STAGE YOUR PRESENTATION WITH PROPS 139 Short. A good demo does not suck the wind out of your audience.
Simple. A good demo is simple and easy to follow. “It should
communicate no more than one or two key messages. The goal
is to show the audience enough to get them tantalized but not
so much that they get bewildered.”^3 Sweet. A good demo “shows the hottest features and differen-
tiates your product from the competition’s.” There’s more: “You
have to show real functionality, though. Imagine that every
time you show a feature someone shouts, ‘So what?’ ”^4 Swift. A good demo is fast paced. “Never do anything in a
demo that lasts more than fifteen seconds.”^5 Substantial. A good demo clearly demonstrates how your
product offers a solution to a real-world problem your audi-
ence is experiencing. “Customers want to do things with your
product, so they want to know how the product works.”^6As noted in Scene 9, Jobs nailed all of Kawasaki’s conditions
for a good demo when he launched the iPhone 3G at the W WDC
in October 2008. The phone ran on the faster, 3G cellular net-
works, an upgrade to the second-generation (2G) wireless data
networks. Jobs’s words from the presentation are listed in the
left column of Table 12.1, and the right column describes the
corresponding slides.^7
In a brief demo, Jobs had met Kawasaki’s criteria for a great
demo.
It’s short. The EDGE-versus-3G demo lasted less than two
minutes. It’s simple. What could be more simple than showing two
websites loading on a smartphone? That was as complicated as
it got. It’s sweet. Jobs placed the 3G network in a head-to-head face-
off with its primary competitor, the EDGE network. It’s swift. Jobs keeps the demo moving but remains silent at
critical points to build the drama. It’s substantial. The demo resolves a real-world problem: wait-
ing an excruciatingly long time for graphically rich sites to load.