Mark Smith
Reprise is the leading no-code demo creation platform; we enable sales and marketing teams to control the narrative of their product experiences. Sales teams can create customizable demos for live sales calls, or guided demos for marketing campaigns.
Tell us about yourself?
I am a repeat entrepreneur, and most recently the co-founder and co-CEO of Reprise. I previously worked at HubSpot, InsightSquared, and ELance (now Upwork). I am also a venture partner at early-stage VC firm Accomplice and a dean-appointed Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
No matter what the business it’s always the team. Great teams can do great things, and other teams do not. It’s that simple and overthinking it is just making excuses. So focus above all else on building your crew.
What problem does your business solve?
Until recently, software companies had only three options to demo their solutions: Flip through a Powerpoint presentation; create a shared portal for all sales reps; or develop an in-house demo cluster run by the engineering team.
Each of these solutions is incomplete and incurs problems that can lead to longer sales cycles, frurstrated or unsatisfied prospects, and extensive engineering resources.
Reprise solves that by offering both live “simulation” type demos as well as self guided “product tour” demos. Our platform is no-code, which means sales teams can quickly and easily customize demos without relying on engineering.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
All of the co-founders for Reprise are repeat entrepreneurs in B2B software companies. With each company, it was incredibly difficult to demo the product.
We tried several solutions, but found they all came up short. Demo creation was a key pain point, which led us to finally solve it.
What is your magic sauce?
Only Reprise can do both live “simulation” type demos, as well as self-guided “product tour” demos. Every other solution in the market does just one of these two products.
Sales and marketing teams often share assets, so any solution that can only satisfy one side ultimately limits an organization’s ability to effectively demo their product.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
We are changing the way companies sell software. Buyers’ expectations have changed. The proliferation of consumer software has led to buyers now expecting to interact with a product before they buy it. Software companies in the business world are not ready for that.
Software companies generally put the product behind their sales and customer-facing teams. What the buyer expects is the opposite, the product at the forefront of their interaction with a company.
We enable every software company to put their product first. We enable every software company to tap into product-led growth.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Our biggest challenge has been twofold: launching during a pandemic and intentionally growing quickly. We launched in March 2020, just as the world was shutting down due to COVID.
Since that time, we’ve grown from 7 team members to over 130 employees in just two years. Growing quickly means we need to adapt and scale quickly, and part of that is understanding what skillsets are needed at each stage of the business. This is hard, and complex.
However, we felt this challenge was worth undertaking because the market for demo platforms is developing rapidly. There are already a dozen competitors in this market, and slow growth is a bigger risk than scaling quickly. As an early leader in the market, we’ve challenged ourselves to stay ahead by anticipating where the market is going next and identifying what new pain points we can solve quickly.
While there are many products on the market, Reprise is primarily focused on enterprise solutions, so we continually look for new ways to help companies quickly scale their demo process to shorten the sales cycle and increase their customer base. That means we are solving the same problems we’re running into ourselves, and it requires creativity, adaptability, and a willingness to take risks.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We’re here to help enterprise companies improve their demo process. You can start by booking a demo at https://www.reprise.com/solutions/.
