Acquisition project | Storylane

Storylane provides interactive and scalable product demos for SaaS companies for faster and higher conversions. It solves the problem of dynamic demand for sales time and conversion drop due to delays between a request for sales demo and the actual sales call.

The primary user group is growth and marketing folks who are primarily responsible for MQL to SQL conversion.

Storylane provides interactive demo creation platform for SaaS companies who use it to easily and quickly create and share product demos with their customers. It solves the problem of dynamic demand for sales time and conversion drop due to delays between a request for sales demo and the actual sales call.

1. Understanding the product

• What is the fundamental need or want that the product is solving?

The market is saturated with software options, making it essential for new users to have clear guidance on product functionality. Providing effective product demonstrations is crucial, especially for first-time users. However, creating these demos manually often involves tasks like screen capturing, recording, and editing, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. This highlights the need for a streamlined demo creation platform, enabling SaaS companies to efficiently produce high-quality, interactive product demos that drive faster conversions, shorter sales time and thus better user adoption and understanding.

Also the process of scheduling a demo for SaaS product is cumbersome and takes weeks - one has to go through phone calls with sales, multiple emails, and not to mention the pre-qualification process. Hence there is a need to share async product demos which users can discover at their own pace and depth.

• What are the basic features and functionalities that the product provides?

Storylane offers a robust set of features tailored to simplify demo creation for SaaS products:

• • Screen Capture and Recording – Easily capture and record screens to build a visual demo
  • Annotations and Overlays – Add text, highlights, and arrows to guide users through the demo.
  • Interactive Clickable Demos – Allow users to explore by clicking within the demo.
  • Embed Options – Easily integrate demos into websites (slack, hubspot etc) or emails
  • Demo Publishing- making the demo available for web
  • Demo Sharing- functionality to share demo with team

• What other ways are users using to solve the same problem? If it is a new category, how else were people solving the problem?
• • Screen Recording Tools (e.g., Loom, Clueso, Kroto) – Easy to consume but lacks interaction. Very one directional
  • Presentation Software (e.g., PowerPoint) – Customizable but static - outdated.
  • Video Editing Software (e.g., Adobe Premiere) – High quality but time and effort-intensive - also one directional non interactive.
  • Interactive Demo Platforms (e.g., Storylane, Navattic) – Interactive, easy, no-code.
  • Prototyping Tools (e.g., Figma) – Great for concepts, lacks real product experience, requires designers to effort every time there's an update.
  • Onboarding Software (e.g., Appcues) – In-app guidance but limited demo control.
  • Custom Demos – Fully tailored but resource-heavy.

1.1 Product Exploration:

We started off with exploring the product on all available platforms—mobile web, desktop web, iOS, and Android apps and got answers to questions we had about product.

Web View:

Following is the screenshot of dashboard post creation of 1st demo

Mobile web view:

Following is the screenshot captured for the mobile view of a demo

IOS and Android app:

Storylane does not have IOS / Android app

Observations:

Web: Product's core hook was creating the demo under 10minutes. When we tried out the product, it actually fared well on the promise. We were able to learn about the various features of the product and build a demo in more or less 10 minutes. When I published the demo - that was a big AHA moment for me. The onboarding could have been better. But the product wasn't too complex to navigate through.

Mobile web: Mobile experience was not ideal. Demo customization options were not available.

Product has two variants (with different pricing plans):

HTML (premium paid plan)

• They feel way higher quality, which for some people is worthwhile.
• The ability to edit content in your demo after capturing.
• The ability to personalize your app for demos after capturing.
• Tend to be either a bit more expensive or a lot more expensive.

Videos and screenshots (free and basic plan)

• Typically pretty cheap
• Quick to get started
• Captures interactions as a video or a screenshot, which can sometimes feel pretty weird to the viewer.

1.2 Researching user feedback:

I used the product multiple times and understood different use cases. Went through all the features extensively. Gained insights into the primary value proposition. Used competing products to see how your product differs. Spoke to users, did primary and secondary research.

Reddit users seem to have mixed opinion towards Storylane. Some broader trends are highlighted below:

Pros:

1. Free tier for the product lets users try out the product

2. Serves a wider pool of applications across marketing and sales vs other tools which are biased towards either

3. starting out is cheaper - First paid tier is $40 vs $20k for Consensus

4. Easy to setup and start - 10minutes vs almost a month with Consensys

5. Account Reveal: It shows which companies visited your demo based on IP tracking—super useful for targeted follow-ups.

Cons:

1. inability to organize demos - the demo library hierarchy is just one level deep

Organic search results

Google Keywords:

1. "interactive product demo"

2. "automated product demo" - SEO ranking 3
3. "product demo" - SEO ranking 3
4. "sales demo tool" - SEO ranking 4

Partner program

1.3 Core Value Proposition

Helps companies adopt PLG by explaining to the user what their product does through a guided product demonstration that takes few minutes to setup.

Understanding the User

Based on my research and discussions, the users of Storylane range from large enterprises to SMBs, from cybersecurity to sales tech companies. Most often they deploy the product on their website and track conversions.

example: https://www.gong.io/platform-tour/

Typical Scale: 10 employees to 1000+ employees

Typical industry: Sales tech, cybersecurity, Marketing tech, HR tech, Edutech, Market intelligence

The free tier offered by Storylane makes it accessible by the smaller companies. Product has a unique PLG advantage because of this feature.

Here are a few comments:

" I dove into a bunch of them: Navattic, Floik, Walnut, and Storylane. Each tool had its own setup and quirks, but Storylane was the winner for me. Super user-friendly, just the right mix of features, and the price is on point. Unlike some of the others, it runs smoothly without any glitches. Some tools were either too buggy or way overpriced for what they offered.

One major issue I found with Navattic was that it's purely marketing focused tool and you'd need to buy another interactive demo tool for your sales team if you have one. Storylane expands across the org with both HTML (sales) and screenshot (marketing) demos. Good balance of features, ease, and cost vs the others."

" We evaluated Navattic, Storylane and Walnut a few months back while looking for an interactive demo platform. Opted for Storylane because,

It served a much wider pool of use cases under both marketing and sales while the other tools primarily served one or the other

Their integration capabilities was far better than anyone and had both HTML and screenshot demo capabilities

Storylane was free to try without any restrictions and pricing was economical too

They provided 24x7 support which was important for us given our global team and of course, we got glowing reviews from the references"

User calls and interactions:

1. For the first set of interviews we spoke to founders who had used Storylane or similar products to create demos for their prospects. Some findings are listed below:

- Most early stage founders love the speed (less than 20 minutes) with which demos can be created and published

- Main distribution channel for the demo was to

- publish on the website

- send link as slack or email messages

- Launch the demo on product hunt

For them, the product ranked high on NEED than a want.

2. The second set of users were growth and marketers who were responsible for MQL to SQL conversions. Some findings are listed below:

- instead of speed of execution they were using product for conversions improvement

- they wanted quick editing and customization product.

- Somebody with a non technical background should be able to use the products

- They are looking to give quick demos without involving a pre-sales or solution architects or worst case Engineering folks into customer conversations

For these set of users also, product was a NEED and not just a want.

Ideal Customer Profile

Based on the ICP prioritization framework Gong would be the ICP

Understanding the market

Competitor research

HTML and Screenshot based products

Storylane is in a very competitive space with more than 20 companies offering same or similar value proposition. Some basic comparisons from the landscape:

Since most of them have similar offerings, the customer acquisition channels and ICPs are also very very similar.

Video demo tools

There was also the space of video demos covered by the companies such as Clueso, Kroto, Vidyard etc. Regarding these options, my key takeaways from user interviews was around frequent updating of the screen recording for every new product change. The whole video needed to be re-recorded to tune it for new feature or UI updates.

Macro market research:

1. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-05-17-gartner-says-adaptable-sales-organizations-must-rethink-ther-customer-understanding-engagement-and-operating-models#:~:text=72%25%20of%20customers%20said%20they%20prefer%20a%20%E2%80%9Crep%2Dfree%20experience%2C%E2%80%9D
2. https://www.walnut.io/blog/product-demos/full-funnel-demos/#:~:text=45%25%20of%20the%20respondents%20from%20Walnut%E2%80%99s%20buyers%E2%80%99%20survey%20admitted%20their%20last%20SaaS%20buying%20experience%20was%20more%20complex%20than%20they%20wanted%2C%20while%2075%25%20of%20the%20respondents%20to%20Walnut%E2%80%99s%20sellers%E2%80%99%20survey%20said%20they%20want%20the%20sales%20process%20to%20be%20shorter.
3. https://www.walnut.io/blog/product-demos/full-funnel-demos/#:~:text=Based%20on%20TrustRadius%20research%2C%2070,try%20things%20on%20their%20own.
4. https://www.walnut.io/blog/product-demos/full-funnel-demos/#:~:text=1.%20Buyers%20want%20to%20view%20demos%20without%20sales%20reps.%C2%A0
5. https://www.walnut.io/saas-sellers-survey/

Trends

In a world where attention span is reducing every day, conveying the true value proposition becomes more critical. Not surprisingly, during our market research, we found that a lot of website visitors have slowly started gravitating towards a voice agent instead of typing out their queries for more efficient search experiences. This is especially true for tier-2 and tier-3 markets. A decent solve will be a pre-sales assistant that can convince and convey the value offerings in a conversational tone.

Tailwinds

1. the market is trending towards low-latency, self-serve demonstrations on websites and product pages
2. A staggering 80-90% of the buyers are looking for 100% self-serve options at every stage of the buying process across different sizes of businesses.
3. Visitors like a low touch discovery process.
4. More than 61% users said that they reconsider their purchase if they are asked to enter their credentials before for the demo.
5. Not surprisingly, the popularity of CTA - “product demo/tours” has increased by almost 90% since 2022 based on a survey of ~5000 B2B SaaS websites .
6. CTRs in traditional marketing (source: databox.com/campaignmonitor.com) channels such as PPC/email/FB/Linkedin ads is <2% (source: databox.com/campaignmonitor.com) vs tours/demo is 25 to 35%.

🔥 Self research - buyers prefers to act independently and do their own research before engaging with a salesperson

➡️ Product led growth (PLG) - prospects essentially educating themselves on a product without the guidance of a salesperson.

7. PLG leaders are growing 50% year-over-year, far faster than traditional SaaS companies (21%). As companies are looking to be more efficient they are looking for ways to adopt more product-led strategies. (Source: OpenView 2022 SaaS Benchmarks Report). In this PLG world, prospects do their own discovery, eliminating the need for lengthy discovery calls altogether.

Market Sizing

Based on current product line, $57 million is very achievable for Storylane. The largest company in the space is doing close to a similar figure. The biggest ones such as Intercom have launched multiple products across sales landscape.

Of course as Storylane reimagines the TAM and brings out more sub products and upsell opportunities, the TAM is likely to increase.

Another way to look at the market size is to look at the current consumption trends in the target industry.

SaaS companies spend roughly 80 hours of demo/ month on manually provided demos. Most companies keep on an average 7 Account Execs for this job. Based on average AE salaries in the US (more than 17k SaaS companies in USA alone), this translates to $226,000 / year spent on product demos on an average per SaaS company.

For 32000 SaaS companies this translates to roughly 7 billion dollar spent on manual demos per year. (TAM)

40% of these have some form of product demo on the websites - roughly $3 Billion SAM

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/global-demo-automation-software-market-size-2031-growth-ulcaf/

What will drive TAM expansion?

The PLG wave is taking over Software industry. Here are a few snapshots of how it will impact the product demonstrations space:

Reimagining the TAM for tomorrow

What new product lines are possible? Where is the industry heading?

Storylane does more than $3.5Mn revenue. Product is in early scaling stage, not in PMF stage.

Although the channel selection framework would be much more useful at the mature stage of the product, we still use it here to identify general patterns that can help us identify the trends.

Based on channel selection framework and on the fact that we are an early scaling company, we'll choose following 3 channels:

1. One Referral Program
2. One Paid channel- Google Paid Ads
3. Organic

1. Keyword research

From Google keyword planner, we figured some of the direct keywords that prospects look for and the kind of monthly it generates. Applying the SEO framework as follows:

Understanding the ICP and identifying the gaps

Analysis:

1. Here we can see that competitor product searches have very high search volume.
2. For example Consensus has upto a 1M search volume per month. Also, the effort to rank on the top is fairly less as Storylane is not even ranked till the 10th page.
3. To add to this average cost per click is quite low for both - especially for consensus.

Hence we can clearly design the strategy to target these kind of keywords which are satisfy our following criteria.

1. Low effort to rank on the top
2. quick to proof of concept
3. quick to scale (high potential monthly signups)

How to think about Content

We will address this gap by creating targeted articles on this search case with relevant headlines that can be published to enhance Storylane's visibility in searches capturing the interest of Gong- which is our prioritized ICP.

Content strategy

1. Comparisons between features of competition (mentioning them in the keywords) vs us
2. Since the space is super competitive with no product differentiation, we need to emphasize on our rights to win - this could be features, support, service, geographical or language supports, ancillary value added services etc.

Tracking and updating the content strategy will be a continuous job

I am not prioritizing or using content loop but here is an example of one:

Hook:

increase conversions by up to 30% with 10 minutes of work; Example how XXX 5xed their revenue with 8 minutes of demo

Content Creator:

Brand generated content; Podcast with customers and users

Distribution channel:

• Linkedin content and short videos distribution algorithm;
• Podcasts with customers and users

Calculating LTV

In our case Average order value that we use for TAM calculations is 15,000 USD per year - including some upsell potential through VAS we come to a figure of 20,000 USD per year

Frequency - once per year

Retention - In case of Storylane customer becomes more sticky as the time passes. This is because the library of demonstrations grows bigger and richer as users continue to refine or add demos to it. Since the entire product demo landscape is not more than 5 years old and also because our users conversations mentioned doubling down on ARR/account YOY, we can make an assumption of a retention period of 7 years.

LTV = 20000 * 1* 7 = 140,000 USD

From founder interviews of similar products, we have come across a CAC value of 3000-4000 USD

Ideal Customer Profile

Based on the ICP prioritization framework presented earlier we will go with Gong as the ICP

Advertising Channel

Since we have mostly B2B customers, we would have a better ROI on platform where business folks often lurk around. Naturally, Linkedin becomes our go to channel for this kind of audience.

Since we are talking about a limited number of companies in the SaaS product demo space, our intent is to utilize the segment of ICP that has the highest ROI for Storylane adoption. In our case, our ICP is Gong like companies. They use Storylane primarily to convert on the website as well as decrease the sales cycle. We also see much higher AOV in this segment.

Within Gong, we would be targeting user groups in the following order:

Campaign design:

Core objective: Drive more traffic to the website and educate about the product about interactive demos are the best tool in the market today to increase conversions.

Canva creatives

For Gong

Gong cares about higher conversions and faster sales cycle. The users gourps are highly potent and organized about their approach - very enterprisy! Hence we present to them our annual sales report as a hook. Next we find a way to bring them to the website.

For People.ai

People.ai is interested in quick experimentation and faster feedback cycles. They have good resources but crunched on time and under scaling pressure. Our campaign needs to address exactly this - quick feedback and learning from large enterprises to try out different strategies. The CTA would bring them to some customer success stories on the website.

We are not exploring this strategy. But just to update here Storylane has already got a huge number of deep integration options available to customers.

During our research we found that Storylane already has a successful partner program so we won't cover that in too much detail.

Let us talk about referral Program

1. Customer Touch points
   We started out by mapping out the touchpoints where we experience an AHA moment. This is represented like the following:

2. Define the Brag-Worthy Element
   

Brag worth element for Storylane is - we can create product demo in as fast as 10mins, this makes users rave about it. The interface is very simple to navigate and it clean and uncluttered which lets users focus on demo creation.

3. Define Your Platform Currency

4. Determine Who to Ask for a Referral
   

Users are happiest when they:

• publish the demo
• share the demo with the team

At this moment user experiences the core value proposition. We will follow a 2 step approach:

1. Step 1: We can ask for providing a product rating here.
2. Step 2: Once they rate well say 4.5* plus, we can trigger a referral request on publish/share screen to the user.

5. Referral/Partner Discovery

A. For first time demo creators:

• • Email communication as soon as user finishes creating a demo and gives a 4* plus rating
  • Once they rate well say 4.5* plus, we will trigger a referral request on publish/share screen to the user.

B. Users who have already given 4* plus ratings and are onto the next demo creation user journey, they can be triggered:

• • In-app top banner on extreme top on the dashboard
  • In-app notification on next login
  • Email communication as soon as you finish creating your demo and give a 4* plus rating
  • push notification once you created a demo

6. Referral Sharing & Communication

Referral Message:

We make sure that the core value proposition is clearly communicated and message includes reward in platform currency. We will keep the message small and appealing.

Hey Neil,

Kush gave you $40 to create 10 minute product demos

Sign up to get your free credits

7.Tracking Referrals

Referral Tracking page: