What Is a Demogod and How to Become One?

DEMOgod Awards™

What is a DEMOgod and how to become one?

The experience at DEMO is unique – from the challenging six-minute live demonstration on stage to the 1-on-1 encounters in the Pavilion, and that’s only after weeks of preparation and interactions with the DEMO team. From the first application through to the closing dinner, we strive to make DEMO an outstanding experience for our demonstrators and attendees. DEMO is the outstanding event that it is because every company is focused on delivering the very best at the conference. To honor the best of the best among the demonstrator participants, DEMO presents a very few members of each demonstrating class with our coveted DEMOgod Award™.

DEMOgod awards are given to those demonstrators that inspire, enlighten, entertain, and - above all - effectively communicate the features and benefits of their debuting products/technologies. But that’s not all. A company’s performance during its six minutes on stage is only one consideration in the judges’ final decision. The company’s preparation in advance of the conference, its interactions with the DEMO team and its fellow demonstrators, and its engagement with the DEMO audience in one-on-one conversations in the Pavilion – these things all play a part in the evaluation.

Make sure to reference your DEMO demonstrator contract & agreement. Not following the policies outlined in that document can disqualify a company from receiving the DEMOgod award. And, of course, there is one sacrosanct rule: do not exceed your six minutes on stage.

Speaking of the stage, here’s our advice: Plan and practice (DEMO is too important to “wing it”), exhibit good will to the production team (no one has ever won a DEMOgod award after missing rehearsal or berating the AV team), and wow the audience (it’s hard to elicit an enthusiastic response if you’ve put the audience to sleep). While awards have been given to presenters who have sung and danced their way into the audience’s hearts, these choreographed presentations were winners not because of the staging, but because of the effective messaging. Likewise, awards have been given to presenters whose demonstrations crashed, not out of sympathy, but because these presenters were passionate advocates of their products and recovered from the presentation glitch in a manner that impressed and imbued attendees with a curiosity to learn more about the product.

The DEMOgod award winners are selected by the executive producer in consultation with the production staff, input from DEMO advisors, and reaction of the DEMO audience (a standing ovation after your presentation is a sure sign that you’ll be taking home an award).So, practice, practice, and then practice some more. Maybe you, too, have a DEMOgod inside just waiting to shine.

If selected for a DEMOgod award, you will receive at the closing of the conference a certificate acknowledging your accomplishment. Your engraved award will be sent to you after the conference. You also will receive special DEMOgod buttons and banners to post on your company’s Web site.

Tips from a Past DEMOgod

Humans can only remember three new things...

DEMO attendees (given that they are watching demo after demo) remember less. The key here is to demo less and to demo very clearly. I’ve always worked from something I call “take-aways.” A take-away is what you want the audience to remember and be able to repeat at the end of the demo. There are never more than three take-aways; often there is only one. Select your take-aways carefully and NEVER demo anything that doesn’t relate to one of them. This may seem a little restrictive at first, but if you organize the presentation into manageable chunks of information for your audience, they have a much greater chance of remembering them. Prior to the demo, tell your audience what you are going to show them (your take-aways) and after the demo summarize what you just showed them – your take-aways!

Mind your time

One of the biggest demo traps I see are demonstrators that think that they can somehow communicate everything they have learned about their product in the last three years to their audience in six minutes. We tend to demo too much – way too much. To take advantage of the time you must keep it “brain numbingly” simple and straightforward. And at DEMO they will cut you off if you don’t stick with your allotted time. That means you won’t be able to summarize or deliver your key messages and you certainly don’t win DEMOgod status when you’re dragged kicking and screaming off the stage. The time you have at DEMO is incredibly short. You must be prepared to use every second of it effectively.

The stars at DEMO are the products, not your executives

Your short demonstration slot is not the time to stroke an executive’s ego. Get your best, most experienced demonstrator on-stage regardless of their title. I have seen more boring and embarrassing demos by key executives at DEMO than anywhere else. Somehow we think since all the key industry insiders are at DEMO, we have to put our CEO or Executive Vice President on stage to do the presentation. Unless he or she has been demoing the product non-stop for months, don’t do it! If you put an experienced demonstrator on-stage they will be comfortable and natural in front of a large audience and they will be able to recover from glitches – technical or otherwise. Best of all, the audience will remember your product, not your stumbling and flailing executive! And if you can’t convince them to step aside – just leave this little tip sheet on their chair and maybe they will take a hint!

Take risks, but only at the end!

DEMO is a place where risk taking will be rewarded! A lot of products are in BETA and even ALPHA stages and many products will crash. If you want to show something truly revolutionary and there is some risk of crashing – go for it anyway! But let your audience KNOW that you are taking a risk so you get the most credit for your risk. You can get great rounds of applause for showing truly revolutionary new features in you demo as long as the audience recognizes them as revolutionary. The key to being successful with risky demo elements is to not depend on them for the success of your demo. If you have a very hot demo without the risky feature, adding an element of risk only excites your audience more. Take the risk at the end of your demo; it is nearly impossible to recover from a crash early in the presentation. If it crashes just stop demoing, tell them what was supposed to happen and get to your demo summary. If it doesn’t work – you’re still a winner. If it does, you’re heading for DEMOgod status.

Use Humor, but only if you're really funny

People love humor in demos…but you have to be naturally funny. The way to be really funny is to stick to your natural style of humor. Be yourself. Usually, if you have to practice your jokes a bunch of times, you’re going to bomb. If they come out naturally they will be very funny. Gimmicks seem to bomb. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a gimmicky demo that really works well. If you were meant to follow Jay Leno on the Tonight Show, you wouldn’t be in the technology industry. Most of all, why devote any of your precious time to an irrelevant joke or gimmick? Instead, use it to communicate to the audience! The kind of humor that works well tends to be “buried” in the demo. If you have some fields to enter – enter something funny and relevant to your audience. Poke fun at yourself – that usually works. If you’re not naturally funny, don’t force it. Not all DEMOgods are funny!

Additional Tips from a Past DEMOgod

How We Got DEMOgod

There are a lot of good resources on how to be successful at DEMO and even more good resources on what makes a great demonstration. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these are the things that stood out the most in our successful attempt to be a DEMOgod at DEMO 2006 and in watching the 69 other demos.

Use Fewer Everything

Words, Points, Features. DEMO is not the time to explain the nuances of your product, your market, or your company. Many companies see the six minutes as a time trial to see how many cool features they can show off without crashing the application or getting tongue twisted.

Don’t be optimistic about what your audience will remember from your demo. Depending on when you demonstrate, they may have already seen 60+ product demos ranging from image search to spam filtering. After awhile, the demonstrators start to sound like Charlie Brown’s mom.

If you expect anyone to gather anything about what you do, then you have to put everything you have into demonstrating one or two main, benefit-oriented features that you think will blow the audience away. If you try and fit in three main points, then they may only remember one. If you try to fit in four, then they probably won’t remember any.

Repeat...Repeat

“DEMOgod” is a play on words for the term “demigod” which is defined as “a being with partial or lesser divine status, such as a minor deity.” The point of this is that you are NOT God and, as such, have no right to assume that you will not make a fool of yourself in front of 600 people given the opportunity but not preparing.

Your underlying assumption should be that you require endless planning and repetition in order to ensure that the components of the demo that you control go as planned. You can calculate the number of times you should rehearse a demo by using this formula:

Importance of the demo (on a scale of one to ten, ten being most important)
x
Inability to get a second chance (on a scale of one to ten, ten being no second chance)

A demo to your mom on how to use a new toaster would get a one. A demo to Barack Obama about why your product should be deployed nationwide by a federal security mandate would be a 10. If you graduated from Stanford with a double major in computer science and drama, then you should double the number of repetitions to compensate for overconfidence.

Even well-prepared companies fail at DEMO, but you want to stack the deck. We repeated our script with each other until it was more natural to say the script right than it was to say it wrong. Could we have winged it? Sure. Have we winged other demos? Uh, yeah. Were we capable of screwing the demo completely up in the first thirty seconds? You betcha!

For DEMO, the importance was high and the repeatability low, so impromptu and ad hoc were replaced with robotic adherence to “the plan”. Adhering to a scripted plan has the added benefit of naturally eliminating sections of the demo that didn’t sound cheesy to you the first ten times you practiced.

Practice Failing

No matter how much you prepare, something can still go wrong. Fortunately for us, our product worked great. However, the day before, during our technical rehearsal, the product froze. I didn’t really have a good way of keeping the demo on track, but Joel probably could have bailed me out had it been the real thing (as a CEO, he is better at producing words without corresponding mental activity).

We had rehearsed contingency plans, but, looking back, should have done a lot more practice to ensure that we could still go on past a product crash. Realistically speaking, a crash is sort of like landing on your butt in the Olympics after attempting a triple Sow Cow; you can get up and complete a great show, but you are probably out of the running for a DEMOgod. Lesson learned: test your product until it knows the script as well as you do, and then assume it will forget its lines.

Learn from the past

You can benefit from the experience of countless other DEMO participants in the excellent training material that DEMO offers to its demonstrators. This material teaches important tactics for not looking stupid, making the point, demonstrating relevance and preparation. Despite this wealth of resources, company after company violated the rules that DEMO laid down, almost universally to the company’s detriment on the stage. Among these enlightening insights was...

Skip the Skit

Of all the helpful hints that the DEMO training offered, this was the most clear, the most helpful, and the most violated by DEMO 2006 demonstrators. I watched approximately 25 skits, and there was only one that I remember being funny or entertaining (the goal of all 25). Unless you and your fellow demonstrators are exceptionally talented actors/actresses, your skit will come across exactly the same way as an elementary school skit. . . with one important distinction:

Your parents are not the audience.

DEMO attracts hundreds of venture capitalists, journalists, and entrepreneurs--all of which share the common trait of not having a sense of humor. Even if they did have a sense of humor, they would not laugh at you wearing a cape and pretending to be Captain Spammer. Skits at DEMO were, for the most part, boring, embarrassing, long (it seemed like skits were given twelve minutes), and painfully non-professional. People train for years to act like they are not acting when they are acting. You are not one of those people.

Don’t force the laugh

Because DEMO attendees are born without a sense of humor, they may not laugh at your jokes even if you are generally known to be funny (if you are not known to be funny before DEMO, you won’t be given that gift the night before DEMO). However, jokes help to make your demo engaging if they are delivered correctly. Here’s the rule of thumb should you attempt jocularity:

Don’t tell jokes that require laughter.

You should be able to continue past the joke without awkwardness even if you don’t hear a peep from the audience. (I think that all but one of our jokes met this criteria. Looking back, I would have taken that joke out.) At DEMO 2006, there were approximately 15 venture capitalist jokes (we considered trying a company valuation joke, but took it out). The auditorium contained probably 100+ venture capitalists and not even the first venture capitalist joke got laughs. If the absence of laughs would leave a painful silence, kill the joke. It’s not worth the risk.

Have Fun

Assuming you have rehearsed 20 times more than you really felt was necessary and paid attention to all of the DEMO training, then you should feel licensed to enjoy the experience on stage. It’s quite a rush with very few parallel experiences. Don’t waste it; use it, relish it. The demonstrators who seemed like they were actually enjoying the experience were refreshing to an audience that had been nervously watching group after group of white-knuckled, poker-faced execs.

Pray

...I’m not kidding. You may get a DEMOgod, but you are still not God.