If you sponsor a conference, you put a demo on an iPad and call it a day.
If you own the conference, you can get a little more ambitious.
For DEMOFEST NYC, we built a demo bar: a dedicated onsite space where attendees could explore our product through a mix of interactive demos, tours, and Talkables, either with someone from our team or on their own.
The idea came from a very practical problem. We had two different jobs to do at the same time:
Those are not the same conversation. So they probably shouldn’t be the same demo experience either.
That’s what made the demo bar work.
Instead of relying on one live walkthrough and hoping it fit every person who stopped by, we created a more flexible setup that let people explore the right experience based on what they cared about.
Shoutout to our demo bar tenders, Adam and Todd, who spent the day serving demos instead of drinks. Though I do think there’s still room to workshop actual drinks at the “demo bar” concept for London.
At DEMOFEST, we set up a section of the venue with iPads loaded with different types of demo experiences.
Some were high-level interactive demos designed to help prospects understand the platform quickly. Others were more focused tours of specific features. We also had Talkables available so attendees could ask questions directly inside demos and reports and explore the content at their own pace.
The result was something closer to a self-guided product experience hub than a traditional booth demo setup.
People could:
It gave us more flexibility in the room, and it gave attendees more control over how they engaged.
One of the biggest takeaways from the demo bar was that not every event demo should be delivered the same way.
Different demo formats are good at different things. Once we leaned into that, the setup got much stronger.
For prospects who wanted the broad overview, interactive demos worked well. They gave people a fast, accessible way to understand the platform without needing a full live walkthrough from the team.
That mattered because not everyone walking up to the demo bar wanted a 20-minute conversation. Some people just wanted to get the gist, click around a bit, and decide whether they wanted to go deeper.
Interactive demos let them do that.
One of my favorite parts of the setup was having Talkables available for anyone to interact with whenever they wanted.
Attendees could ask questions, click around, explore reports, and get a feel for the product without waiting for a formal demo or someone from our team to become available.
That made the experience feel much more approachable, especially during the busy stretches of the event when people were moving between sessions or only had a few minutes to spare.
It also lets us showcase a newer way of interacting with content. Instead of just showing a report or demo, we could let people literally talk to it.
For event environments, that’s a pretty compelling format. It gives people something to do, not just something to watch.
This was probably the most practical lesson of the whole setup.
For features that are harder to show in a live environment, we used tours instead.
That included product moments where:
In other words, anything that could betray you in front of a crowd if the WiFi was feeling dramatic.
Tours gave us a way to do polished, repeatable product reveals without depending on a live environment to cooperate. We could still walk someone through the feature in a conversational way, but the experience was faster, more reliable, and much easier to control.
Our team used the same approach on stage at DEMOFEST for one of our product reveals too. The audience got a smooth demo moment, and we got to avoid the special kind of adrenaline that comes from waiting for something to load in front of a room full of people.
Everybody wins.
The best part of the setup wasn’t just that it looked cool. It’s that it let us tailor the experience based on who is standing in front of us.
That flexibility matters at events, because the audience is never as uniform as the booth script assumes it is.
The demo bar gave us a way to meet people where they were, rather than forcing everyone onto the same path.
Like any event experiment, this one gave us a list of things to improve for the next round.
If you’re offering multiple demo experiences, make it obvious what each one is for.
For example:
The more self-explanatory the setup is, the easier it is for attendees to navigate without needing a guided handoff every time.
Event spaces are loud. Demos with audio are better when the person using them can actually hear them, and when the person next to them is not also hearing them against their will.
This is the big one I’d push further next time.
Our product team has prototypes and early concepts that don’t always lend themselves to a clean live demo. A tour is a great way to package those experiences so they’re easier for event attendees — and even internal demoers — to explore.
It creates a lower-risk, lower-friction way to show off something that may not be fully linear yet, especially if the goal is to gather reactions, test messaging, or shop around new ideas before launch.
And now that we’ve added Saleo to the mix, I have a feeling this category is about to get a lot more interesting. That deserves its own post after the next DEMOFEST.
The other thing I liked about the demo bar is that it made post-event follow-up much easier.
Every conversation our team had there now has a natural next step: send the exact demo, tour, or Talkable that matches what that person asked about.
That’s a much better follow-up than the classic event email that says “great meeting you!” and includes a generic meeting link for decoration.
If someone spent five minutes talking about a specific feature, they should leave with something specific to go back to. The demo bar made that much easier because the content was already built, organized, and tied to the conversations happening onsite.
If you’re running your own event, treat demos like an experience layer, not a single booth asset.
Use different demo formats for different goals. Build for self-guided exploration as well as live conversations. Make it easy to show the polished version of something when a true live demo isn’t the best tool for the job.
That’s what the demo bar gave us at DEMOFEST NYC.
It helped us support prospects and customers differently, made the onsite experience more interactive, and gave our team stronger follow-up paths after the event was over.
Also, if we eventually start serving drinks at the demo bar in London, I’d like credit for the idea now.
Ready to build a better demo experience at your next conference? Book time with our team now, and we can get you up and running quickly.