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  Landing Page

Molded — Let buyers feel the product before the meeting

About the project

Molded turns a real product workflow into a guided, interactive demo that can live directly on a company’s website.

Instead of asking a prospect to book a call, create an account, or watch a passive video, Molded lets them explore the actual product interface themselves. A founder or sales team records a workflow with our Chrome extension, edits the buyer journey in a visual Studio, and publishes it as an interactive, lead-capturing demo.

The core idea is simple: your product is often your best salesperson. Molded helps it do that job earlier in the buying journey.

What inspired us

Product demos are frequently too late in the funnel. By the time someone sees the product, they have already booked a call, created an account, or dropped off.

We wanted to build something more immediate than a traditional demo platform: a way for a prospect to experience the real interface, follow a deliberately guided path to an “aha” moment, and raise their hand only when they are ready.

We were also inspired by the gap between a polished marketing site and the real product. Molded closes that gap by letting teams capture a genuine browser session rather than rebuilding their UI as a separate mockup.

How we built it

Molded is built with TanStack Start and React.

• A Manifest V3 Chrome extension captures real browser activity using rrweb.
• The extension records DOM snapshots, mutations, clicks, scrolls, and interaction events from a selected tab.
• Recordings are sent to Molded’s backend and stored locally for a reliable hackathon demo, with optional Supabase persistence.
• The dashboard displays captured sessions as demos.
• The Studio lets creators place, resize, and lock spotlight targets over the recorded experience.
• The buyer-facing demo uses rrweb replay in interactive mode, so prospects can follow the guided path and interact with the captured product.
• A publish flow provides a shareable demo experience, embedding direction, and a buyer handoff form that creates an intent signal.
• OpenAI-powered tour suggestions are supported when an API key is configured, while a local fallback keeps the core workflow usable without one.

What we learned

We learned that recording a web app is only the first step. The much harder product question is: how do you turn a raw session into a persuasive experience without making it feel like a video?

That led us to build around guided interaction rather than passive playback. Spotlight targets, locked click areas, and buyer-controlled progression make the demo feel more like product exploration than a slide deck.

We also learned how important reliability is for a product built around browser capture. A capture system has to handle navigation, restricted browser pages, delayed event batches, and the possibility that a recording ends unexpectedly.

Challenges we faced

The biggest technical challenge was making rrweb capture and replay feel dependable inside a hackathon-sized architecture.

We worked through:

• Chrome extension injection timing and restricted-tab limitations.
• Keeping Start/Stop recording controls reliable when a tab navigates.
• Persisting event batches without making the dashboard feel broken or stale.
• Making replay fit cleanly inside cards, the Studio, and the buyer-facing demo.
• Keeping spotlight targets fixed after a creator places and locks them.
• Designing an interface that feels polished enough for a customer-facing product while still making the capture-to-publish flow easy to understand.

What’s next

Next, we would deepen the AI layer: automatically identifying high-intent product moments, suggesting the best conversion path, and generating personalized demo narratives for different buyer personas.

We would also add production authentication, stronger multi-workspace collaboration, durable cloud storage, analytics dashboards, and a one-line embed SDK for customer websites.

Molded’s goal is to make a product demo feel less like a presentation and more like proof.

Built With

• codex
• gpt
• javascript
• supabase
• tanstack