Introducing an Impactful Feature to Boost App Installations

:loudspeaker:We are thrilled to unveil a new feature that will take your marketplace apps to the next level. Say hello to the Demo Experience! :rocket:

What is the Demo Experience?

The Demo Experience is a powerful tool that enables you to create immersive demo environments for your marketplace apps.
This game-changing capability allows potential users to get a hands-on experience of the core functionalities of your app without the hassle of installation, admin approval, or granting access to account data.

What value Deme experience can give you

:mag_right: A Seamless App Exploration: With the Demo Experience, users can try out your app safely and securely, ensuring they find the right fit right away.

:clock1: Reduced Time to Value: The Demo Experience greatly accelerates the decision-making process, allowing users to experience firsthand the benefits of your app and increasing the chances of them becoming long-term users.

:rightwards_hand: Enhanced Decision Making: By providing users with a real-life experience of your app, they can make more informed decisions about its relevance to their specific needs.

:white_check_mark: Streamlined Approval Process: Allows users to present a solid case to their administrators, making the approval and installation process smoother than ever before.
We believe that this feature will revolutionize the way users interact with marketplace apps, providing an immersive experience that will drive them to install and use the app.

Next steps:
Here is our suggested implementation strategy!

  1. Watch @dipro video and/or read the documentation to get all the details you need (ETA- 10 minutes).
  2. Set a time for you and your team to brainstorm on the most effective way to showcase your app value (in the shortest time to value) using a demo experience.
  3. Implement the demo experience technically for your app (ETA differ between apps).

Excited to see your demo’s experience :blush:

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Amazing work, this one is a real game changer!

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Really excited about this capability! We expect it to offer a smoother experience for users looking to try an app before installing. Looking forward to see implementations of it.

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Amazing!
Can’t wait to see developers start using this feature!

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Wow! Looks really amazing, looking forward to see how it impacts the marketplace experience

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This is so awesome!
Can’t wait to see the cool demos developers are going to build!

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If only the JWTs included a designation it was a demo environment so we could skip subscription checks, and usage quota checks that require database records - since install webhooks provision that stuff first, and demo doesn’t send those. :wink:

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@codyfrisch – totally understand. I know your app is more sophisticated and needs this, but for simpler apps it’s already usable.

For anyone having the same issue as Cody - please vote on the feature request for it here!

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Voted :slight_smile:.

We keep track on accountIds when starting the app in trial mode (in the customers account). The license check we do require an entry in this purchase table (local database) and the entry is added on app lifecycle webhooks. We can’t use this fantastic feature if we don’t receive a lifecycle webhook that shows it comes from the sandbox environment.

Alternatively, if the shortLivedToken contains a fixed accountId (e.g. 0) we can work around this.

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Exactly, something we know when the event arrives, its from a demo, and then we can skip the license checks etc.

I think this is far better than having a different demo install lifecycle webhook - thats going to take a lot more to work around rather than just pass it through as a trial if its that fixed account ID or some other flag.

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Has anyone implemented the demo experience yet? We’d love to hear all about your experience so far! :slight_smile:

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Hey guys,

I have implemented the demo experience and released it just yesterday. Today I can see a first sandbox user with email: app_sandbox@app_sandbox.monday.com. This is enough for me to know the account is from a demo environment and I can setup a demo account on our side.

The issue is an pre-setup Integration Recipe in our demo board with some configuration and app authorization. I have noticed we can provide some images (probably gifs as well?) and video guide hosted on cloudinary. We can also select a landing view, which potentially makes the user authorize our app in the sandbox environment, if the authorization screen does not scary him at the beginning :smiley:

The integration recipe is questionable - I am not sure it’s good to let this configuration to a user, because I would like to present a simple button click which automatically creates a PDF from board item. This should make the user curious about how it works and then we can explain the setup step by step. When we annoy the user with automation setup at the beginning, there’s a chance he doesn’t complete the setup and leave, before he experience the app’s value.

@rachelatmonday I am wondering what is your point of view about the demo experience, should we let the app authorization and integration recipe setup to a demo user, or we should find some workaround to remove this friction?

@dipro any idea how we could automate the sandbox app oauth authorization without user’s interaction?

Thanks in advance,
Lubos

Do you really need to generate an OAuth token for a 24h sandbox environment?

You can use the integration shortLivedToken to make your API calls if they are in the demo environment. You can check this when they are redirected to the “Authorization URL”.

What do you think?

Thanks @dipro for the idea, I didn’t know about shortLivedTokens yet!

Unfortunatelly it is not enough for our use case, because we use a demo user profile in our cloud which holds a demo template. To setup integration recipe we need to list templates using custom Field Type. So we need to map a new sandbox monday user to our demo account and for this we need to complete oauth where we get an email address. AccountId and UserId is not enough to distinguish wheter it is a sandbox user/account.

I have implemented a quick code to our oauthCallback which checks for sandbox email and then maps the sandbox user to our demo account. Surprisingly, when I opened a sandbox and started the oauth, monday did not required manual authorization confirmation, it simply went through the process… I am completely happy how it works now :slight_smile:

Slight friction may be an inactive Integration Recipe which I needed to activate manually.

Now I am going to find out how the documentation works, it would be great to have this magic ‘Start Demo’ button in our developer section to easily check our updates to the demo workspace, is it feasible?

Thanks,
Lubos

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Being able to test this in your demo account – we are aware of this limitation. It wasn’t included in v1 because it would have slowed down the release, but we can prioritize it if enough people need it.

Can you vote on this feature request?

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Hey Rachel, we did have it enabled but now it seems to not be working properly?

The option to select demo this app, or whatever doesn’t appear to exist anymore for our CarbonToolbelt app.

And for our newly released app today (CarbonCRM Retail & Ecommerce) its prompting to download the workspace template right into a workspace within a live account.

Not sure what’s up with that?

@Carson – can you open a support ticket about this?

I can see the App Demo button for the Carbon Toolbelt app:

Hey @Carson - note that if the app is installed, the demo experience isn’t available

Not sure what happened the other day but maybe it was just glitching on me in the moment. I’m seeing the toolbelt demo in a test account now, will go re-add and try it out with our new app.

Thanks for following up @dipro !

Thanks for the added insight @hen - I was curious of how that affected things.