How Business Warrior uses HowdyGo to onboard 25 new stores a month

Business Warrior builds lending software. One of their tools is PayPlan, an end-to-end in-house financing platform. Their fastest-growing market is furniture and mattress stores. When a customer walks in for financing, most stores refer the deal to an outside lender and collect a one-time fee. PayPlan lets stores run their own financing instead.

Jonathan Brooks is their COO. He built their training hub, owns product demos, and decided to bring in HowdyGo.

We talked to Jonathan about how they use interactive demos to onboard 25 new stores a month. He talks about the ways that AI cut demo build time down from hours to five minutes, and what 25-30% operational gains from product demos actually means for their company.

Training customers in UAT environments wasn't working

Business Warrior used to train their customers in UAT environments. For every new customer, they had to configure the environment, test all the flows, and make sure everything was set before training and onboarding calls started.

"We would rush to configure, rush to get them into UAT, then have to test every single thing. And this was all before even getting on a call with a customer."

Jonathan was looking into building a demo environment in Lovable from scratch. His VP of product pushed back because of the amount of maintenance lift that could turn into. Instead, they asked Claude which demo tool to use and HowdyGo came up.

"Within five minutes of looking at HowdyGo, I was like — done. Sold."

How a fintech platform uses interactive demos

Business Warrior uses HowdyGo for two things: sales demos and customer onboarding.

They want to use it for top of funnel marketing, too, but their main pain point right now is in CS and sales demos, so they’re starting there.

The onboarding piece is where most of the demo work lives. Every new store (customer) gets a self-serve training hub as part of their onboarding, and demos are a huge part of that onboarding experience. To build it all out, the account management team contributes individual modules, and Jonathan is the one grooming every screen and making sure the AI-generated content is accurate and on-brand.

They add around 25 new stores a month. At that volume, reducing human touchpoints and QC in training is really the only way to scale.

What do the numbers look like?

Their main success metric is around getting new customers to be actively lending. Specifically, they want to see five new loans in the system within three days of going live. They’ve built the training and demos to make sure customers can do that easily. 

So when it comes to measuring demos, they see them as a leading indicator of that onboarding metric and getting people live.

They also feel big wins in time saves for the account management team. He estimates that interactive demos equate to 25-30% operational gains. In practice, that means that time that used to go into setting up UAT environments and prepping for training calls now goes into following up with customers and getting them live faster.

"The account management team can now focus on getting the customer live, rather than spending all their time getting ready for a training."

AI turned hours of demo work into five minutes

Jonathan's team uses AI heavily across the business, so when he evaluated HowdyGo, the Howdy AI functionality wasn't a novelty. It was a requirement.

"The reason I chose HowdyGo was because their implementation of AI takes something scary and the thought of “oh my god, I'm going to have to spend hundreds of hours building this”, and turns it into five minutes. The ability to ship guided walkthroughs in five minutes and have them be 90% accurate is the reason I choose to pay HowdyGo every single month."

Jonathan's advice to people starting with demos

"Be really clear on the business problem you're trying to solve. Once you're set up, it takes things that were hours and turns them into minutes. But you do have to plan."

He's also clear that interactive demos replaced more than he expected. Business Warrior tried support articles, three-minute videos, ten-minute videos, none of them landed.

"It synthesizes the sweet spot of getting the product understood in the medium that meets the customer where they're at. I used to think I needed quick reference guides, one-pagers, support docs. What we actually need is the interactive demo, because it solves all of those problems in one."

What's next for their team

Top of funnel demos are next. Jonathan wants demos on the main website to work earlier in the sales process, and is looking at how HowdyGo could support enterprise customers who want their own branded training programs as an add-on service.

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