twelve people signed up for the live demo and one turned up, is a demo just the wrong channel this early

Numbers from doing this badly for a year: group demos ran at about a one in six show rate for cold signups, one to one calls booked directly off a reply ran at about two in three, and a three minute recording sent in an email got watched by roughly a third of recipients and produced more replies than either. Same product, same list. The format was doing almost all of the work.

Three weeks for twelve signups also tells you the top of the funnel is the real problem, not the demo. If the same three weeks had produced 200 people who read one useful thing you wrote, the no-shows would not matter. Fix the volume before you optimise the format.

One practical change that doubled my show rate: confirm the day before with one line that names their specific problem rather than the product. Generic reminders get archived with everything else.

Twelve signups from cold outreach is twelve people being polite. A calendar entry costs them nothing at the moment they book it and costs them thirty minutes at the moment it fires, and by then whatever mild curiosity they had has been buried by their actual job. This is not a you problem, it is what a scheduled group call costs a stranger.

Send the recording and stop scheduling anything for a while. Record the walkthrough once, keep it under four minutes, and reply to every cold conversation with the ninety second section that matches what that person complained about. It converts worse per viewer than a live call and enormously better per hour of yours, and at your stage your hours are the scarce thing.

Going to disagree with abandoning live calls. The one person who turned up and stayed nine minutes is worth more than the eleven who did not, and you have not followed up properly. Ask them what they were hoping to see and what made them leave at nine minutes, in one short message with no pitch. Two of my first four paying customers came from that exact message, and both had ghosted me first.