There’s a live demo dashboard now, at app.sendtidings.com/demo. No signup, no form, no half-hour call with me first. Open it and click around.
The client in it is a garden centre called Fern & Field, and it does not exist. Every number on that dashboard is invented. I want to say that in the second paragraph rather than the tenth, because the interesting part of this isn’t the demo. It’s why we made one up.
The obvious option was to use a real client
It’s what most reporting tools do, and it’s tempting, because real data looks real. It has the odd spike you can’t fake and the search queries nobody would think to write.
Then you follow it through. A public demo is an indexable page that sits there indefinitely. Pointing it at a real client means publishing that client’s traffic, their top search queries and their conversion counts, permanently, to anyone who finds the link. Their enquiry volume is a decent proxy for how their business is doing. Their search queries tell you what they sell and what people are actually looking for.
No client agreed to that. They signed up for a monthly report about their website, not to be the shop window for someone else’s software. Asking afterwards would be worse: it puts a client in the position of doing their agency a favour, which isn’t really a free choice.
So we invented a garden centre instead.
It also makes for a better demo
Two practical things fell out of the decision, which is usually the sign it was the right one.
No single real site has every panel switched on. One client has conversion tracking but no uptime monitor. Another has Search Console connected but no goals configured. A demo built on a real site is always a demo with three empty pages, and empty pages are the ones people assume are broken. Fern & Field has everything populated, because we decided it did.
And there are no upstream API calls. Nothing to rate-limit, nothing to time out, no chance that someone else’s analytics outage makes our demo look broken at the exact moment a prospect opens it. It loads instantly because there’s nothing to fetch.
The numbers move, but they don’t go stale
The dates derive from whenever you happen to open it, so the demo never shows you a report from four months ago. The figures themselves are stable, so what you see is what the next person sees.
One detail I enjoyed more than I should have: the traffic has a weekend lift, because a garden centre’s would. People buy compost on Saturdays. A flat line reads as fake even when you can’t say why, and the demo is trying to show you what a real month looks like, not a straight line with a nice font.
Where your name goes
The demo says “Your agency” throughout, and that’s not laziness. The whole product is white-label: your logo, your colours, your name on the report and the dashboard. Putting our brand on the demo would show you the one thing your clients will never see. A placeholder is more honest about what you’re actually buying.
What this is worth to you
Anyone can put “we take privacy seriously” on a page. It costs nothing and proves nothing.
Choosing to invent a garden centre rather than borrow a client’s numbers is a smaller claim, but it’s one you can check. The demo is right there, and there’s no real business in it. If you’re weighing up handing your entire client list to a reporting tool, the way that tool treats the clients it already has is worth more than the privacy page.
Have a look at the live demo, or if you’d rather see the email, there’s an “Email me one” box on the home page that sends you the demo client’s monthly report. One email, nothing stored, no list to unsubscribe from later.
