Customer Show + Tell: Liz Van Hoose: Driving Self-Serve Growth with Interactive Demos

In our Customer Show and Tell series, we feature presentations from Navattic customers about how they're using interactive product demos. These talks were given initially at Navattic’s User Event Meetup in April 2025.

Liz Van Hoose, Senior Marketing Manager at Meez, shared how they used interactive demos to transform their customer acquisition process and dramatically increase their self-serve growth.

At Meez, a recipe management solution for professional kitchens, they faced a common challenge: efficiently demonstrating their product's value to potential customers who aren't typically sitting in front of computers all day.

They needed a way to support both their sales-assisted pipeline and the increasingly crucial self-serve revenue stream.

Watch or read on to learn how they allow prospects to experience Meez on their own terms and timeline.

We are a recipe manager solution for restaurants or anybody with a professional kitchen, hotel, or anyone you can think of who has somebody in the kitchen doing something. If you've seen The Bear, that means a lot is going on. They're not necessarily in front of a computer all day.

Meez ensures your recipe is connected to how much you're physically costing every recipe and that it connects to your overall menu. This impacts your profitability and bottom line. It gives you a better idea of what your full menu looks like.

Meez is a 30-person team. Our sales team is only a handful of individuals, so they need something to use for prospecting.

But another part of our revenue is from people in our self-serve cycle, people who are interested in taking a trial and experiencing the tool without necessarily talking to our sales team. That was a driver for why we decided to look into an interactive demo.

Having some self-guided exploration experience and activating our trial list in a way that didn't just force them to log in, but actually to understand how to use the product. In addition, because we're such a small team, having just one individual be able to build out a product demo without having their sales team involved is super efficient.

It's a gated experience, and then you can choose what you're interested in.

Because we have this choose-your-own-adventure experience, we're able to capture and understand exactly the features that people are interested in.

If they have taken several tours, we'll know they're most likely to convert and are ready to talk to sales. For example, if a prospect chose the food costing tour, it’s the biggest indicator for us that this prospect is ready to buy.

Our food costing tends to be the first tour, the most significant indicator that somebody is ready to buy.

1. Website Tours

On our website, it's a fully gated experience.

We have tours that walk through our six main features, and it's a way for prospects to understand what Meez is without having to talk to sales.

Even in our demo form on our website, if somebody isn't qualified based on how they've answered the questions, we encourage them to take a tour because the sales team is small.

We want to make sure that they're talking to the right people, but this isn't necessarily preventing people from taking a trial because all they care about is being able to see the product.

2. Free Trial Activation

In our free trial experience, most of the emails we send have a link to take a tour, pointing to these different features, whether or not the user has logged into the app or just within our general marketing automation systems.

They're most likely to convert if they reach specific activation points. That information is passed on to the sales team, letting them know that people are ready to talk. If we can see, for example, what their email is, if they're part of a restaurant group, etc..

3. Feature Launches

This is one of the main reasons we decided to invest in Navattic.

We're a startup, and new features are on the way. We want to make sure we have an easier way to demonstrate what is in the pipeline without necessarily having to go back and say, "Hey, sales team. Create something for us."

Our head of growth is the main person who updates our Navattic tours. They make sure they connect with our product team, have other people on our team who have experience within the culinary industry to make sure that whatever we introduce feature-wise connects with our audience of people in restaurants.

4. Supporting Onboarding Flows

We also use it to support flows and answer common questions for anyone undergoing a self-serve onboarding experience.

For us, it's truly to highlight the moment of what Meez is because, like I said, people aren't really at their computer looking at something like this. They just want to be able to do it on their own time, so it’s a great way to offer product transparency and give people back their time to do things they need to do.

The impact has been significant:

• Self-serve growth increased from 10% to 50% over twelve months
• Enhanced sales efficiency by focusing the team on high-potential users who engage with key tours
• Higher average contract value from more qualified self-serve purchases
• Overall boost in customer growth by being more transparent about our product

1. The "choose your own adventure" approach works best. We initially offered a more open experience, but saw improved results after implementing a selection-based flow.
2. Keep tours brief. Each tour is limited to 12 steps or less, taking only a couple of minutes to complete.
3. Prioritize core values first. When launching new features, we immediately show what users will gain before walking through functionality.
4. Set clear expectations. Showing users exactly how many steps a tour contains (like "only 16 steps") has been helpful for engagement.

In our food costing tour, users can experience one of our most compelling features – the ability to update ingredient costs and instantly see the impact on recipe profitability.

Users can update an ingredient cost (reflecting today's inflation realities), adjust purchase quantities, and immediately see how these changes affect the total recipe cost, cost percentage, and profit margin. This demonstrates the power of connecting individual ingredients to overall menu profitability.

As one recipe may contain sub-recipes (like a bánh mì pork bowl), understanding the cascading impact of cost changes across complex menu items showcases why food costing is such a strong conversion indicator for our platform.

This content was adapted from a presentation by Liz Van Hoose, Senior Marketing Manager at Meez.