first discovery call tomorrow — do you demo or just ask questions for 30 minutes Discovery Calls

Rough shape for 30 minutes:

• 2 min: why you got in touch, plus the honest sentence about where you are ("four customers, built it because X")
• 15 min: their world. How do you do this today, what happens when it goes wrong, when did it last go wrong, what did that cost
• 8 min: show the two screens that touch what they just described. Not a tour. Two screens.
• 5 min: what happens next, with a date attached

The reason people say don't demo is that a demo lets them be polite. They say "neat" about everything, you leave feeling great and you learned nothing. Questions first means the demo lands on something they've already told you hurts.

And it stops feeling like an interview the moment you ask about the last time something happened rather than about how they do things in general. "When did an invoice last go out wrong?" gets you a story. "How do you handle invoicing errors?" gets you a policy statement that isn't true.

Record it, with permission. You will not remember it accurately. I thought I was a good listener until I played back my first three calls and heard myself interrupting people to defend features nobody had attacked.

Also: silence. When they finish an answer, count three before you speak. The best information in every call I've done arrived in the second half of an answer, after the pause.

You're an engineer, so: you're not selling, you're reducing uncertainty. You have a hypothesis about what's painful and roughly what it costs them. The call either raises or lowers your confidence in it. Going in with three specific things you want to find out makes the whole thing feel much less like improv.

Write the three down. Look at the list at minute 20. If you haven't got them, ask directly — nobody minds a direct question at minute 20.

just demo it, people are busy and they booked to see the thing. 30 minutes of questions is annoying

Don't apologise for the state of the product and don't narrate the roadmap. New founders spend a third of the call pre-defending things nobody has complained about. If a screen is ugly they'll say so, and then you say "yeah, that's next month" and move on.

End with a specific next step or the call was worth nothing. Not "I'll send some information over". Something like: "I'll set up an account with your two branches already in it and send it Thursday — can you run one real job through it by the end of next week?" Then you find out whether they meant any of it.