Recording Best Practices

What Makes a Great Demo

Before getting into tools and recording methods, it's worth grounding on what we mean by a great demo.

A great demo is focused on one outcome. It's easy to follow. And it's easy to keep current over time.

That applies whether the demo is for marketing, sales, onboarding, support, or internal training.

Throughout this academy, you'll learn how to design demos that hit those goals. You'll learn how to structure them, personalize them, share them effectively, and measure how they perform across different use cases.

But before any of that work really pays off, there's a foundational layer that applies to every Supademo.

No matter what kind of demo you're creating, there's a small set of decisions that happen before recording that have an outsized impact later.

Recording best practices aren't about creativity or polish. They're about making sure the work you do later — editing, personalizing, structuring, sharing, and maintaining demos — doesn't get undermined by avoidable setup issues.

Planning Matters Just as Much as Recording

Before you start, get clear on what this demo is meant to do. Is it a high-level marketing overview? A sales walkthrough? An onboarding flow? Or something designed for a very specific audience or use case?

Knowing that upfront affects everything that follows. It influences how long the demo should be, how focused it needs to stay, and how reusable it will be later.

As a general rule, short and focused demos consistently perform better. Longer demos tend to have higher drop-off, and they're harder to maintain and reuse over time.

If more information needs to be shared, it's better not to force everything into a single demo. Create shorter demos and group them later using showcases, or combine coverage by copying and pasting steps between demos when it makes sense.

Demo Length by Use Case

For marketing demos on a website, this usually means high-level overviews. A good rule of thumb is around eight to twelve steps, since engagement drops quickly beyond that.

Sales demos can go a bit deeper, but the same principle applies. Keep them concise. If more coverage is needed, record by buyer persona or by module, then group those demos together in a showcase instead of forcing one long flow.

For customer success and support, it helps to think in natural breakpoints, similar to writing paragraphs. When one idea is complete, that's a demo. Feature-specific demos work best, and closely related actions should live together. For example, add, edit, and delete are tightly connected and usually belong in one cohesive demo, with branching handled at the beginning using chapters.

Sandbox Demos

Sandbox demos are the main exception. If you're on a Growth or Enterprise plan and creating sandbox demos that give viewers a realistic environment to explore, these require more upfront planning. Because viewers can click freely, there's more depth to consider. A strong approach is to record one section or module at a time, then continue adding steps from within the demo as the experience evolves. How deep to go depends on your product, but a helpful way to think about it is how many clicks or layers it takes to move through a typical workflow from start to finish.

Consistency Is Critical

Once the demo is planned, consistency becomes critical.

Recording in the same dimensions every time makes a big difference. Supademo records based on screen size, and when different team members use different dimensions, things like hotspots, copied steps, and layout alignment can break down later. Consistent dimensions make demos easier to edit, easier to extend, and easier to keep accurate over time.

If you're recording your entire screen rather than a single window, a few setup choices will save a lot of cleanup later. Hiding your bookmarks bar keeps the screen from feeling cluttered. Turning off notifications prevents unexpected pop-ups. Keeping your desktop clean and distraction-free helps viewers stay focused on the demo itself.

HTML Recordings

Finally, if you're on a Growth or Enterprise plan and have access to HTML recordings, that's almost always the recommended option. HTML recordings provide more precise capture and stronger post-recording editing, which makes demos easier to maintain as your product changes.

These best practices don't define what kind of demo you create. They make sure that whatever demo you build next stays focused, easy to follow, and easy to keep current.

With that foundation in place, we can now look at the different ways to record Supademos, starting with the Chrome extension.