You built something worth showing. Maybe it’s an investor asking for a progress check, an advisor who offered feedback before your next raise, or five early users who signed up for a private beta.
Problem is, your app only runs on your machine. No staging server, no preview deploy. Just localhost:3000 and a browser tab no one else can reach.
This guide covers the tools SaaS founders use to demo pre-production software: screen recorders for async walkthroughs, live preview tools for interactive demos, and a workflow you can run this afternoon without setting up infrastructure.
Why Founders Can’t Just Use a Staging Environment
Staging makes sense once you have a team and a deployment pipeline. Pre-launch founders have neither.
Setting up staging means configuring a server, syncing environment variables, dealing with database seeds, and building a CI pipeline. That’s a day of work. Meanwhile, the investor wants to see progress by Friday.
Even if you have staging, it may not match your local build. Your latest branch has unmerged features. Your local database has realistic seed data. Your staging install has a stale build from last week.
Founders demoing to investors need to show what exists right now, not what was deployed three days ago. What’s running on your machine this minute.
Screen Recording Tools: Async Demos That Work on Your Schedule
Sometimes you can’t schedule a live call. Time zones, busy investors, or a founder who wants to record something clean without a live audience. Screen recording tools let you record a narrated walkthrough and share it as a link.
Loom
Loom is the default for async demos. Install the extension, record your screen and camera, and it generates a shareable link. The viewer sees your face in a bubble alongside the recording, which matters when you are asking someone to trust in what you are building.
Founders use Loom for cold investor outreach (send a 90-second demo alongside the deck) and async advisor check-ins. The free plan covers 25 videos of 5 minutes each. Paid plans start at $12.50/month.
Best for: Async investor updates, cold outreach demos, advisor check-ins.
Screen Studio
Screen Studio is what you use when polish matters. It automatically smooths cursor movements, adds zoom-ins on clicks, and generates videos that look professionally edited with no editing work.
For a lead investor demo or a waitlist launch video, the production quality difference is noticeable. Tradeoff: it costs $89 one-time or $10/month, and it’s macOS only.
Best for: Polished demo videos, waitlist launch videos, investor pitch recordings.
QuickTime (macOS) / Built-in Recorders
You don’t need a paid tool. macOS QuickTime Player does screen recording with microphone audio for free. Windows has Xbox Game Bar (Win+G). Both produce clean recordings with zero setup.
The downside: no automatic link sharing, no camera bubble, no editing. You record a file, upload it somewhere, share a link. Works in a pinch.
Best for: Quick internal demos when you already have a file sharing workflow.
Live Demo Tools: Let People Use Your Build in Real Time
Recordings work for one-way presentations. But investors and early users often want to click around themselves. They want to test responsiveness, check interactions, and get a feel for the real product.
Live demo tools give you a public URL for the build running on your machine. No deployment, no staging, no waiting.
WireMaven
WireMaven is built for when you need someone to see your local build and you need to know whether they looked at it. One command (npx wiremaven init then npm run dev) gives you a temporary encrypted public URL that auto-expires after 15, 30, or 60 minutes.
What makes it different is the session awareness overlay. A floating panel shows viewer count, request count, and whether any requests failed. If an investor opens your link and hits a 500 error, you see it instantly instead of finding out days later.
No account needed. Works with Next.js, Astro, Vite, Webpack, and Rspack. Free during beta.
Read more: How founders demo progress to investors from localhost and Session awareness for developers.
Best for: Live interactive demos, investor walkthroughs, early user testing when you need visibility into what happened during the session.
Vercel Preview Deployments
If you use Vercel for hosting, every pull request gets a preview URL. It’s a full deployment, meaning the build is detached from your machine and the URL persists until the branch is deleted.
The downside: preview deploys require a full build cycle. On the free plan, builds are queued and can take minutes. You also need environment variables configured in Vercel and database connections whitelisted. Not something you do for an impromptu demo.
Best for: Teams already on Vercel who want persistent preview URLs per PR.
Netlify Deploy Previews
Netlify’s deploy previews work the same way: every PR gets a unique URL with a production-like build. Generous free tier.
Same tradeoff as Vercel: you need code pushed, env vars configured, and a build cycle to complete. Good for planned demos, not for “let me show you what I built this morning.”
Best for: Netlify-hosted projects that need persistent preview links.
ngrok
ngrok is the best-known localhost tunneling tool. One command (ngrok http 3000) and your local server gets a public URL. Reliable, been around for years.
The free tier has limitations: URLs expire after 2 hours, there is a browser warning page before visitors reach your app, and there is no session visibility. Paid plans start at $8/month and remove the warning page plus add custom domains.
Best for: Quick one-off demos when you just need a public URL and don’t care about viewer visibility.
Demo Visibility: Know What Happened After You Sent the Link
Sending a demo link is easy. Knowing whether anyone used it is the hard part.
If you send a Loom video, Loom tells you whether they watched it and for how long. But if you send a live demo link through a tunnel tool, most give you zero feedback: no view count, no error alerts, no indication the link was opened.
WireMaven solves this with the session overlay: connected viewers, request count, error count, and a live event log. You watch the demo happen from your side.
For screen recordings, Loom and Screen Studio include view tracking. For live demos, the visibility layer separates tools built for confident sharing from generic port forwarding.
Comparison Table
| Tool | Type | Setup Time | Viewer Visibility | Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loom | Screen recording | 1 minute | View tracking, watch duration | 25 videos (5 min each) | Async investor updates |
| Screen Studio | Screen recording | 1 minute | No built-in tracking | No free tier ($89 one-time) | Polished demo videos |
| WireMaven | Live demo tunnel | 1 command + npm run dev | Live overlay: viewers, requests, errors, event log | Free during beta | Interactive demos with session awareness |
| Vercel Previews | Deploy preview | Push to GitHub + build cycle | No viewer visibility | Free tier (build limits) | Persistent PR previews |
| Netlify Previews | Deploy preview | Push to GitHub + build cycle | No viewer visibility | Free tier (generous) | Persistent PR previews |
| ngrok | Localhost tunnel | 1 command | Web inspector only (paid) | 2-hour limit, browser warning | Quick one-off URL sharing |
| QuickTime / Xbox Game Bar | Screen recording | Zero setup | None | Free (built-in OS) | Quick internal recordings |
A Founder’s Demo Workflow
Here’s a practical workflow covering both async and live scenarios.
Step 1: Record an async walkthrough (Loom).
Before scheduling live calls, record a 2-3 minute walkthrough. Narrate the key features and mention what feedback you want. Send this to advisors and non-critical investors. It filters out people who won’t engage and surfaces real interest before you spend time on live demos.
Step 2: Share a live build link (WireMaven).
For people who watched the Loom and want to try the product, run npx wiremaven init once, then npm run dev. Send the generated URL with a 30-minute expiry. Monitor the session overlay to see when they join and whether any requests fail.
Step 3: Read the session data before following up.
After the demo window closes, you know whether they opened the link, navigated the app, or hit errors. Follow up with specific observations instead of “did you get a chance to look at it?”
Read more: Temporary public URL for local dev server.
Step 4: Polish for important demos (Screen Studio).
For a lead investor or waitlist launch video, record a polished version with Screen Studio. Smooth cursor movements, auto-zooms, and clean output that takes minutes but looks like hours of work.
Show People What You Built
Investors, advisors, and early users don’t need a production deployment. They need to see what you built and know that it works.
Start with what you need today. If you’re sending async updates, Loom takes one minute to set up. If you need someone to click around your live build, WireMaven turns your local server into a public demo with session visibility in one command.
npm install -D wiremaven