How Sked Social uses HowdyGo to show their product (without recording videos)

Sked Social is a social media scheduling platform. They're in a competitive space where most sales come from people switching tools, not finding out about the category for the first time.

Rich Henson works between product and marketing at Sked. He came to HowdyGo looking for a way to show the product at its best, without having to record and manage a ton videos. (Which can drain time and energy fast).

We talked to Rich about how he uses interactive demos, why he replaced Appcues with interactive demos, and why he'll never go back to videos.

Why he didn't want to use videos to show off the product

Rich is a product and marketing person, not a video editor. Getting screen recordings to a publishable state was taking too long, and the output wasn't good enough.

"Recording videos... It turns out I'm really bad and slow at it. I'm not a video editor, and getting things to a published state was a huge time investment."

Even if you're a pro at video editing, videos can quickly a colossal time sink that pull you away from other priorities on the marketing to-do list.

Rich knew that he needed a way to show people what Sked could really look like once they were fully set up. I.e. He wanted to show them a polished, aspirational, and interactive experience. And he had one specific technical requirement that ruled out most tools he evaluated: an editable UI.

"If you're recording screen states, I need more than just take photos. It has to have an editable UI. HowdyGo was the only tool at the time that had this at a price that made sense."

The other options he looked at were either missing the feature or priced at $500–600 a month (often with a lock-in), which wasn't aligned for his budget.

Moving on from Appcues

The push towards HowdyGo really bedded in for Rich when he hit a second problem. Sked's Appcues contract was coming up for renewal, and Rich wasn't getting value from it.

"Appcues was becoming monstrously expensive for us. I'd spend four or five hours trying to build tours, navigating through beacons, and then no one used it. It was $4,000 US a year for us."

Tours were expensive for Sked because their software is built on single pages with iframes, and Appcues couldn't target CSS elements sitting below an invisible iframe. Building tours for key parts of the product was practically impossible.

The solution was to split the problem in two:

1. Amplitude guides and surveys (already in beta) replaced those in-app experiences
2. HowdyGo came in and handled everything else

"For roughly the same price, we actually got better tooling through HowdyGo and Amplitude. Plus, no videos. Done."

The ways a social media platform uses interactive demos

Rich is the main HowdyGo user at Sked, with a customer support team member also building demos for help documentation. The way they cumulatively use interactive demos spans the product experience:

• In-app modals — Short three or four step demos that pop up inside the product
• Help documentation — Embedded clickable walkthroughs alongside written guides (managed by CS)
• Feature marketing — Demos for features that are hard to describe but easy to understand once you see them
• Replacing video content — Old product videos are being systematically swapped out with clickable, interactive demos

"Show don't tell" for features that don't describe well

Sked uses interactive demos for their approvals feature, which translates to content approvals between agencies and their clients. It can be genuinely hard to explain in words.

"Part of the value of the approvals feature is in the simplicity of the experience, and describing it doesn't do it justice. When you actually do it and click around in a demo, it connects the dots to, 'oh, well, that was easy.' Because if you tell people something is easy, they don't believe you until they do it."

Showing it in a clickable, interactive state means people get it and experience it immediately. That's not something a paragraph of copy (or a video) can replicate anywhere near as efficiently.

What do the numbers look like?

Rich has built over 150 HowdyGo demos. Not all of them are high traffic, and that's intentional.

Because demos are so quick to spin up, Rich can easily set up demos for his main uses cases, but then also build demos for edge cases, niche features, and low-traffic documentation pages that would never justify the time investment of a video. If a demo gets used once in a help doc and saves a support ticket, it has effectively paid for itself.

He also mentioned that maintainability is underrated, and can be as important as the ease of demo creation. HowdyGo is a tool anyone on the team can pick up.

"It's low maintenance. I can hand it to someone who doesn't require a lot of technical experience. If I left, someone else could feasibly take it over."

Rich's advice to anyone starting with product demos

We asked Rich what he would tell someone just getting started. His advice was to embrace the fact that UI editing tools are there to let you edit and save time. Here's what he means:

"UI editing saves an unbelievable amount of time. I could just go into my own accounts, record the stuff, edit the UI, swap out images. And if something changes in the product (which it always doe) I can go back and re-record with new clicks rather than starting from scratch."

What's next for Sked

Rich has his eyes on sandboxes. Specifically the multi-pathing capability, which would let users click around more freely rather than following a pre-selected flow. He sees sandboxes as a marketing use case as well as a sales demo use case; letting people jump in, explore, and move around the product on their own terms.

He's also continuing to replace old video content across the product. Anything that's currently a video is getting a clickable demo built for it.

"HowdyGo is one of those products where after more than a year it's like, 'you can take this out of my cold, dead hands."