Startup Success: How Supademo connected with a key investor

In our series exploring successful startup stories at our events, we spoke with Joseph Lee, co-founder and CEO of Supademo.

Supademo is an AI-powered platform for creating interactive product demonstrations, with more than 10,000 users across 75-plus companies. The company was founded by Joseph Lee and Koushik Marka just one month before attending our 2023 event in Toronto.

British Columbia-based Joseph is a lifelong entrepreneur with a background in computer science and business.

Joseph attended Collision (our former North American event, succeeded by Web Summit Vancouver) in 2022 and 2023, making multiple connections with new and existing Supademo customers, and meeting investors who helped the Supademo team close out a funding round.

We recently sat down with Joseph to discuss the founder’s experience of attending a Web Summit event, and advice for other startups.

Can you tell us a little about your background?

My name is Joseph and I’m the founder and CEO of Supademo. I started my first business when I was 14, and I’ve been a lifelong entrepreneur since.

I previously studied computer science and business at the University of British Columbia (UBC), before I dropped out in my final year to pursue entrepreneurship full-time.

Since then, I’m proud to say I’ve only worked for myself and haven’t had a traditional job. Aside from UBC, I’m a proud alum of On Deck, Next 36, Techstars, and Forbes’ 30 Under 30.

Prior to Supademo, I helped scale Freshline as co-founder and CPO, a leading sales-enablement platform built for food distributors and wholesalers.

Can you tell me about what Supademo does, and how you came to co-found it?

We help anyone create beautifully interactive product demos with generative AI. We’ve helped more than 10,000 users across 75 countries drive adoption, accelerate time-to-value, and close more deals.

Supademo was founded in 2023 when my co-founder Koushik – a fellow repeat entrepreneur – and I first met and shared our collective frustration of creating product demos and guides manually via error-prone video recordings.

At my previous company, I constantly struggled with explaining the “aha moments” of my product to our audience of wholesalers and distributors, who were laggards when it came to tech.

But once I got them on a sales demo and walked them through the magic of our product, click-by-click, that’s when they got it. I tried experimenting with other tools but found them to be resource-intensive and difficult to edit or update. At that point, I knew there had to be a better way.

In a similar vein, Koushik ran a creative agency that often created product demos and interactive content for its clients. But creating these took a ton of time, didn’t scale, and was very expensive. And from this pain was where Supademo was born!

How did you first learn about Web Summit events, and what was your first event?

I first heard about Collision in 2019 when it was announced that the conference would be moving to Toronto. I was the co-founder and CPO at Freshline at the time, which was based in Vancouver and Toronto.

I’ve only been to Collision (2022 was my first year), though I’ve also heard great things about Web Summit in Lisbon and Rio.

What stage of development was the company at before you went to the event?

I attended Collision with Supademo in 2023, only a month after Koushik and I decided to go full-time on the company. We had just passed our first 2,000 users and were starting to generate our first few thousand dollars in recurring revenue.

We were also fortunate to take part in Collision’s ALPHA program that year.

Who are some of the connections you made at the event?

I made hundreds of connections – it was an amazing melting pot of investors, fellow founders and potential customers. I personally met several angels and VCs through off-conference events held by the likes of Forum Ventures and Vancouver Takeover.

We were also lucky to meet several existing Supademo customers who were exhibiting at both the ALPHA and BETA booths, and who were actively using Supademo to demonstrate their products at their booth and on the show floor. That was amazing to see.

Did attending the event have a positive impact on your business development? If so, what was the impact?

Absolutely. Aside from the investors we met who helped us close an oversubscribed fundraising round, we were able to connect with existing Supademo customers who were serendipitously using Supademo to demonstrate their products to other attendees!

Through our own startup booth, I was able to demonstrate our product to over 200 potential users – ultimately leading to over a dozen paying customer conversions.

Would you recommend our events to other founders?

For early-stage startups or young, aspiring founders, I’d definitely recommend Collision. It’s an amazing confluence of opportunity, luck and network.

Will you be returning to the event this year, or to any other of our events?

Yep! I’ll be at a booth again at Collision 2024 in Toronto, so please, to any readers, reach out ahead of time if you’d like to connect! I’m also exploring the opportunity to attend Web Summit Rio, granted the timing works out.

What advice would you give to other founders to make the most of the event?

Firstly, large-scale conferences like Collision can be a huge resource drain or time suck if you don’t come prepared, don’t do research, or don’t have a clear goal in mind.

Collision is a hectic, busy time for everyone, so make sure you’re really intentional about booking meetings, connecting with attendees, or building relationships well in advance of the conference.

Secondly, practise your “one liner”, and make sure you can clearly articulate what you do, who you’re building for, and why it’s impactful in one or two sentences max.

Time is a scarce resource during Collision, so you realistically only have a few moments to capture your audience’s attention. Your elevator pitch should be memorized since you’ll be repeating it verbatim, hundreds of times.

Lastly, if you’re demonstrating your product – whether through a booth or on the show floor – use a platform like Supademo to create a simple, elegant and contextual demo of your product. Let your product do the talking, and visually guide potential customers on why it matters to them.

Web Summit is coming to Vancouver in 2025. Don’t miss out.

Main image: Web Summit