Joseph Lee (Supademo): From Pivot to $5M+ ARR, SEO Playbooks, Product-Led Growth That Converts

Kosta Panagoulias: All right, we are live. Today's guest, someone who I think is going to resonate with a lot of you, uh, because his story is not a straight line. He started out building a food commerce platform for distributors and wholesalers. Uh, ran that for nearly a decade and somewhere along the way realized he wanted to solve a completely different problem. So in 2023 he co founded Supademo, which is an AI powered interactive demo platform that helps SaaS teams create product walkthroughs that convert. Uh, in about 12 months they went from zero to over a million in ARR, fully bootstrapped and they're now used by over 15,000 companies according to their website. He's uh, a Forbes 30 under 30 Techstars alum and someone who walks the talk on founder led growth. So a lot we want to get into. Uh, Joseph, welcome to Founder Views.

Joseph Lee: Thanks for having me. Klasse excited.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, me too. Uh, a lot of uh, topics I want to get into. I actually came across Supademo, uh, not too long ago. So I was looking for uh, kind of products for my SaaS company, um, the time. So um, I am familiar with you guys. Cool.

Joseph Lee: Do we do a good job of trying to get you to sign up?

Kosta Panagoulias: I didn't end up signing with anyone, uh, to be honest, but uh, you

Joseph Lee: got to do a better job.

Kosta Panagoulias: Things change. But no, look, there's a lot I want to get into, if you don't mind. Uh, you know you spent nearly 10 years building. Was it Freshline, your first company?

Joseph Lee: Yes.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I was in the food distribution space before launching a super demo. What triggered that decision to start something new rather than continuing to grow Freshline,

Joseph Lee: uh, a lot of different things. So I think Freshline, the way you described it there, ah, it's actually kind Of Ah, version 2 or version 3.0 of the original product. So when we first started, um, actually we're operating more so as the distributor or the wholesaler ourselves. So we wanted to create this marketplace, uh, where we connected fishermen, seafood companies in um, you know, Canada, United States, Japan, folks that were um, kind of selling through the antiquated traditional seafood supply chain. Uh, we wanted to connect them directly to the restaurants and the buyers at procure their goods. Um, so that was the original like uber for seafood type of business that we built. Uh, it morphed and changed multiple times. We went through a massive pivot during the height of the pandemic where we went from probably around 3, 4 million dollars in revenue to like nearly zero pretty much overnight. And it eventually evolved into Freshline and uh, what it is today. But to answer your question, a lot of different things. I think one, uh, big thing was probably marketing, um, know, working within a more antiquated industry that hadn't changed in decades, if not centuries. The change management required to get people to adopt new software and uh, firstly even to get in touch with them. Right, because these are not digital natives, uh, that are out there looking for new tools. You're, you're, you know, boots on the ground, knocking on doors, cold calling, trying to get in touch with chefs, trying to get in touch with distributor owners. And it's not a, not a, not an easy business to run in, um, especially in a capital efficient way. So, um, yeah, there were a lot of challenges structurally there. We still made it work. Uh, but I think for the next one I kind of realized, hey, my learning had tapped out and um, I wasn't living up to the potential of what I was able to, um, what I was capable of doing. And um, yeah, the space that Supademo and the problem space that we're solving for, it's uh, an exciting one that uh, I, I think has uh, a better answer to the what now, why now question.

Kosta Panagoulias: Uh, yeah. Okay. I love it. Tell me about Supa demo. A little bit. Like, I know you've been around three years, but you know, team size. I know you're fully bootstrapped. Uh, are you guys fully remote? So just, um. Yeah, quick.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, totally, yeah, super demo. We founded and incorporated the company back in May of 2023. So coming up on Three Years now, which is pretty crazy to think about. We are a team of, uh, 16 people right now, fully, uh, distributed, fully remote. We have team members in New York, in Kansas City, in Wisconsin, in Toronto, in Seoul, Korea, in India, really all across the board. And the ethos there has always been, hey, let's kind of increase our surface area for getting really quality candidates and not geographically constrain ourselves to one city, which is what we've done. And um, yeah, we've grown really quickly. We've done it in a capital efficient way. We've done it in a profitable way as well. Um, and a lot of that was due to the mistakes that I made with my first company. Um, you know, making rash decisions, making the wrong decisions, being dragged through the mud and telling myself, hey, if I built a company again, I'm going to make sure I do it a little bit different.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I love it. Okay, so. And you guys are fully bootstrapped.

Joseph Lee: We, uh, we actually did raise a pre seed round um, when we first started the company. But uh, we actually haven't touched any of the, the money. So we raised a million dollars. We have much more than a million dollars in the bank now. Uh, and um, yeah, so we've, we've always run it like a kind of a bootstrap company and, and, and never really touched them.

Kosta Panagoulias: Awesome. Okay, that's great. Um, what's your, are you a developer marketer? Like what's your thing?

Joseph Lee: Uh, I, uh, I do whatever the business needs in order for us to grow and kind of run in the right direction. So that's a cop out answer. But I think in the early stages I think every CEO um, is having to take on that role. So I've taken on the engineering role, I've taken on the marketing role. Um, more recently I've been a bit of a megaphone for the company, um, trying to share my thought, build in public, do a little bit more marketing and growth related work. But you do what needs to get done.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But you are a technical founder. Like you can, you can code.

Joseph Lee: I am, yeah.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah.

Joseph Lee: Okay, well anyone can code now, right?

Kosta Panagoulias: That's true. Yeah. That, that barrier has completely. Yeah, it's gone. Um, which I want to get into as well, how you guys are leveraging AI and all that. But um, so with Supademo, your customers are what segment of in the SaaS space typically like your ideal customer? Small. Ah, companies. Like what does that look like?

Joseph Lee: It's interesting because I think uh, as you mature as a product and as a company, your ICP changes over time. What started off as us primarily selling and uh, marketing to indie creators, folks that have like one person teams all the way to 10 person teams has quickly shifted to become more of an enterprise product. Um, with that being said we are, we're a purely product led uh, growth business. So anyone can try out the product, anyone can access our free plan. So we do have a huge amount of customers that are in the smaller SMB SaaS space but we also have a lot of enterprise customers that have you know, uh, the desire to get their entire onboarding team, entire sales team, entire enablement or marketing team using super demo to demonstrate and explain uh, their product. And we have a segment of customers that are just not even in technology but are in you know, architecture or insurance or uh, finance. Because I think one of the interesting insights that we had that we didn't foresee in the beginning is every knowledge worker has a need to demonstrate how products work. Uh, or to explain workflows, not even in just their product, but in the tools and the products they use to. Yeah, onboard employees and trained folks. And um, so a lot of folks use it for those types of use cases as well.

Kosta Panagoulias: I'm curious, like, when that ICP change, when it started off for indie, indie companies did. Was that evolution, was that led by your actual users growing themselves or just like the product changing and you guys were just targeting different companies?

Joseph Lee: Very much. Uh, just the market pulling us in that direction. Um, even today we try not to build very esoteric or specialized niche features for a particular industry. Um, when we think about impact, we always try to nail down to what are the features or things that we're going to build, uh, what are the things in our roadmap that create the highest net leverage across, uh, all of our users, which again are very, very diverse.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. And what, uh, you guys are a million ARR. Do you share the numbers or you just say over a million?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, yeah, we're, yeah, we're, we're actually uh, approaching 5 million in AR, so we're past 3 million in AR growing quickly. So we. Okay, we hit a million I believe in 2024. Beginning of 2024 I believe. And so we've been growing about 3, 3x every single, uh, year. And about 20x in 2023-20.

Kosta Panagoulias: You say you incorporated in September 23rd?

Joseph Lee: May, May of 23.

Kosta Panagoulias: Okay, so you got to a million in, in less than a year.

Joseph Lee: Call it, uh, roughly a year.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, roughly a year. So okay, let's start there. Right, because that, that's very impressive on its own. Right. Especially as a, ah, you know, bootstrapped company. I know you had that seed run round which you, you never touched. But um, did you get that first million? What was the, the growth channel that led you there, man?

Joseph Lee: Um, I, I would caution by saying a lot of what we did back then um, are uh, like the, the Playbooks wouldn't work today because I think growth Playbooks and just the market itself is changing a lot. There are I think lessons that we've kind of played out that I think are very pertinent today. So I think the biggest thing that we took away was uh, start with um, you know, latching on to existing demand, uh, and the existing market that your incumbents and your competitors have created for you. So for us that was, um, people were already on the market searching for, you know, different types of interactive demo tools, different types of demo automation tools, um, or even competitor pages like Reprise, competitor Or loom alternative. So there are clear signs that there were a segment of customers that were unhappy with existing, uh, incumbents and were uh, on the hunt. So the first step was let's try to create comparison pages, alternative pages, pricing pages of our competitors in our space and in adjacent spaces, um, in a programmatic way where we create hundreds and hundreds of these pages and then let's measure what is actually naturally picking up momentum both in LLMs or in SEO, which are kind of the same. And um, as soon as we see things are working, let's double down and optimize and improve and build backlinks to those specific pages so that we have very highly qualified people that we can now funnel into our product and explain why it performs better than some of the competitors, uh, that we're citing. So that is one, um, another one is obviously looking at like marketplaces and G2 traffic, uh, is another one. And um, just doing things that don't scale, I think is a key thing. Um, when you're a startup, you need to be doing anything and everything to make it as easy as possible for people to say yes to you, uh, doing the things that bigger companies won't do. So that means like white glove onboarding. For us it was creating product demos for people on Reddit, on indie hackers, on different forums where we would publicly create demos of other people's products, post them publicly for them and other people to see. So that it created a little bit of that viral, a viral flywheel. And um, and again just making it easy for people to buy, um, across the board.

Kosta Panagoulias: So the, you'd say that the main channel, if you had to like categorize those or rank those would be SEO as number one.

Joseph Lee: I would say SEO and LLMs, they kind of are one and the same thing. Uh, it's all about creating valuable content and getting things out. And the earlier you do that, the faster, uh, and more it compounds. So that's the number one thing I would do. And then I would layer onto that with things like doing things that don't scale or creating free tools, creating content around, you know, middle and top of funnel, um, and building in public.

Kosta Panagoulias: Okay. And that, ah, SEO traffic that was hitting your website, were you, uh, how are you capturing those leads primarily through the free trial or did you have any, you know, value content, gated content or.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, so we, we experiment with, experimented with a lot of different tactics. So I talked a little bit about the bottom of funnel tactics we used in the middle of funnel. Some of the things that we did were create like interactive tutorials of adjacent tools. So things like Canva or Ahrefs or figma. Uh, we already knew that there were thousands of search traffic for different like workflows that people are trying to achieve. So people were naturally searching for it. Whether it was LLMs or uh, on Google people are searching for how to export frames on figma to PDF. So there was a lot of existing pent up demand there. So we create a lot of programmatic content where we would um, at scale create blog posts with super demos embedded inside of them that answered that exact search query. So people could go in get value by clicking through and learning about how to achieve that workflow or job to be done in a visual kind of interactive way. And uh, by association a sliver of those customers would be in the market for our type of solution or they would kind of envision their own type of use case because it had uh, a watermark that said created in Supademo and a portion of them would sign on. So uh, that's an experiment we ran. Another thing we did was um, making our product fully ungated so you wouldn't even need to create an account or you didn't need to, you didn't need to talk to a salesperson. You could just go right to Supademo, go into the editor and create your first few interactive demos without having any kind of commitment. So the thesis there was if we can add value upfront and show people the ins and outs of our product signing up is uh, suddenly more of a formality than something that we need to convince them on. So that was on the product. And then we also did things like reverse trials. We did free tools that funneled people into our product. Um, yeah, we did a whole bunch of different things.

Kosta Panagoulias: M. What do you mean by reverse trials?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, good. Ah, question. Uh, so, uh, typically what I would say a lot of uh, SaaS companies have done in the past is uh, just do a traditional free trial where uh, people would select into a plan and they would get um, you know, 14 days to try it. Um, if not they would just sign up for a free plan. What we ended up doing is um, automatically when somebody signed up for any plan on Superdemo, we would automatically put them into a trial of our highest tier plan. And the idea there was you get to see all the bells and whistles and all the capabilities of our most powerful plan and features. And then if you wanted to, you can self select down into, you know, lower tier, even the free plan. So without you having to commit anything or even put in a credit card, we would essentially show, not tell. We're so confident in our product and our capabilities that we're just going to give you access to everything for 14 days with no commitment, and you choose the type of plan that, uh, best suits your needs.

Kosta Panagoulias: Okay, Nice. All right. No, that's, that's awesome. Thanks for breaking that down. Um, but you mentioned the things you did to get to that first million won't work today because, you know, things have changed. What doesn't work today and what are you doing now?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, I don't mean across the board things won't work today. Um, uh, I guess what I'm more m inferring is, um, and getting at is it's harder than ever to get attention. So it's not just about, um, you know, blasting content across every channel. I feel like you need to be a lot more methodical about making sure every single piece of content and information you put out there adds value in a very tangible way. And there's a high bar for taste and quality because there's a lot of slop out there. It's very easy to ship, and the easier it is to ship across product and marketing, um, the harder it gets, right, to stand out.

Kosta Panagoulias: So what is the driving force today then, for Supademo?

Joseph Lee: Um, I would say one of the biggest, uh, pieces, uh, or drivers for growth is just the virality of the product itself. So we've been extremely methodical about our flywheel and how we design our product, how we design our aha moment, how we design our onboarding moment that encourages people to share. Our activation metric is actually, you know, what is the percentage of people that are coming into our product and within the first seven days creating more than five demos and actually going out and sharing it out into the world and getting a view. And that is kind of that aha, uh, value moment where we feel that when other people experience the magic of clicking through and learning by doing and having something that's less passive than a video, um, they're likely to be, um, you know, encouraged to create and explore their own use cases for a product like Supadevo.

Kosta Panagoulias: So I like that.

Joseph Lee: Uh, yeah, because the product is meant to be shared. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kosta Panagoulias: No, I want to get into that more like, you know, because product led growth, that can mean so many different things. So in your case, the that aha moment that you're trying to drive trial signups to and to experience, that is, or at least the metric you Track is the share. Is there anything else that you guys do? Like, what else does product led growth mean to you?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, uh, the product led growth just means that the inherent product experience itself across onboarding to the upgrading experience, to the expansion experience, to the sport experience, a lot of that is driven, um, by the product itself itself. It's not a team of salespeople that needs to, you know, coax people to add more seats or expand into new use cases. Uh, it's one where, you know, even companies as big as Siemens or HP can start off self serve without ever talking to a person, prove out the value of the use case that they have in mind. The product is frictionless in the sense that it can allow them to expand out to 10, 20, 30, 40 different people and different features that uh, they could deploy across their org.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I love that. Do you guys have a sales team?

Joseph Lee: Uh, yeah, we now have one. One ae. Um, and um, uh, he's in charge of like basically fielding inbound demos because we do get a lot of inbound demos from larger organizations. Yeah, um, so him and I are pretty much the only ones that just. Yeah. Field inbound demos.

Kosta Panagoulias: Okay, nice. So you're still involved in the, in the demos and you know, part of the sales.

Joseph Lee: I think you have to be. Right. It's the easiest way for you to, you know, understand, um, your product inside and out and keep a really good pulse of feedback.

Kosta Panagoulias: I think so too. I say that all the time. I'm the same. I still very involved in demos, um, primarily for that reason. Right. Just to be on the ground and understand what people are asking for, where the demand's going. You just learn so much. Um, aside from making sales, there's a lot of value there.

Joseph Lee: Agreed, Agreed.

Kosta Panagoulias: Um, all right, so just one AE now doing demo. So basically most of your sales are just coming from people online, not speaking to anyone and the product is doing the talking.

Joseph Lee: That's correct. Yeah. Even on the enterprise side, it's typically just one demo. Uh, folks putting in a form, doing a demo and then them expanding because they, the, the, the end users have actually validated that Supademo fits, you know, their use case. They've done all that research and done the exploration of the platform before talking to us.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. Okay. Where are you finding the, um, the most traffic source coming from nowadays?

Joseph Lee: Um, I would still say like SEO and LLMs are the biggest source. Everything we did in the past for we building our depth and breadth of SEO coverage is what is helping us on the LLM side. So all the valuable pieces of content we've created across YouTube, across just blog posts, across product updates, playbooks, um, those are all the ones that are still being ranked, um, in LLMs. Uh, same thing with free tools, right? The free tools that we've all created, um, they're targeting specific, uh, search terms and intent, and those are being recommended by LLMs and SEO as well. So that's in total probably about 50 plus of our traffic.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. How does social media play into this? Do your clients live on social? Is that a, a channel for you guys?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, um, I would say less so on like traditional social media, like, uh, Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. Not to say those aren't viable channels. I'd say the biggest channel for US is, um, LinkedIn. So that's where a lot of our ICP and B2B SaaS or software companies live and breathe. Uh, so that's where I try to build in public, uh, share our metrics, share our challenges, share the lessons that, uh, I've faced, uh, head on. And I try to post probably three or four times a week. Um, and it's definitely a challenge, but if you're consistent with it, the amount of trust and the amount of, I think, traction you can build up in a fairly short period of time, it's, um, it's, uh, yeah, it's impressive what you can, what you can do there if you're, if you're consistent. Now we're looking at, uh, YouTube as well as, as another channel.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. And you're obviously on this podcast and you did one earlier, so you're obviously seeing podcasting as a channel to spread the message out. How is that going? How are you finding the podcast world?

Joseph Lee: Um, no, I think podcasts are great. Um, I think whenever you have an opportunity, um, to work with people, amplify your message, um, uh, it's a great bet to take. Right. So I think, um, a lot of people are afraid that they don't have unique insights or unique learnings. Um, and, and so they are detractors where they uh, stray away from sharing m, uh, their message and their story. But there's always an audience for, ah, different types of stages and different types of, of stories. It's not just the Elon and the Jensens, uh, that can tell stories or, or be on podcasts. Anyone can be on podcasts.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. 100% love it. Okay, um, let's talk about AI. How, uh, how is. How you know where to start with AI obviously changed the world and is continuing to do so. How do you guys use AI? Um, on the development side.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, I um, mean we use AI across the board, not just in development, but across all areas of the business. Um, so to uh, give you some tacit examples, obviously every engineer is armed to the teeth with the Claude codes, the codex, the cursors, whatever subscription they need to enhance their workflow, uh, we have it. So when it comes to planning what we're going to build as well as actually building itself, a lot of that is now done with AI. And you can imagine each engineer is uh, essentially like a director in an orchestra. And the orchestra members and the instruments are all different agents and um, models that do the work and is approved by the uh, conductor or the director itself. So that's on the creation side obviously. On the review and QA side we use AI heavily end to end tests, qaing, um, getting multiple eyeballs from both humans and agents on like what we have built so that it is production ready. Um, and we have um, MCP connectors for us, our tools, super demo, our AI tools so that when uh, folks in support or non technical roles are also flagging issues or bugs, it's actually as simple as like right clicking the issue on Slack, calling Claude or calling our agent, explaining what the bug is, telling it to, you know, create a draft pr and based on the context of our code base, it does the work, puts in a draft PR for an engineer to resolve and review and then you know, the engineer plugs that into code and it basically amplifies um, what we're able to achieve, um, across the engineering side and love that, yeah, our growth side uses it as well.

Kosta Panagoulias: Did you find any resistance to AI in any department in the business or was, was everyone just like all in from day um one?

Joseph Lee: I wouldn't say.

Kosta Panagoulias: Sorry, just add to that. And the reason I want to frame it in a certain way is I find it it's one thing to put tools in front of people, it's another thing to actually, you know, start using it and using them properly. Right. And I feel like that requires a bit of, you know, pushing and nudging. Uh, just wondering what your experience was implementing uh, it inside the business 100

Joseph Lee: I think you bring up a really good point Kostya, because uh, I shout this from the rooftops all the time. Um, and it's more relevant today than ever before. The biggest challenge when it comes to software has never been about building. It's about change management and shifting behaviors that are uh, habitual. So it's actually even harder Today because you have more choice and more noise and more tools launching every single day and they're all vying for someone's attention. But if someone has gone through training and gone through the mental anguish of setting something up and integrating it into their workflow that is damn hard to displace every single week or every month. You're not going to pick up a new tool and replace it every time. So uh, the same can be true and it is true in AI and we had that same resistance. I think the biggest part for us was number one, it's naive for us as an AI platform and an AI native workflow to not use AI across the board to amplify the work we do. But two, it's um, creating a system where we encourage exploration and experimentation and failure while using these tools and we give as much resourcing and hands on support so that folks can pick it up the right way. So what I mean by that is having lunch and learns and having set sessions where an AI expert within the company, um, is in a pretty low pressure way showing people how easy it is and how simple it can be to integrate it into your day to day. Because I think the hardest hurdle is um, starting right, it's starting and getting into it and then once you get going you realize actually it's not as hard as I thought. But uh, we all have that preconceived notion that whatever we're going to pick up is going to be difficult or different or uh, not aligned with our workflow. And it just takes a little bit of hand holding and positive reinforcement to get people to use it the right way.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I agree. I found very uh, similar experience in my business as well. Um, you mentioned, ah, uh, like I'm curious to hear some of your workflows. Like you mentioned that one about you know, you have like a support person or QA that you know, like talk about some of the workflows that you, you use. And is it Claude that you guys mostly use?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, we use Claude, uh, for engineering work we use Claude code. Some people use Claude Cowork. Uh, we also use tools like um, openclaw and Zoe. So more like true agents that have a heartbeat and run 24 7. Uh, so I can give you some examples. So um, you know you and I just talked about enjoying uh, the, the process of doing sales. So we like doing sales, we like going on the, the demos. One thing that I hate is the follow ups. I am so busy that after I send the first follow up I'm Forgetting to do follow up 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And you need to do follow ups 2, 4, 5, 6, 7. To close the deal, you need to be omnipresent, you got to be on the ball. Um, I would always screw up the cadence. Sometimes I would forget to follow up in uh, for four days. Sometimes I would forget to send the right cadence. So I wanted to automate that. So I built an agent essentially that goes in every single day. It reviews all of my fathom notes and my calendar to analyze what meetings have taken place. And uh, it searches my inbox, my Gmail to ensure that that person got the five to six templated follow ups that is required to close the uh deal. So it'll assess how many days it's been, it'll assess the meeting notes, it's assess um, what has been sent already and it will draft up the right email in the thread or in a new email and it will place it in my inbox in a draft and it will email me saying, today you need to follow up, uh, with client A, client B, client C, client C. And for each of them it tells me the stage they're in with a link to the draft email. So all I need to do at 8 o' clock is go in, I have the reminders, I click the draft, it opens the draft, I review what it's written, change things up if I need to, and then I can click send. So I never really miss a follow up. So that's the sales example. One other one is, you know, we built an agent that is uh, connected to our database and it has access to certain like APIs on stripe or uh, uh, different tools we use. So through mvp we can basically in Slack say, hey, what workspace is this person a part of? Or how many demos does they, do they have who's a part of their workspace? So we can get, you know, instant answers that queries both Stripe and our database and other tools in real time. And we can actually, you know, make it take actions like, hey, uh, you know, extend this person's trial by 14 days and it knows it has the context that they need to create a subscription in Stripe, put in the trial, take that subscription ID and put it onto our um, workspace on our database.

Kosta Panagoulias: Ah, maybe you can relate to this, maybe not. But I feel like there's a window right now, especially for smaller teams, bootstrapped companies that are really going all in with AI like internally just getting every single department, every single employee using these tools to increase productivity. Um, because it's much faster and easier to implement within a smaller team as opposed to like a, you know, a big venture backed uh, company with like hundreds of employees and management and middle management and all this. So I feel that there is this window uh, for these small teams to, to make big strides in not only catching a lot of bigger companies and players, but even surpassing them because of this implementation and productivity gains using uh, AI. Um, what are your thoughts there? Do you agree with that or what's your, how do you see that?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, it's an interesting question because I think um, I don't necessarily think the size of the company discludes them from adopting these tools and, and working in a nimble way. Um, so I think we need to kind of shed that preconceived notion that just because you're smaller you're more nimble. Uh, in some ways from, from my experience like seeing some of the larger companies, um, I do think it, AI allows you to operate at ah, ah, an efficiency level that was not possible in the past. I don't know if that necessarily means that you can catch up to the large players with the bigger team because at some point you do need like the human oversight and different processes. Um, I think the danger actually is overdoing it with AI and um, shipping so much stuff for the sake of shipping because you could like move faster and not having the right sieve or filter for like determining what should exist and what shouldn't exist. Um, like we deal with that ourselves where you know, I think I've also pushed back on our team where you can now build so many internal tools that uh, you know, folks get overzealous or excited about being able to track metric A, B, C, D, ed that they couldn't track before. But the root of it is what are you going to do with that data? Are you, are you just like contributing to like uh, analysis paralysis or just collecting data for the sake of collecting you. You need to have a higher degree of intent before you ship something and move with something. So I would apply that same thing with internal tools. Right. See people are saying SaaS is dead. We're going to just like vibe, build our own tool. But like what, you're now just gonna have your engineer support like a wholly new product and ensure that it has like the right compliance and pen testing and support and you know, like the iterations of improvement. It needs to be like a mission critical tool. Yeah, I don't know.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I agree. I don't buy that narrative either. I mean if you've managed, ah, a SaaS company for long enough. You know, what's involved in the support and the bugs and just things that happen that. Yeah, um, yeah, I'm not bought into that notion either. Um, but, but the idea to, you know, regarding the big companies, like, what I mean by that is like a lean team. I think there is a bit of a difference. Like a lean team can mandate new ways of working and kind of steer it and embed it in like a week. Right. As opposed to a company with, you know, middle management and you know, committees like phase rollouts. Like there's, I think it is more of a process to kind of unify and you know, mandate a new way of working within a large team. Uh, not to say, you know, they're, they're gonna get there, but I think, uh, of course they will. Everyone will. Like, that's not. The tools are not the moat. It's, it's just the uh, you know, utilizing them in the right ways like you were describing. Because it is very easy to, to overdo it totally. Um, there's that fine line for sure.

Joseph Lee: One, the one thing caveat I'll add there is, I think, um, typically, yes, smaller teams can move faster and mandate the usage of different tools to like get to a higher degree of product market fit or pmf. But these smaller companies typically have less defensibility and like brand eminence compared to the bigger companies that are a little bit clunkier and a little bit bigger because those, those companies have their fingertips. In many enterprise, uh, companies they have a lot of different use cases. They're like embedded into key habitual workflows. So uh, they have a little bit more eminent domain and a little bit more like staying power. So they're less susceptible to, you know, new incumbents or new companies coming out versus, um, a small company. You actually have to mandate, uh, the usage of AI and move faster because someone might actually build what you're doing and try to emulate and you have to constantly be, you know, staying ahead, building the moat, building the distribution engine, doing whatever you can do to, you know, prolong PMF as long as you can before you inevitably, you know, pivot or move in a different direction.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I agree. Um, speaking on that, another opportunity that I see as a SaaS company or really any, let's just stick with SaaS. But I feel like, you know, traditionally your total addressable market is like, hey, how many SaaS companies are there out there? And you know, these companies can, can use my product and that's my, my addressable market. But now with, with AI agents, you almost have to put yourself or company in a position where you're, you're not only selling to your traditional tam, but also to a new tam, which is AI agents and just bots being deployed by people or companies to kind of, you know, tap into to different tools and things. So if you're not, if your company's not accessible to AI agents, I think you're missing out on a, actually like a whole new market in a way.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah.

Joseph Lee: I mean I, I very much believe in a future where we're building like experiences and product for two different types of audiences. Exactly. Like you, you mentioned, uh, Kasra. So you got agents and you got people. People are still going to need the deterministic guardrailed UI UX where they want to know that if you click a button this happens or if you click a toggle that happens. They want it to be kind of more predictive. Um, but you're also going to have to have MCPs and APIs and connectors and agents, um, where people or, you know, ChatGPT or OpenAI or Claude can access and create drafts and create content that humans can look at and interact with and preview and edit. But you're gonna have to package both into like one cohesive product experience as well.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, for sure. So right now, uh, with Supademo, you mentioned you're at 5 million ARR.

Joseph Lee: We're headed towards 5 million.

Kosta Panagoulias: We're not going towards 5. That's impressive. And team size of only 16. Very good. Where do you see the company in the next 12 months?

Joseph Lee: It's tough to say, honestly. Um, I feel like technology and AI is advancing at ah, a rate like so unprecedented right now that I think the only thing we're focused on is how do we add like relentless value to our customers and build the best possible product we can, like a quarter by quarter, uh, basis while maintaining flexibility and being malleable so that we can shift and pivot and iterate as needed based on what the market needs. Because I think right now, you know, you and I talking about agents and building for agents being the future, that wasn't the case like eight months ago. So. And this might not be the case eight months from now. Right. So, um, I, I honestly don't really believe in like planning beyond a quarter or six months at a time at our, at our stage.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah.

Joseph Lee: Um, so I try to be really close and year to the ground at a time. Um, and that typically Puts us in the best position to add value to customers.

Kosta Panagoulias: It's funny, when I asked that question, like, I'm like thinking back, usually when someone asks that question, it's like, where do you see yourself in the next, like five years? Like I, I consciously caught myself, like that is way too far. Like I even think, like you said, 12 months is probably even a little far to look out because of how things are changing right now. Um, yeah, you mentioned, uh, moats. Right. So, you know, nowadays, like you're in a competitive space, um, as with pretty much any SaaS company is nowadays. So when you think about moat and differentiators, 12 months ago a moat could have been like, you know, we're a lot simpler, our UI is better, just the experience is better. But I, you know, I don't think that even is a moat anymore. Um, just because the way these, the quality and output of a lot of these tools now with AI in this, what is supademos moat? Like, what makes you guys different? Like, how do you look at that?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, yeah. I think it always has been in the past. You know, ease of use and simplicity of the product. We've never been about. We're gonna have every bell and whistle under the sun. Uh, we want to build a tool that isn't clunky, isn't overly technical, anyone can pick it up and uh, people to derive and get value from it very quickly and get out of the way. In helping people achieve their desired outcome, that has always been key and I think to an extent it still applies even in the AI first age because you still need to have taste for what needs to get built and what shouldn't get built. And that's harder now because you can build everything right? Uh, so you determining taste and being the seed for what can and can't be, uh, can't, uh, should and shouldn't be built. I think that's the number one thing. I think product velocity is a big one. So how do we build, uh, like the most elegant, exceptional product experience, um, at the right time when the product, when the customers need it. Um, and beyond that, I think it's really kind of twofold. One is brand eminence, right? How do we build a product and an ecosystem of like, channels and stories and narratives across as many different places where we have eminence across the demo automation or interactive demo or product demo space. When somebody thinks of product demos or interactive demos, um, our defensibility is that SUPA demo is One of the 1, 2, 3 names that come to Mind very often when you have sophisticated buyers, they're not looking at option number 4, 5, 6, 7. And just because you have a brand new shiny AI generated product means you can suddenly leapfrog into like 1, 2, 3. So I think like having that brand eminence is important. That's why I post on LinkedIn, that's why I post on um, you know, YouTube as much as I can to ensure that we tell this story in the right narrative. Um, and the second part is distribution. Right. It's the density of super demos created, it's the density of customers we have around the world where you could have an exceptional product. But just because you build doesn't mean customers are going to come. So we already have a snowball effect. Somewhat of 200,000 users worldwide, across 100 plus countries where they are creating content and demos and sharing it out with other people. So every new user is bringing in organically, uh, more customers and new uh, eyeballs. And you're not going to get that just by building a brand new product and shipping it out into the world tomorrow. And that takes like years of dedicated execution, customer support, education, uh, and just shipping like day in and day out.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, you mentioned uh, product velocity. I'm curious to hear from you as not only a founder but an engineer background. What is your product review or prioritization process look like? I'm sure you get, you know, your, your backlog or whatever you want to call it, uh, of like things that you guys want to do is like miles long. How do you prioritize like what's next? What does that, what does that look like inside?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, we try not to like make it too much of a like quantitative practice. Like I know in the past we've like experimented with like adding stars for like scope and impact and all these different things, but we find that actually ends up slowing you down and uh, there's too much imperfect information and unknowns to accurately, you know, foresee impact. So a lot of that is based on like gut that we shape through customer um, uh, feedback as well as like one to one conversations. Uh, but I would say we try to plan a quarter at a time. So we try to plan like high level milestones and themes we'll understand on a like a year by year basis. But like, like tacit specific examples of what we want to build. We plan out like three months ahead of time like quarter by quarter and uh, from there we try to break things down into like smaller scoped items that we can achieve on a week by week. Basis. So if we're for example building out our new like mzp, what are the components of that that we need to uh, do and how can we break it down on a week by week so that daily or weekly we're shipping something incrementally into production to help us get to our final kind of finite goal of getting the MCP out.

Kosta Panagoulias: So do you guys, do you guys push things into production every single day?

Joseph Lee: Pretty. Pretty much, yes.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. Okay. Um, all right, cool. I wanna, last topic I want to kind of get into is uh, just kind of your, you know, pricing conversions, things like that. Um, you guys do have a free plan, right?

Joseph Lee: That's correct.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. Do you share like the conversion numbers? Like what is a good uh, conversion rate from free to paid that you're happy with?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, I'd say anything. Honestly anything above 10% is pretty um, solid, um, considering the amount of um, like new users that we're bringing on board. So to give you like an example, we probably ah, fluctuate anywhere from 400 to 500 new users signing up for the product every single day. So four or 500 customers, uh, every single day you get 10% of that. That's pretty significant, right? Not, not every user is equal. Right. Because uh, obviously there's different industries, different countries, different sensitivity when it comes to pricing. But generally speaking, um, like double digit is kind of what we um, aim for. Um, but free plan and free users are completely fine. Like we actually value them uh, as much because to us they're not a cost center. Right. Again, looking back on the virality of the product, they're actually a much more organic and powerful means for us to acquire new customers. Because they're going to drive conversions way better if they're like out there creating valuable content they're using for onboarding, sales, marketing and enablement than us spending the same amount of money on like ads or you know, creating a blog post or creating a video that is a little bit more forced. Yeah, we look at them as like, like an investment and a, in a, in a marketing driver rather than a, a cost center?

Kosta Panagoulias: Mhm. Makes sense. Um, any, I know you have a few uh, pricing tiers as well. Are there any, have you had any pricing mistakes that you've made? Uh, that looking back you might.

Joseph Lee: A ton. A ton. I, I think the biggest thing is like uh, every founder does this. You end up undercharging for the amount of value that we're bringing. Um, in a lot of cases, uh, depending on the customer, we definitely are undercharging um, and the other, other mistake I would say is um, trying to get pricing perfect. It's never perfect whether you do usage based pricing, outcomes based pricing, seat based pricing or a combination of all of them. I think too many times people are like over index on like analyzing the data and getting it perfect before like they get something out. It's actually better to just like as scary as it is, just get it out and like learn from that data and reorient. Um because you never know until it's actually out on production and like people are like you know, you're testing it with like hard earned dollars being put down on the table.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, makes sense. Um, okay, I have another topic um, lastly here but uh, you know just being a remote company, you mentioned 16 uh, uh, team members across what 10 countries was it? Maybe more.

Joseph Lee: I think it's like five.

Kosta Panagoulias: Five. Do you have team members that you, you've never met face to face?

Joseph Lee: I'd imagine yeah, yeah there are team members that I haven't met. Uh, I, I have met a lot of them. The most of them I and I, whenever I can I, I do try to make an earnest effort to like fly out and, and like meet face to face because I think that sets the right tone. So even people in Korea or in Toronto or in Vancouver or in Kansas City. I've ah, all met in person um, and and onboarded them. Obviously it's not always possible like folks in India. Unfortunately I haven't had the pleasure of going to India and I'd love to um. But uh, yeah when I can I try to.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah. So how do you manage the culture side of the company? How do you maintain and build a cohesive culture where you know, people are aligned, um, different time zones. Like how do you manage that? Any processes, workflows, things you do?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, I think, yeah that's a great question because I think that's the key question isn't it? Is like how do you ensure a lively aligned culture uh without like being there together in person and whiteboarding and having like the non verbal connection um for us. I don't think I have like ah a tried and true process per se. Like I, I try to have relationships with everyone and have enough like um, touch points with everyone to like know them beyond just the work setting that's key and like making sure that I encourage people to go out there and be independent and do their own thing, fail quickly, learn quickly and do it all over again. Um, and you know there are processes I guess in, in terms of like having enough um, like stand up meetings where everyone is together like and, and are able to see each other and um, um, have some level of face to face and even doing things like monthly socials where everyone gets to talk or doing um, we do this thing on like a random channel where everyone like posts pictures of their weekly um, endeavors or I guess like weekend endeavors. So we kind of get a pulse check of what people do outside of work. Uh, but beyond that I would say um, it's up to the people. Like as much as I'd like to say that like as a top down um, as a CEO, I do like a top down uh, like culture setting. It's not that case. Like I think it's really every person that comes in has a pretty like gargantuan impact on the type of like culture and experience that is curated within the company. So for me it's just more about like how do I find really, really smart yet wonderful humans that are empathetic and just great people, um, and nice people. And just by doing that they're going to help shape and do their part in like making sure the culture is set the right way.

Kosta Panagoulias: So that. I totally respect that answer. And yeah, that's good. Um, have you noticed, speaking of people and hiring, have you noticed now with just the, the implementation of AI productivity gains, your pace of hiring, has it slowed down? Are you getting more productivity out of people where you don't need to hire as much or what does that look like? Um,

Joseph Lee: yeah, it's a great question. Hiring it, I don't think it's easier. I actually think it's harder. Uh, because I think the type of hires we're looking for, precisely to the, to your point, we're looking for like conductors, right. Of the orchestra and those are very, very hard people to find because they can easily go out and start their own companies as well. Right. There's nothing stopping them, especially now. So I think it's uh, actually gotten harder to hire the right people, types of people for us rather than uh, before and sorry, what was your second. The second part of your question?

Kosta Panagoulias: Just like has, has your pace of hiring slowed down because people are more productive now using AI. Ah. Are you still hiring at the same velocity or you're getting more out of people where you don't need to hire as much?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, for us I think because of the growth rate we have had to hire and we are always looking for really good talent, um, just because of the pent up demand. Uh, with that being said, yeah, it's a great question, uh, in terms of like, do you continue hiring or do you try to like get more juice out of the orange? Right. Uh, because you can do more with less. We still want people to have lives and have balance to a certain extent as well. Um, so it's, it's a fine balance of like, hey, what type of gaps necessitate bringing on new people versus setting up an automation or getting more efficient? Um, there's no clear answer to that. Right. Um, um, because for us, yeah, we can like economically continue to hire more people. Right. And, and continue to be profitable. But um, a key thing that I also don't want to forget is, hey, don't forget that it's capital efficiency and frugality and like concern for spending. That is actually what got us to here today and what has enabled us to have the level of optionality of like continue bootstrapping, raise more money, sell the company. You know, we have a lot of options at our, ah, disposal because we built it in a methodical way and we can't lose grasp of that just because we.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, no, no. Like, ah, I don't think there's anything wrong with um, you know, leveraging AI in a way where like, you don't have to hire. Like. Let me ask you a more direct question. Has AI replaced a role either that you don't need any more from a human or that traditionally you would have hired someone for, but now you don't need to?

Joseph Lee: I wouldn't say it's like replaced a role that we already had, but it definitely has eliminated, uh, the need to have certain contractors or certain roles opened up.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, of course, yeah, that's, that's what I'm kind of getting at. So, so what is that like on a now like a more of a macro level on how that kind of plays out beyond like, you know, the, the micro and the business? Um, I'd imagine that that's true for my company as well and most others that I speak to. Does that mean fewer people broadly will be employed because of AI? Like, what's your macro thinking?

Joseph Lee: Like, oh man, that is a scary proposition. And I talk about this daily with a lot of founders here in New York. Um, it's like, what does society look like? Uh, what does the knowledge economy look like? What does the world look like for young people that are just like getting into the workspace or workforce? Um, I don't have an answer for you. So, um, if we continue down the current path with like zero intervention from either businesses or you Know, the government, I, I do think we're gonna have some sort of like an existential reckoning because you can't get to like peak uh, efficiency in a, in a purely capitalist world where I think the, the accumulation of value and this like, the accumulation of like wealth in a few companies. It's getting even more pronounced than it already was, uh, in the SAS age. And it was already, you know, pretty extreme. At least here in the US it's going to get more extreme if like, left unchecked. I'm not saying, you know, we should be socialist, but, um. Yeah, I wonder if we continue going down the path we're going down with like zero repercussions or guardrails, what happens? I don't know.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, I don't, I don't think anyone knows for sure. That's, to me, that's like an even scarier proposition is giving that much control to people in government to, to kind of make those decisions.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, yeah, I don't know. But yeah, that's true. Like in, in, you know, like in a perfect world, um, you know, the efficiency gains and all the, all the things that AI unlocks for us that should dramatically increase output not just in, you know, like business, but in like creating food and farm, like all across, uh, every industry and, and that creat. It somehow needs to be, uh, divvied up across like all people so that we can maybe if we don't have jobs, but we have a lower, you know, cost of living because of the efficiency. But, you know, that hasn't played out in like traditional software, traditional capitalism. Right, because like, technically we've begotten way more productive than ever before. But cost of living and yeah, the wealth.

Kosta Panagoulias: Is that capitalism though? Or is it just, you know, the financial system that's broken? That's, you know, that's what I mean. And inflation and it's not true. Theoretically, if technology, there should be deflation. Really. Like, if you're being more productive and you know, things are more efficient, naturally things should kind of go down in price, but it's not. And I think that's, uh, that's probably a topic for, for another day. But uh, I don't know if you point that to capitalism or it's just an unwinding financial system that I think people paying attention can see that it is unwinding.

Joseph Lee: Um, yeah, but yeah, that's probably a better way to put it. I don't mean capitalism. I mean like the current financial system and their definition of capitalism, I guess.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah, yeah. For sure. Um, couple last questions I like to, to fire off here before we close up. I, I do. I'm mindful of your time, Joseph. Um, if you can put one thing, message, business lesson insight on a Billboard for every SaaS founder to see, what would it say?

Joseph Lee: Um, I would say just start.

Kosta Panagoulias: Nice.

Joseph Lee: Don't over index on data and don't get into analysis paralysis. Don't overthink it. Just like get started and do the thing and then like measure and iterate.

Kosta Panagoulias: Right.

Joseph Lee: That's like the hardest part.

Kosta Panagoulias: I'm smiling because I, I was actually saying this, uh, the other day. I actually put a tweet, I think, or on LinkedIn. But uh, I feel like now is the time where you cannot overthink right now. Like that thing M. You are overthinking or like analyzing or trying to figure out you can wake up tomorrow and that thing could be totally obsolete. So to your point, just start, don't overthink, just do it. That's a good one. And lastly, just out of curiosity, what are you kind of consuming or reading learning right now that's helping shape how you think?

Joseph Lee: Um, well, I am doom scrolling on tech Twitter a lot, which has shaped my paranoia, uh, about the future of the industry. So, um, I uh, actually do a lot of that and that serves as like more of the directional compass of like bleeding edge tools and things happening that I try to incorporate into like what I do in my pocket product. Not all of that is true in like the day to day, so I actually balance that out by having dinners and talking to founders in more traditional spaces. And you realize that, whoa, there's a huge echo chamber of uh, yes, like this tech talk of me thinking that everywhere. Yeah, it's like some people have not even used AI and I'm like, okay,

Kosta Panagoulias: that's, that's more of speaking of moats, like we were talking about before, I could see a moat in the next, next, you know, little while. We're like, human interaction is like a moat. We're like imagine you're a company that has like, we have human support. It's like, oh, wow. Yeah, that might be like a rare thing, you know?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, yeah. Like human events, human marketing. Yeah.

Kosta Panagoulias: There's a lot like we are human. Like we, we do need that. Ah, you can never replace that, I don't think.

Joseph Lee: Yeah, agreed.

Kosta Panagoulias: Anyways, but um, Joseph, this was fun, man. I really appreciate taking the time. Um, if someone wanted to reach out, learn more, where's the best place they could do?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, you can, uh, connect with me on LinkedIn, I guess. Costa, uh, you can share the link or you can follow me along on YouTube. I just started a YouTube channel. I think I have, like, 50 subscribers.

Kosta Panagoulias: Nice. Like your own personal channel.

Joseph Lee: Personal channel with, like, founder learnings and lessons. Yeah.

Kosta Panagoulias: Amazing. I'll definitely subscribe to that and, um, any. Any, um, anything you want to offer our listeners. Any SaaS, companies who are thinking of super demo. Do you guys do any promotion?

Joseph Lee: Yeah, totally.

Kosta Panagoulias: Yeah.

Joseph Lee: Yeah. I mean, obviously. Yeah. If anyone finds value in Superdemo, try it out and you can message me, um, for 30 off your subscription. Happy to be helpful and whatever I can. I can also drop the discount link or discount code directly in your.

Kosta Panagoulias: Awesome. All right, sounds good. Sounds good. Joseph, this is a pleasure. I, uh, had a lot of fun. I really appreciate the time. This was super insightful, not only for me, but I'm sure everyone listening. So I, uh, do appreciate the time and I hope we can do this again sometime.

Joseph Lee: Totally. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Kasa.

Kosta Panagoulias: All right, have a cheers.