Build a Private Demo Before You Pitch

✓ How To Do It

1. Pick one prospect whose current site is slow or hard to use on a phone. Open their live site on your phone and write down three real problems, like a tiny call button or a form that fails.
2. Collect only what they already show the public. That means their business name, their own logo, their own photos and their own service list. Do not pull anything from behind a login or from another company's pages.
3. Build the demo as a plain page or three on a host you control. Use their colors and name so the owner recognizes it in two seconds. Fix the three problems you wrote down.
4. Make it private on purpose. Put noindex in a robots meta tag on every page, and add an X-Robots-Tag noindex header if your host allows it. Leave it out of your sitemap and do not link to it from any page.
5. Do not block the demo in robots.txt. Google must be able to fetch a page to see its noindex rule, so a robots.txt block can leave the URL listed anyway.
6. Use a long, odd address that nobody would guess. Never put the demo in a public portfolio, a case study or a social post.
7. Send the link to that one owner only, by the email address on their own site. Do not forward it, post it or show it to anyone else.
8. Write two short lines. One says what you built and why. The other says, "If you do not want this, reply and I will delete it the same day." Then do exactly that if they ask.
9. Check the demo in a private browser window and search your host for the page title. If anything shows up, fix it before you send the email.
10. If they say yes and want you to go live, get written permission to use their logo and photos on the real site. Before you show the work in your own portfolio, ask again in writing. Some photos belong to a photographer, not the owner.