Chapter 04
The self-demonstrating channel
The demo is the product. Do not describe Housewarmly to an installer. Generate a pack for a house that has just sold on their patch, put their logo on it, and post it to them. It costs about two pounds and it is the entire go-to-market.
Pick a target installer. Find a live Rightmove listing within four miles of their showroom, with a tired kitchen and a floorplan. Build the pack in their name, with their logo and their phone number, exactly as their customer would receive it. Post it to the installer, with a covering note that says: this went out to nobody. It is a pack for a house down the road from you, built in your name in eleven minutes, and it cost us two pounds. If you want the real one to go to the real address, you know where we are.
4.1 Why this beats every other first touch
| Channel | What the installer receives | What it costs | Why it loses to the pack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold email | A paragraph about software | Free, plus a privacy notice obligation | They are on site. They do not read email on a phone in a van. |
| Cold call | An interruption | Your time | Gatekeeper, or voicemail, or "send me something". |
| A demo video | A generic kitchen they have never seen | Free | Every AI render tool in chapter 02 has one, and they all look the same. |
| A free trial | An empty account and a job to do | Free, plus a churn problem | They have to do the work to find out whether it is any good. |
| A pack, in their name, of a house on their patch | The finished product, addressed to them, that they did not have to make | About £2S1 | It answers "what is it", "is it any good" and "would it work for me" simultaneously, on paper, with no login. |
The argument in one line: every other channel asks the installer to imagine the product. This one hands it to them. And because the marginal cost of a pack is compute and a stamp rather than a person's time, the demo can be given away to the entire target list before a single conversation happens.
4.2 What it costs to demonstrate to everybody
| Line | Cost | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Renders, three styles | 63p | measured at 20.9p a render, current settingsS1 |
| Print and post, one item | 88p | published Stannp A4 letter, Free plan, the honest low-volume priceS7 |
| Listing fetch | ~5p | derived from the fetch service's credit pricing |
| Covering note, printed as an insert | 5p | published Stannp insert rateS7 |
| Cost of one demo | £1.61 | Call it £2 with the fourth style and the odd reprint |
| Cost of demonstrating to all 52 targets in chapter 05 | ~£104 | Two pounds each, once |
| Cost of demonstrating to 500 installers | ~£1,000 | The whole first year's outbound budget |
4.3 The pack that goes to the installer is not the pack that goes to a homeowner
This is the part most likely to be got wrong. Three differences, all deliberate.
It is marked as a specimen
The demo pack must say, on the artefact, that it was not sent to the property. Anything else risks an installer believing we have already marketed in their name to a house they have not agreed to, which is both alarming and, if it were true, a genuine problem.
It carries a covering note, not a brochure
One side of A5, six sentences, written by a person. The pack does the selling. The note only explains why an unbranded envelope contains their own logo.
It goes to the named individual
The homeowner pack is addressed to "The Homeowner" for the legal reason in chapter 10. A business-to-business pack goes to a named director at a business address, which is a different and easier position.S40
The covering note, verbatim
4.4 Choosing the listing, which is where the demo is won or lost
A demo pack of a beautiful kitchen is worthless. The whole point is the gap between what the room is and what it could be.
Within four miles of their showroom
Close enough that they know the street. If they do not recognise the address, half the effect is gone. Use the address of the showroom from chapter 05, not the registered office, which is often an accountant's.
Sold, or under offer, in the last month
A live listing works and is easier to find. Sold subject to contract is better, because the trigger story is true.
A genuinely dated kitchen or bathroom, and a floorplan
The floorplan is a required input, and without it the measured plan page and the fit engine have nothing to work from.S6 Reject the listing rather than send a pack with no dimensions in it.
In their price bracket, not above it
Send a bathroom fitter in Ilkeston a pack for a £900,000 barn conversion and you have shown them a customer they do not have. Match the house to the work they photograph on their own site.
Their trade, and only their trade
A company is a kitchen installer or a bathroom installer in the product, never both.S5 Pick the one their website leads with. Getting this wrong is the single most obvious error a recipient can spot.
4.5 Getting their brand right without asking them
The demo has to look like theirs, and we are building it before they have given us anything. Three inputs, all from their own public website.
| What we need | Where it comes from | The trap |
|---|---|---|
| Logo | Their website header, at the largest resolution served | A logo lifted at 200px and printed at 300dpi looks like a forgery. If the only logo available is small and lossy, set it in type instead and say so in the note. |
| Brand colour | Sampled from their own site | Sampling a stock photograph rather than their palette. Take it from a heading or a button. |
| Phone, email, address | Their contact page | Registered office instead of showroom. Chapter 06 flags every row where these differ. |
| Trade and styles | Their portfolio pages | Sending Shaker to a firm whose entire gallery is handleless matt. Spend two minutes looking. |
4.6 The sequence around the pack
The pack is the first touch, not the only one. Five steps over eighteen days.
- Day 0The pack goes in the postWith the covering note and nothing else. No brochure, no price list, no QR code to a booking page. The pack has a QR code already, and it goes to the share page, which is the product.
- Day 3It landsSecond class is two to three working days. Nothing happens on our side.
- Day 5One phone callTo the showroom, not the mobile. "I sent you a pack for the house on Oaklands Avenue. Did it turn up?" That is the whole opening. It is a question about the post, not a pitch.
- Day 9One email, only if the call did not connectThree lines and a photograph of the pack. The subject line is the street name.
- Day 18StopTwo touches after the pack and no more. A firm that has held a printed pack with their own logo on it and said nothing has told us something. Move on and revisit at month six with a different house.
4.7 Making the channel a machine rather than a stunt
Doing this fifty times by hand is a fortnight of work. Doing it five hundred times by hand is not possible. Three things turn it into an engine, in the order they are worth building.
A prospect brand kit that fills itself in
Paste an installer's website URL, and the system pulls the logo, the colour, the phone number and the trade, and creates a company row in a "prospect" state that can generate packs but cannot log in. Half a day of work and it is the highest-return half day in the plan.
A listing picker for a postcode
Given a showroom postcode, return recent sold-subject-to-contract listings within four miles that have a floorplan and a photographed kitchen. Today this is a person on Rightmove for four minutes per target. Read the terms-of-use position in chapter 10 before automating it, because this is exactly the activity the portals prohibit.
A demo pack template
The specimen watermark, the covering note as an insert, and a variant of the back page that addresses the installer rather than the homeowner. Two hours.
4.8 What we do not know, and how to find out cheaply
The measurement that costs nothing
Fifty packs is £104 and it produces the only number that matters. Instrument it properly the first time, because there will not be a clean second chance with the same list.
| Record | How | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Which target got which listing | A row per demo, before it is sent | So a reply can be traced to the pack that caused it, and so a good listing choice can be repeated |
| Whether the share page was opened | The QR code already resolves to a tokenised share URLS5 | The cheapest possible signal of interest, and it fires before anybody rings |
| Reply, by type | Interested, not now, wrong fit, no reply, angry | "Angry" is a real category and its rate is the single most important safety metric in this channel |
| Days from send to first response | Timestamps | Sets the follow-up cadence for the next fifty. Guessing day 5 is a guess. |
4.9 The risks in this channel, stated before somebody else states them
- It uses somebody else's photograph to build the demo. Everything in chapter 10 applies to a demo pack exactly as it applies to a real one. The demo is not a research exception. There is no research exception.S37
- It puts a company's logo on an artefact they did not commission. For a demonstration addressed to that company this is ordinary business practice, and it is how every agency in the country pitches. It stops being ordinary the moment the artefact goes anywhere else.
- It does not scale past the portal terms. Picking listings by hand is one thing. A crawler that finds listings near 500 showrooms is the activity Rightmove's terms prohibit by name.S38 The channel's ceiling is set by the data problem in chapter 10, not by the printing.
- It is copyable. Any of the four threats in chapter 02 could do this tomorrow. The defence is not secrecy. It is being the one who has already done it to their entire customer list.