The demo ask

Of 198 early-stage B2B software homepages crawled on 2 October 2026, 99 (50%) led with a sales-led ask: book a demo, request a demo, get a demo, or talk to us. 54 (27%) led with a free start. Only 3 led with a tour or interactive demo, and just 11 (6%) linked to one anywhere in the hero or the main navigation.

Where the first ask was a demo request, the visitor had few other ways in. 68 of those 99 sites showed no second call to action. 69 sites in all (35%) paired a sales-led button with neither a free signup nor an interactive demo link. Where we could follow the button, 49 led to a form with a median of five fields, and 16 to a scheduling calendar.

Written by Inkly, which sells an AI demo agent. These are measurements of other companies’ public homepages, not Inkly product data, and no site was chosen because of any relationship with Inkly. A homepage is one door among several, and a demo that lives deeper in a site is not counted here.

It shows that, among young B2B software companies, the default first ask is still a conversation. A buyer who is not ready to talk to someone has, on about half of these homepages, no obvious way to learn more. On the other half, the way in is usually a free signup, and a free signup means an account and setup before the buyer sees any value.

It does not show that a sales-led ask converts worse or better. We measured what the page offers, not what happens after. It also does not show that these companies lack demos: most probably have a video, a gated tour or a call to book, and a visitor who scrolls will find them. The finding is about the first thing a homepage asks for.

Two more figures are worth holding up against your own site. Only 16 of the 198 (8%) showed a chat launcher on the homepage. And among the 49 demo-request forms we found, the median asked for five fields before showing the buyer anything.

Sample. 139 companies from the public Y Combinator company directory (active, B2B or SaaS, listed team size 10 to 100, drawn at random from a pool of 493) and 59 picked by hand from Hacker News Who is hiring threads. We removed large enterprises, consumer apps, agencies and the demo-software vendors we compete with. The headcount of the Hacker News companies is unverified. 199 sites were crawled; one was skipped because its robots.txt could not be read, leaving 198.

Crawl. A headless browser loaded each homepage once at 1440 by 900 on 2 October 2026, identified as InklyHomepageAudit, following robots.txt. Where the primary button was a demo request we loaded the linked page once, without submitting anything. We read the page the way a visitor would: the most prominent button in the hero was the primary call to action, and we classed its wording as a sales-led ask, a free start, a tour or interactive demo, a video, or other.

Checks and limits. We checked a pilot of 19 sites by hand against screenshots and the call-to-action class was right on 18. We then checked four more drawn at random and all four matched. On 27 sites two buttons looked equally prominent, and those are flagged primary_cta_ambiguousin the data. Leaving them out moves the sales-led share from 50% to 51%, so the headline does not depend on them. “Offers an interactive path” counts only links visible in the hero or main navigation, so a demo buried deeper in a site is missed. Buttons that open a pop-up were not followed, so their form shape is unknown. The sample skews early-stage, technical and English-language, and these are companies that are hiring, so it should not be read as all of B2B software.