[SaaS Series] Product Demos That Accelerate Sales Onboarding and Adoption With Joseph Lee

Joseph Lee is the Co-founder and CEO of Supademo, an AI-powered platform that helps teams create interactive product demos and guides for sales, marketing, onboarding, and customer education. He leads Supademo’s product vision and growth, building intuitive, self-guided experiences that enable companies to simplify product education and drive engagement. Previously, Joseph co-founded Freshline, a B2B e-commerce platform for food distributors, where he served as CPO and led product strategy and execution from customer insight through product development.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:37] Joseph Lee explains how Supademo helps teams showcase products and workflows
• [5:50] The role of interactive demos in helping customers understand product value faster
• [8:18] Customer onboarding, training, and product adoption with Supademo
• [15:14] Why Joseph uses reverse trials to help users experience product value
• [20:41] AI-powered features for creating personalized and scalable product demos
• [22:38] Supademo’s evolution from self-serve SaaS to AI-powered and agentic demos
• [36:30] Joseph shares how companies use Supademo for in-app onboarding and product tours
• [38:51] Lightspeed’s use of Supademo across sales, onboarding, marketing, and training

In this episode…

Product demos are no longer just a sales tool — they can shape how prospects understand a product, how customers learn to use it, and how teams drive adoption at scale. But what makes a demo effective enough to move users from curiosity to real product value?

Joseph Lee, a two-time startup founder and product builder, says the most effective demos help customers understand value faster by letting them experience a product rather than passively watch it. He highlights the power of interactive, self-serve experiences that can support sales, onboarding, training, enablement, and product education. Supademo’s product-led approach also allows users to experience advanced features through reverse trials, while AI helps teams personalize, translate, maintain, and scale demos more efficiently. As these experiences become more intelligent and agentic, companies can guide users through workflows with less friction and help them reach meaningful outcomes sooner.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz speaks with Joseph Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Supademo, about using product demos to accelerate sales, onboarding, and adoption. They discuss interactive self-serve demos, AI-powered personalization, and in-app product education. Joseph also shares how Supademo evolved from SaaS into an agentic demo platform.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Joseph Lee on LinkedIn
• Supademo
• Freshline
• Next36
• Claude
• OpenAI
• Slack
• Tailwind
• React
• Next.js
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Lightspeed
• ”How Lightspeed scales customer education and enablement with interactive demos”
• Growth Unhinged with Kyle Poyar
• First Round Review

Related episodes:

• “[SaaS Series] Revenue You Lose When You Stay Live With Melissa Kwan” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “The Webinar Framework That Turns Trust Into Sales Calls With Jon Schumacher” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Online Forms and Productivity With Aytekin Tank of Jotform” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Automation Solutions with Wade Foster Founder of Zapier” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “How do we build demos that are more interactive, more self-serve, get people hands on instead of just watching?”
• “How do I add value before asking for anything in return?”
• “I think first impressions really matter, right? People are really, really busy.”
• “You want to give people the full profile of your capabilities and what you can do.”
• “You can translate a single demo into 50 plus languages, so you can build once and serve customers globally.”

Action steps:

1. Create interactive, self-serve product demos: Giving prospects hands-on experiences helps them understand product value faster without waiting for a sales conversation.
2. Deliver value before asking for a commitment: Offering useful demos or product experiences upfront can build trust, generate interest, and make potential customers more willing to engage.
3. Let users experience your strongest features early: Reverse trials can expose customers to premium capabilities first, helping them identify which features matter most before choosing a plan.
4. Use AI to scale product education: AI-powered voiceovers, translations, personalization, and automation can help teams create and maintain effective demos for more customers with less manual work.
5. Extend demos beyond sales: Using interactive demos for onboarding, training, marketing, and in-app education can improve product understanding, accelerate adoption, and support customers throughout their journey.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Joseph Lee of Supademo. You can check it out. It’s Supademo.com. And Joseph, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

Of course, Melissa Kwan, founder of eWebinar. This is how Joseph and I met. And she goes deep actually, you know, we went and, you know, the revenue you lose when you stay live. And we talked all about her journey there also. Jon Schumacher, we talked about, he actually, he introduced Melissa to me. He talked about the webinar framework that turns trust into sales calls. And, you know, really, you can use that Supademo to do that. You know, his methodology for what they do over here because its exceptional product demos in minutes, not days, with Supademo. Some other interesting ones, Joseph, I heard you talk, you’ve talked about product-led marketing. A really good episode was I the founder of Jotform on the podcast and he talks about growing 25 million users, because of the product-led marketing and, you know, it’s not just enough to have a free product, obviously, it’s got to be good. So it was really interesting how he grew the company there. Also one of the co-founders of Zapier, since this is part of the SaaS series, that was a really good episode. Wade Foster talked about that. So that many more on InspiredInsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships. One we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. Number two, we are an easy button for a company’s gifting. You know, gifting, staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects, simple, easy. And I like affordable. So, you know, for me, Joseph, I’m always looking at ways to give to my relationships. And I found no better way to profile the people I admire and share with the world what they’re working on the podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail. So you can check out Rise25.com. You can also email support@inspired insider.com.

I am excited to introduce Joseph Lee, the co-founder and CEO of Supademo. It’s an agentic demo platform which helps teams create world class product demos and self demoing agents at scale. So he has a really interesting journey from Korea to Vancouver to New York. He’s grown Supademo in a company that’s used by over 200 000 users and 3000 paying organizations, really earning recognition from Forbes, G2 and many more. Joseph, thanks for coming on and for being here.

Joseph Lee: 03:18

Wow. Thank you, for the kind introduction and thank you for having me. Excited to chat today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:24

So let’s start off with Supademo and what you do. I gave a brief introduction. I’m going to pull up the websites. If you’re listening to the audio, I’m going to pull up. There is a video version here. So we’ll pull it up and you can walk us through a little bit about Supademo.

Joseph Lee: 03:37

Yeah, yeah, I know there were a lot of buzzwords thrown around. So, I can explain what the agentic demo automation platform means. So in practical terms, what we do is we help software companies better demonstrate their product, their workflows, their features, their value moments, and ultimately why they matter and use that across sales, onboarding, enablement, marketing, training, really anywhere a customer needs to get to value and get to understanding quickly. So we let people do this through a variety of different ways. AI agents, as you kind of alluded to, that help qualify, help, guide, help onboard and help demo your product or your process or your workflow for you 24/7 in any language.

And then we have our core demo platform that allows folks to create kind of interactive, clickable, self-serve demos that get them hands-on and trying the product or trying the process without having to talk to sales or talk to, you know, someone on the team and wait around. So, that’s kind of what we do in a nutshell. And I think you mentioned some of our customers, including, you know, Jotform, I think if you look at several of their product-led marketing efforts, you’ll see Supademo embedded and you see some of the other customers, like light speed and easy and, other companies here in our case study page.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 05:06

We’ll get some examples. We’ll talk about some real specific examples. But I want to start with, I mean, you had a successful company, Freshline, which we’ll get into. And I’m curious as to why Supademo. But I want to start with how when you first started it, obviously you had some hypothesis and how people would use this. Can you talk about the evolution of, okay, here’s how people started using it. And then here’s, you know, because you have a lot of differences, when I was looking at the page, different use cases now, right? From sales enablement to customer success to product marketing to onboarding, to product internal training, customer support. What was the idea? What did it start with? You’re like, okay, this is what people are going to use it for because I’m sure it didn’t start with all of these.

Joseph Lee: 05:50

Yeah. Well, when you first start off, I think there’s a first of all, you know, I think there’s a preconceived notion and misconception that demoing is only for salespeople. But if you really think about it for any knowledge worker, whether they’re in training, whether they’re telling a colleague how to do something or they’re onboarding a customer onto a critical feature that’s going to retain them, you have this common trait of needing to demonstrate a workflow and why it matters, right? And doing so in the past has been really, really painful. So you obviously like record your screen, you screw up, you say the wrong thing, you click the wrong spot, and hate the sound of your own voice. You constantly have to redo it every single time your product changes. And I kind of lived that reality when I was building Freshline when, you know, we went through like a massive pivot during Covid and I was suddenly tasked with cold calling people and getting them on calls to kind of explain what we did and why it mattered. But, no one wanted to watch our videos. It was passive. It was long, it was not very engaging.

But when I actually got them on a call and it was more interactive and more of a back and forth session, and I got them to click through the experience. That’s when they got it. They’re like, holy crap, how do I adopt Freshline in my company? So that was kind of the moment of, hey, the first wedge being, you know, how do we build demos that are more interactive, more self-serve, get people hands on instead of just watching to get them to understand value. Because a lot of humans learn by doing. And from there, we kind of realized, hey, this actually applies across so many different verticals within a company because, as I said, demonstrating how your product works and why it matters is more difficult than it should be.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:47

What was next? I mean, you know, obviously sales has a very compelling value proposition, right? I mean, if you look at the, you know, the page, it’s like double your revenue or, you know, that’s just a compelling one. What was the next like, I guess, branch of a solution? Like, you know, what people can use? It’s just easier to sell sales. Like it’s like, oh, you’re going to make sales. What was next in the evolution of like, okay, here’s how people are adopting it.

Joseph Lee: 08:18

If you actually click our Supademo logo there, you can actually, and then scroll down to the main image and then just click on the tab. If you click guided demo down a little bit below or you see right there, the second tab is a guided demo. Yeah, you can actually click through an interactive demo. Just a basic kind of demo walk through experience. So you can overlay voiceovers, you can have clickable tooltips. And what you’ll notice is the product experience that’s cloned. The actual demo is a copy of your actual product. So it’s not a video, it’s not a screenshot. We’ve actually cloned your actual product for people to get hands on with and learn about, without actually having to sign up or book a demo or fill out a form.

But, you know, getting back to your question there, Jeremy, I think, we, we, we always launched as a product led kind of self-serve motion. And the whole notion there was, why don’t we just let people, get to value quickly without, you know, forcing them to talk to us or forcing them to subscribe and a byproduct, a benefit of that is, yeah, people explore different use cases and try out different things, based on their needs. So the second big area was, was actually around training and instructional design and tutorials. So a lot of CS teams onboarding teams or having to jump on calls or create videos on a regular cadence to get people to understand how to do specific tasks. And we noticed that they were replacing it with Supademos just like this that allowed their customers to not only click through it, but also share it with their champions, people on their team. So that, you know, they could help drive adoption and drive software usage within their companies.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:13

This is really cool. I like to compare it to, you know, the VWO visual optimizer, except you’re the demo version. They’re like the conversion optimization version. Is that a fair comparison there?

Joseph Lee: 10:29

I’m not aware of VWO.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:31

Yeah, I mean, they just do conversion optimization, you know, but they, they kind of like allow you to make these like easy changes and things like that. And yours is really, it’s not the same type of product at all, it’s just for a different use case, you know? Completely. Right. So yeah, this is really interactive for someone to, like their whole website interaction, actually. This is pretty cool. Yeah.

What about getting customers early on? I know you’re scrappy. What were some of the things that you had to do early on?

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