Supademo: 13 Questions Answered From the Starter Story Interview, With Timestamps

Supademo makes interactive product demos, clickable copies of a software product that prospects can try without signing up, and its founder says the first customers came from three unglamorous steps. In the Starter Story interview, founder Joseph reports just over $250,000 a month in recurring revenue and more than 150,000 users about two and a half years after launch. The steps: rank for searches people already make, hand-build demos for founders in public threads, then show up everywhere buyers are.

We transcribed the interview with transcribe.so and asked it the same questions we ask every episode. Each answer below is written in our own words and points to who said it and the exact second, so you can check it in the video. All figures are self-reported by the founder and we have not audited them. We are not affiliated with Starter Story, and we sell a transcription service.

What does Supademo do and how does it make money?

It records a workflow in your product and turns it into a guided, clickable demo you can embed on a website or in docs (Founder, 01:37), so buyers see the key moment without signing up or talking to sales (Founder, 01:49). It is a self-serve SaaS: most revenue comes through its starter and premium tiers, which he calls the main growth engine (Founder, 01:49). The interview gives no plan prices.

What numbers does the founder share?

Annual recurring revenue of slightly over three million dollars and just over $250,000 in monthly recurring revenue, growing every month (Founder, 02:17). More than 150,000 users since launching about two and a half years ago (Founder, 00:58). He also says this is the second product he has taken past three million in annual revenue (Founder, 00:00). The host's intro uses the same monthly figure (Host, 00:04).

Who is the founder?

A builder since he was fourteen or fifteen: reselling electronics, a candle business, a clothing company, a digital agency, and in college a venture-funded B2B seafood marketplace (Founder, 02:44). The interview does not describe a technical background.

Where did the idea come from?

In every one of those ventures, he struggled to show buyers what the product was worth; recorded videos went out of date and buyers did not watch them (Founder, 03:11). To test the idea, he talked to more than a hundred B2B SaaS founders and heard the same pain (Founder, 04:03):

"People hated the sound of their own voice, and that's when I realized, hey, there's something to run with here." (Founder, 04:17)

The next test was simply whether people would pay (Founder, 04:26).

How long did it take to build, and with what?

The interview gives no build time for the first version. Today the team rotates through more than 50 tools a month, codes with AI assistants and hosts on a major cloud provider (Founder, 12:42). No running costs or margins are given anywhere in the interview.

Who is the customer?

B2B software companies that need to show their product, starting with the founders he interviewed (Founder, 04:03) and the founders he later built demos for on community forums (Founder, 08:10).

How exactly did Supademo get its first 100 users?

Asked how he would get the first 100 customers if starting over, he walks through what the team did early on, in three steps.

Step one: capture demand that already exists (Founder, 04:53).

• Bottom of the funnel: comparison pages against every competitor in the space (Founder, 05:20), the easiest way to borrow their search traffic (Founder, 05:27). Imperfect first versions went live fast, then the ones that got cited were improved (Founder, 05:34).
• Middle: dozens of free tools in adjacent jobs such as screenshots and step-by-step guides (Founder, 05:57), usable with no account or trial (Founder, 06:09).
• Top: thousands of how-to pages, each with an interactive demo of a common software task (Founder, 07:32).

Step two: do things that don't scale.

"doing things that don't scale to remove friction for buyers" (Founder, 08:03)

He offered to build free demos for founders on Reddit and Indie Hackers (Founder, 08:10), then replied in the thread with the finished demo so they could sign up and reuse it (Founder, 08:19). Other readers saw the demos and asked for one or signed up themselves (Founder, 08:31).

Step three: be everywhere your users are (Founder, 09:08).

The interview does not say how many of the first 100 customers came from each step, or when the company passed 100.

Where does the traffic come from now?

Roughly 30 to 40% of visitors from search and AI answers (Founder, 09:42), about 30% from word of mouth such as watermarks and referrals (Founder, 09:47), and about 20% from building in public on LinkedIn (Founder, 09:55). Separately, he says the free tools bring about 20% of all traffic and convert 15 to 20% of their visitors into signups (Founder, 06:27).

Which step of that early playbook could another founder copy today?

The host singles out the hand-built demos, a pattern he says he sees in many guests:

"I like to call it hand to hand combat, just going in and doing things one by one." (Host, 08:54)

His reasoning: do it a hundred times and some of those turn into customers (Host, 08:59). The founder's own order starts with the comparison pages, since that demand already exists (Founder, 04:53).

Why does it win?

He says there is no magic channel anymore (Founder, 09:11), so the goal is to be present in many places at once. Against bigger incumbents, his edge is pace:

"the only advantage you have over an incumbent is urgency and speed." (Founder, 10:46)

What went wrong?

He does not describe a failure at Supademo. The mistake he sees most in early SaaS founders is launching late while chasing perfection (Founder, 10:18), with one caveat: he still expects good craftsmanship from every product (Founder, 10:41).

What is the founder's advice?

"stop obsessing over the competition and the idea, and just start building." (Founder, 13:29)

Most markets have room for everyone, and companies more often die from internal problems than from competitors (Founder, 13:37).

What did the host take away?

He likes that the strategy is not glamorous, just what works (Host, 06:35); he files the free tools under what he calls free tool marketing (Host, 06:51); and he closes on a smaller target: aim for 10 paying customers who stay, because then you know you can get more (Host, 14:04).

What to copy

• Write the comparison pages first. People searching for your competitors by name are the closest thing to buyers you can reach on day one.
• Make the free tool part of the product. Ungated sections of the real app show its value and carry visitors straight into a signup.
• Do the work for prospects in public. A finished demo in a public thread sells to the person who asked and to everyone reading.

More from this series: free tools as an SEO engine, Reddit for your first 100 customers, every Starter Story episode answered, and our free YouTube transcript tool if you want to run the same questions on any interview.