Companies in the B2B SaaS space find it difficult to activate users and convert trials without hands-on product support. Existing approaches are either too expensive because of headcount, too passive like chatbots, or too static like product videos. Frustrated with this, CEO and founder Roman Geugelin wanted to build a solution that could match the impact of a personal demo, but in an automated way. That is why he created Pyne, the first in-product digital demo platform.
Pyne enables SaaS companies to achieve 10x higher engagement with their product education, resulting in unprecedented improvements in activation, time to value, and self-serve revenue. To achieve this, Pyne uses HeyGen’s API to create AI-generated demo agents that guide users through products and allow them to choose their own onboarding journey.
“Current ways of engaging users in SaaS products are not effective. Whatever you are doing, whether it is traditional in-product tours or educational videos, people click away and do not complete them,” said Roman. “With the help of HeyGen, the demos our customers build have a completion rate that is 10x higher than comparable onboarding tools.”
Creating the most human route to digital product adoption
Pyne’s customers typically use a product-led growth (PLG) motion to acquire or expand their customer base. “Scaling customer handholding without increasing costs is especially important for companies with high growth ambitions and complex products, where users need to understand the story behind the product and how to use it. Our customers train the Pyne avatars with their most commonly used sales and CS playbooks to achieve exactly that,” said Roman.
“Traditional product demos and onboarding rely on written guides, but years of experience with these tools show that they fail to truly engage people. We know from behavioural models that humans pay more attention when listening to other humans,” said Roman. “We believe effective onboarding and user activation happens with a human touch. That is how you build a strong bond and long-term loyalty with your users and customers.”
One issue is that much of product education happens outside the product. Pyne brings this education inside the product through video. The challenge is that updating video content takes a long time.
“Recording product videos one by one takes an unreasonably large amount of effort. We know it works well and improves conversions, but producing and updating videos whenever things change is a big task, especially if you want to stay agile with the content,” said Roman.
With Pyne, users can explore a product as if the best product expert were right beside them. It enables companies to simplify complex product experiences, onboard each user with a personal touch, and scale onboarding and activation processes. However, to genuinely provide a human touch, Pyne needed the most lifelike avatars possible.
Selecting an AI video platform with an API
When looking for an avatar solution for its AI-generated demo agent feature, Pyne evaluated Synthesia and other companies. Roman tested which avatars performed the best and excluded the ones that did not have an API.
“We want our customers to be able to update their demos instantly through our platform. For that to happen, it has to be a seamless experience, so we needed to provide them with an API,” said Roman. “The value of the API is that it ensures there is minimal friction between enabling the use case that the customer wants—which is to experiment with the onboarding and activation flows—and our platform. That’s why we chose HeyGen.”
HeyGen’s API seamlessly integrates avatar videos, interactive avatars, and localisation into any digital experience. Pyne uses it for product features that let users adjust scripts to update demos in seconds, translate flows into different languages, and upload avatars once for all future videos. No reshoots or production teams are required.
Pyne also chose HeyGen because it offers the highest-quality, lifelike avatars in the market and was simply the easiest to use.
“Our customers start using the product, see the AI avatars and say, ‘Wow, this is so different, and I really enjoy watching it,’” said Roman. “The end user now has a longer attention span and can quickly take in more information.”
Engaging users throughout the customer lifecycle
With Pyne’s HeyGen-powered platform, companies can drive adoption, conversion, and engagement across their user base, including:
- Onboarding faster and achieving 4x quicker time to value
- Boosting engagement by 10x compared to conventional product tours
- Improving conversion rates by up to 2.3x
- Retaining users three times better
“What HeyGen has really given us is a new format that allows us to engage users in a way that simply was not possible earlier,” said Roman. “We can now combine the best of how humans currently onboard people with how technology can onboard people on their own terms.”
