Create Interactive Demos and In-App Experiences at the Speed of Speech 🎙️

Last year changed the SaaS landscape forever. We’ve noticed three major trends shaping the world of software, UX, and digital product adoption forever:

#1: AI has removed the bottlenecks on shipping product; users consuming product updates and discovering features is now the challenge

Years ago, we’d wait for a “version” of MS Office or Windows to get improvements, sometimes over multiple years. Even today, OS upgrades, major feature launches, or new versions come after months or quarters… but that’s changing. 

Considering today's most successful companies (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.), we see the breakneck speed of updates, and that’s only increasing, as velocity becomes the most important lever to capture demand. 

Although the friction to adopt has decreased, there is still a minimum barrier to switching costs—physical limitations in our brains that prevent us from making changes once we’ve adopted something. 

Using AI tools to code products (whether building from scratch or making enhancements and fixes) will become the norm, and on average, the user will have to consume a lot more information about changes and updates. This will make it harder for users and products to distribute and differentiate. 

So, it’s more important than ever for tools to support software companies in communicating changes and updates in ways and patterns that users are receptive to… and that meet their expectations around intelligence, personalization, and automation. 

That’s what we’re building towards at Chameleon.

#2: Users expect value from products even before signing up; user onboarding is therefore “shifting left”

In this cutthroat competition for user attention and product engagement, companies have been racing to reduce friction in letting individuals use their software. 

We’ve already seen examples: bottoms-up consumption at B2B (i.e., individuals can buy on a credit card, without an annual contract sold to the company); free trials and PLG motions (to delay any formal procurement processes); reverse trials and removal of gates to try premium features. 

However, there had been one enduring friction point: account creation. In all these cases, users still had to submit an email address and often verify it before accessing a platform or product. Part of this included accepting legal terms to use the software, the back-end provisioning of an account, saving user-generated data in the correct place, etc. 

Now, that’s also a friction barrier we’ve broken. Many tools, especially those from the AI era, allow you to use the software without creating an account. Marketing landing pages have changed into product dashboards and empty states, and we’ll see this trend continue throughout the world of SaaS. 

This means that teams need tools to communicate product functionality, drive discovery (especially during an evaluation), and showcase best practices, all before login.

We call this user onboarding “shifting left,” and teams need tools to connect the visitor journey pre-signup with the user journey post-signup to provide a seamless and personalized discovery journey. 

Chameleon is the only platform building this with our Interactive Demos capabilities, which add to our in-app engagement functionality.

#3: We expect software to be smarter, and users are becoming reviewers and orchestrators (instead of builders and doers)

We have now likely all experienced the joy of “vibe-coding” – communicating with an “agent” using plain language (written or spoken) and having it build software that matches your expectations. 

Tools such as Cursor, V0, Lovable, Claude Code, Bolt, etc. have shown the value in this, both with their revenues (often breaking growth records) and in the sheer amount of output and adoption. 

We’re seeing these patterns extend to pre-AI tools, with the likes of Notion, Airtable, Figma, and others all offering chat and text prompts as the basis of creation. We’re seeing more ‘connectivity tools’ such as Zapier, Clay, Pipedream, etc., also make it easier than ever to create intelligent connections/integrations/workflows, often simply starting with a prompt. 

This is the standard for software now, and this is the standard that Chameleon has set for our customers: to be able to build with voice prompts and for the software to do the first 60-80% of the heavy lifting!

In line with the trends above, we’re excited to launch: 

Anyone can now create this interactive sequence of annotated product snapshots and videos that can be embedded outside your product. You can set different action buttons, track engagement, and personalize, all without code, to help improve discovery and engagement on websites, in-app, in help docs, etc.

We’re making creating an interactive demo and in-app experiences easier than ever. You simply take a screen recording showing off a feature with some narration (like you were explaining your feature to a friend), and we’ll convert that into your annotated interactive demo.

We know showing off a feature with an Interactive Demo is just one piece of the puzzle. You’ll likely also want to drive discovery through other channels, e.g., in-app, email, social etc. So after you record your Demo, we’ll build for you the whole suite of what you need: an in-app announcement, a follow-up microsurvey, your email announcement, a help article, a LinkedIn post, etc. This makes it much easier, faster, and more consistent to launch. 

We’re revising our Free plan to be more impactful. Interactive Demos are easy to create, have a wide set of use cases, and are relatively low-cost for us to produce (especially without AI features), so we’re offering unlimited Demos on our Free plan. You don’t have to use any other Chameleon functionality. 

(although of course Demos are more powerful with the whole suite; and our Demos AI+ features, which are deeply integrated with in-app, will be available as part of a paid add-on with all annual Chameleon subscriptions.)

Showing off a feature on your marketing site and tracking views is great, but it’s not enough. We want to help you complete the journey by evaluating whether a visitor became a user and whether they took action on what they viewed. Therefore, we will track viewers, allow you to target those who become users in-app with smart audiences, and set in-app engagement goals for your Demos. This changes the game and goalposts for how effective Demos can be!

We’ve had deep A/B testing capabilities (including sophisticated data integrations and effective measurement analytics) for in-app experiences, and we’re now bringing that to Demos. You’ll be able to test variations of a Demo and we’ll help you analyze and choose the winner. Coming very soon. 

We think the features above will improve your ability to effectively engage your users and prospects and can help you gain a competitive edge in chasing adoption. 

A user onboarding or digital adoption platform should be treated as a “revenue center” in that it can meaningfully impact trial conversion, long-term retention, expansion, etc. We believe that the best tooling that equips your team to create (and experiment with) beautiful, native, personalized experiences easily will supercharge their ability to be successful. 

We’d love to talk to you about your current solution and whether (or when) it might make sense to switch. We'd also share best practices and give you ideas for use cases. 

Chameleon is trusted by hundreds of excellent brands, including Bolt, ClickUp, and Chili Piper, and we’re an established Leader in G2’s DAP category. But there’s more to come!

We’re actively building even more advanced capabilities, powered by AI, for our core Digital Adoption Platform (including “Smart Segments,” automation, Agents, etc.) and for Demos as the deepest and most sophisticated platform for user onboarding, feature adoption, and product discovery. 

If you’re not quite ready to take a demo, connect with me or follow our team account on LinkedIn to stay updated on product updates and news. 

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