Async

Final product brief and ship checklist

The brief and checklist that carry your product from "nearly there" to "demo-ready." Treat the checklist as non-negotiable, it is the difference between a demo that lands and one that dies on a detail you could have caught.

Write a one-page brief a stranger can understand:

  • Product: what it does, who it is for, and the one job it does well.
  • How you built it: Lovable, Claude Code, Cowork, n8n, Hermes, and where each one did its part.
  • AI features: what the model actually does in your product, and what you deliberately kept deterministic.
  • Automation and agents: what runs without you, on what trigger, and what happens when it fails.
  • Evals: what TRACE surfaced, your must-pass checklist, and at least one fix you shipped from failures.

Then plan the three-minute Demo Day walkthrough. Aim for about 90 seconds of live demo inside that slot, and keep the story aligned: what it does, how you built it, live demo, what your evals told you.

Critical

Record a backup demo

Live demos break. Record a short screen capture of the same flow. Bring it to Demo Day as insurance.

Ship checklist

  • URL loads for a stranger in incognito, no laptop tricks and no dev server
  • The core action works end to end, from landing on the page to the result
  • Login and data behave: sign up as a brand-new user and check nobody sees anyone else's rows
  • Any automation or agent still fires on its real trigger, not just a manual test run
  • At least one fix from your eval is shipped, and you can name it out loud
  • Must-pass checklist still passes, or you can show the latest result and known gaps
  • Empty states, error states, and mobile width do not look broken
  • Brief or README covers product, build, AI features, and evals
  • Backup recording exported and ready to play

Nice to have before you present

  • A custom domain or a clean project name in the URL
  • One screenshot or short clip you can reuse in a LinkedIn post
  • A one-line answer to "what would you build next?"

Tip

Rehearse against a clock

Three minutes is shorter than it sounds. Say it out loud once, timed, before Demo Day. Almost everyone cuts a third of their intro after the first run.