Show it working, then propose
For the people who build and look after websites for other businesses: every Cluable bot gets a public demo link, so a client can talk to their own site answering questions before anything is installed.
By The Cluable team
You have sent the proposal. It has a scope, a price, three screenshots and a paragraph that begins with "imagine". Now you wait, and the client reads it on a phone between two other things, and what they imagine is not what you meant.
Most of the work of selling a website, or a redesign, or one more feature on a site you already look after, is getting the other person to picture the finished thing. Words are a bad tool for that. A working thing is a good one.
This post is for the people who build and look after websites for other businesses. Freelancers, small studios, the person at an agency who owns a dozen client sites and gets the email when any of them breaks. There is a way to show a client an answering agent on their own website before you have installed anything, and it changes the conversation.
The demo link
Every bot you build in Cluable gets a public demo page. It is a plain page on our domain with the client's bot sitting in the corner, exactly as it would on their site, and a switch to view it on a light or a dark background because the first question people ask is how it will look against theirs.
The page works the moment the bot exists. There is no publish step and nothing to embed. You copy the link and send it.
So the order of events can go like this. You take the client's web address. Cluable reads their public pages, up to twenty of them, favouring the ones that matter, like pricing, shipping, returns and contact. A few minutes later there is a bot that answers from those pages. You open the demo link, ask it the three questions the client's customers always ask, and send the link with one line: here is your website answering questions, try it.
The client is not reading a proposal. They are talking to the result.
What the client sees
They see their own words coming back at them. That is the part no screenshot can do. The returns policy they wrote two years ago, quoted back in a sentence when someone asks about returns. Their opening hours. Their delivery time to a particular region, if the page says it.
They also see the edges, and this matters more than it sounds. Ask the demo something the site does not cover, and the bot says so and offers to pass the question to a person. A client who watches that happen understands two things at once: the tool is honest, and their site has a gap. Half the time the next sentence is "we should really write a page about that", and now you are talking about the next piece of work, not defending this one.
We wrote about the boundary in What Cluable is not allowed to see. The short version is that the bot reads only what a visitor could read, so everything it says can be checked against a page. That is a comfortable thing to promise on someone else's behalf.
The demo keeps working
A detail we got wrong at first and then fixed: the demo link does not die when there is no plan on the bot.
The person who hits a dead demo link is the client, not you. They cannot fix it and they will not tell you. They will just decide the thing does not work. So a bot without a plan still answers on its own demo page, up to five hundred visitor messages a month. That is plenty for a client to try it properly, show it to a colleague, and come back to you.
The plan only becomes necessary when the bot goes onto their site. The demo page lives on our domain, so it is a way to try the thing, not a way to run it for free.
Where you fit
When the client says yes, the install is one line in the site you already manage, and there are guides for the platforms you are likely using, from WordPress and Shopify to Webflow and Framer. If you run a dozen sites, you run a dozen bots, each on its own plan, each with its own demo link. Nothing is shared between clients.
There is no reseller programme and we are not going to pretend one is coming. What there is, is a tool that makes a particular conversation easier. You have been telling clients for years that their site should answer more questions on its own. Now you can show them.
Try it on a site that is not yours
The quickest way to feel this is to pick a client whose inbox you know, build a bot on their site, and ask it the five questions they get most. You will know within a minute whether the demo is worth sending.
Every bot starts with a 7 day free trial and no card. If the client never says yes, the demo page costs you nothing, and you have learned something about their website that you can put in the next proposal anyway.
