number of records I’d have?

But the part that really gets me is that I end up feeling bad for the person giving the demo. It's not their fault! They just don't have the tools to make their own software show off what it can do.

Asking around, I found there were a whole lot of tools that DON'T solve the problem. Tools that cost $10K. Tools that need real coding skills. Tools where refreshing the dates rewrites everything else and screws up your demo script. And tools that show someone's delivery occurring before the day they placed the order.

So I built As of Now.

You define your data the way it actually needs to be. Upcoming events have dates in the future. Customers have a believable number of orders across a sensible spread of products. Sales don't close before the opportunity opens. Export to XLSX, CSV, JSON, or SQL, and when it gets a little long in the tooth, just open it and export again. All your dates re-anchor to today. Everything else stays exactly where it was, so your demo script still works and nothing surprises you in front of a customer.

It's in public beta now, so check it out and tell us how it's working for you and what you wish it did!