Having worked on software professionally for a few years now, I’ve noticed something cool: the moment you feel the most proud of your product, and the moment your customer decides to give you money, is very often the same.

This is called the ‘holy shit’ moment, for pretty obvious reasons. The moment you look at a piece of software (or anything, really) and go Holy shit, it can do that? is usually quite quickly followed by the moment of you opening your wallet to pay for said thing.

As an example of this, we recently showcased a demo of one of our ML tools to a large company prospect. During the meeting, one of the main stakeholders commented:

This is the best software demo I’ve ever seen from a company like this.

This is, more or less, the ‘holy shit’ moment. And, sure enough, they signed with us a ~$200k deal not long afterwards.

How’d we get this to happen? Well, truth is — we were going for it from the start. We were optimizing for the ‘holy shit’ moment.

A holy shit moment can be optimized in two directions: the backend and the frontend. The frontend optimization does most of the work — the visualization of an ML algorithm, for example, can get a reaction like that. Seeing it work in real time — seeing it do exactly what the user wanted in a frictionless, intuitive way — that is how you can optimize for the moment.

Of course, the trap most creators fall into is that they over optimize for the frontend and forget about the backend. The backend is that the product actually has to DO the thing you’re saying it can do. This is not always difficult — you can package a relatively simple tool in a ‘holy shit’ frontend wrapper — but many people try and promise the world with their design. You do that, and at best you become a bullshot — at worst, the next fraud case on Wall Street Journal.

A good way to stop yourself from doing this is to make your demos live and interactive with a lot of user input. This forces you to worry about making a good demo — which you should! — and keep things very tight to have a response for anything a customer might ask for. And by response, I mean app response — if a customer asks what happens when you press a button, and you reply with “That feature hasn’t been made yet”, then you aren’t getting a ‘holy shit’ moment. Keep it clean, keep it tight, keep it real — that’s how you win.