I was having a conversation with a friend about a product idea. Explaining the concept. Describing how it would work. Painting a picture with words, the way strategists are trained to do. He was politely interested. Nodding. Asking reasonable questions. The kind of conversation where someone is being generous with their attention but you can feel them not quite getting it.
Then I pulled out my phone and showed him the live site. The working product. The thing I'd already built.
The conversation changed completely. His posture shifted. He leaned in. Started clicking around. Asked a completely different set of questions -- not "what would this do?" but "how did you build this?" and "can I send this to someone?" The abstract idea he'd been politely entertaining became a real thing he could touch, and the shift was instant.
That's the demo effect. And once you've experienced it, you never want to present a deck again.
Decks are dead weight
I spent fifteen years in advertising making decks. Beautiful ones, too. Carefully designed strategy presentations with insight ladders and brand positioning frameworks and creative territories. Forty-slide masterpieces that took days to build and twenty minutes to present. I was genuinely good at it. Some of those decks won pitches worth millions.
And I'm telling you: a working prototype beats all of them.
The problem with decks is that they're inherently abstract. Even the best ones. You're asking someone to imagine a future state -- to picture how something would feel, how it would work, what it would look like. Some people are great at this. Most aren't. Most people need to see it, touch it, click around. They need the thing in front of them before they can truly evaluate it.
This is why prototypes have always been more powerful than presentations. But prototypes used to require developers, design teams, and weeks of work. Now, with AI tools, you can build a working product in the time it would take to make a deck about it. The economics have completely inverted.
The conversation changes
When you present a deck, the conversation is theoretical. "Would this work?" "Who would use it?" "What about the competitive landscape?" These are all valid questions, but they're operating in the realm of speculation. Nobody knows the answers because the thing doesn't exist yet.
When you demo a working product, the conversation is practical. "Can it do this?" "What if you added that?" "My friend would love this." The questions shift from whether it should exist to how it could be better. That's a fundamentally different conversation. And it's a much more productive one.
I've noticed this in every conversation I've had about my projects. When I describe Modern Retro -- "it's an AI-generated gallery of modern brands reimagined as 1970s retail stores" -- people say "oh, that's interesting." When I show them the gallery, when they can scroll through Nike and Supreme and Apple rendered as vintage shopfronts, the reaction is completely different. It's visceral. They get it immediately because the product communicates the idea better than I ever could with words.
Build the thing, then have the meeting
The old sequence was: have the idea, write the brief, pitch the concept, get approval, then build. The new sequence should be: have the idea, build it, then show people. Skip the middle steps entirely. They were only necessary because building was expensive and time-consuming. When building is fast, the pitch becomes the product.
This changes the power dynamic entirely. In the old model, you were asking for permission. "Here's what I think we should build. Can I have the resources to build it?" In the new model, you're presenting reality. "Here's what I built. What do you think?" The first is a request. The second is a fait accompli. And people respond very differently to things that already exist versus things that might exist.
I think about this in the context of job interviews, too. Imagine two candidates for a product role. One has a portfolio of decks and case studies describing work they contributed to. The other has fourteen live products you can visit right now. Both might be equally talented. But one of them has proof that exists in the world, and the other has claims on slides. The demo effect works everywhere.
The credibility accelerator
There's something else that happens when you demo a working product that doesn't happen with any other form of communication: instant credibility. People believe you can do things because they can see you've already done them. The evidence is right there, running in their browser.
This is especially powerful for someone like me -- a strategy director from advertising who never learned to code. When I tell people I've built fourteen products, they're sceptical. "What do you mean, built?" they ask, imagining I maybe wrote a spec or designed a wireframe. When I show them the products, that scepticism evaporates. The products are the argument. They don't need me to explain or justify or defend. They just need to work.
Every meeting I've had in the past six months has been better because of the demo effect. Every conversation about what I can do has been shorter and more productive because I can show instead of tell. Every opportunity that has come my way has come because someone saw a working product, not because they read a deck.
The demo effect is real. Build the thing first. Talk about it second. The product is always a better presenter than you are.
