Seeing is believing. PowerPoint is a Software Liar.

Go to any large technology event and the bigger the brand, the more likely they use slides on their booth. If you don't see demos on an event or in the first meeting when a software company presents their product then this is a major red flag. You might be handling with a feature monster. A feature monster is a software platform that supports all types of standards, connectors and workflows, even the most obscure legacy ones. Don't be fooled, they might be leaders in their software category. However a feature monster is a software that was built to win RFPs, not to be easy, efficient, effective and secure. Software has a perverse effect. The more lines of code it has, the harder everything becomes. The harder to learn, use, integrate, secure, scale-out, upgrade, and audit. In an analogue world you would change software platforms every 10 to 20 years so you wanted a future proof solution which came with lots of configurable rules, workflows, plug-ins, extensions, connectors, policies and more. You would roll it out globally and integrate all departments so flexibility was a big plus. In an analogue world economies of scale are everything. If you have an efficient 500 people inside sales team then you can outsell with a 100 times a competitor with a 5 people inside sales team.

We live in a digital world now, where the economical rules have changed. You can easily see this in the amount of large corporations which a decade ago where among the top 500 companies in the world and now have gone bankrupt, where bought or are just a mere reflection of what they were. Digital disruptors are able to make viral sales without a large sales force or worse make your customers into the product and give a competing product away for free. This means that the digital rules are now all about speed. Speed at which you can go through thousands of ideas and kill most. Speed at which you make a minimum valuable product and get market fit. Speed at which you scale up from the first $1 to the first $1B. Speed is king. Software is defining everything and is eating the world.

In a digital world, complexity is the enemy of speed. Software that is hard to install, integrate, roll-out, learn, scale, secure, audit, upgrade, and more, is software that makes you slow. Digital native software is beautifully easy to use, integrate, sale-out and so on. So what is the trick to recognise if software is digitally native? A 1 minute video demo of how the software solves a complex business problem breathtakingly easy. If you see this video and your top problem goes away in front of your eyes, then you are instantly convinced you want to see more. Seeing is believing. The beauty of a 1 minute video is that you can simply share it with others. Sales can go viral. The best proof is crowdfunding where short videos are able to convince millions of customers to pay months ahead of the product actually being available.

Try taking your legacy systems and making a 1 minute demo video to attract IT staff to join your company. You will see that faking an easy solution in a software demo is hard. This is why PowerPoint is used to hide ugly lies about software. PowerPoint always compiles. So next time you have a business problem, why not write a blog post asking for a 1 minute demo video for your problem. We received an awesome video from a start-up the other week and we hope to be working with their product soon. Additionally we would like soon to post sexy insurance demo videos ourself, #insuranxy is coming…