Day 26 — building the marketing demo

Every screenshot of barn software I've ever seen looks dead. A static dashboard with sample data and arrows pointing at things. It's the cheapest thing to ship and the worst at communicating what the product feels like.

Spent today building an interactive demo I can drop on the marketing site instead. The shape:

• A ProductDemo client component that holds six animated screens — Manager Dashboard, Horse Board, Trainer Schedule, Client Portal, Show Calendar, Flexible Billing.
• Auto-advances every ~4 seconds. Click any feature in the left nav to jump directly. Fade and slide transitions between screens.
• The Show Calendar screen is itself interactive within the demo — clicking a show in the demo swaps the RSVP detail panel. Visitors can actually click around, not just watch.
• Wrapped in a phone frame so the implication is "this is what it looks like on the device you'll actually use it on."

Most of the day was the easing curves and timing. The demo has to be slow enough to read but fast enough that an impatient viewer doesn't bounce. Landed on ~4 seconds per screen with a manual click-to-jump option for anyone who wants to drive themselves. Tested on three phones because mobile is where this actually matters.

A small detail I'm proud of: the Show Calendar screen reuses real ClassPicker and chip components from inside the product. Same source of truth as the actual UI. When the product evolves, the demo evolves with it. No "marketing screenshots" to remember to update.

The marketing site itself is still in a weird state — there's no public domain pointing at it yet (I never got around to buying a name and the working name I've been using since Day 1 is starting to feel placeholder-y). At some point soon I have to commit to a real brand and a real URL. The product is real now; the company can be too.

Tomorrow: more pre-launch polish — the password reset flow needs its rough edges sanded down, and there's a stale migration in CI that's been bugging me for a week.