Breadslice

Paid demos, by the second.

Extended deck · October 2026

Post by shellac! (@she_llac), 17 Oct 2026: how do you credibly signal that a project was built with care and isn't slop. 175.4k views. — View quotes ↗View replies ↗A real tweet that got traction some time ago, not affiliated with us

It's a good question. In a way it's now the question.

	A	B	C	D	E	F
3	Salesforce Sales Cloud	CRM	42	$75,600	Mar 1	Renew
4	Slack Business+	Comms	180	$27,000	Jan 15	Renew
5	Google Workspace	Productivity	180	$30,240	Jul 1	Renew
6	HubSpot Marketing Pro	Marketing	6	$21,600	Apr 9	Renew
7	Zoom One	Comms	60	$9,000	Feb 2	Review
8	Notion Plus	Docs	95	$11,400	May 20	Renew
9	Figma Organization	Design	14	$7,560	Aug 3	Renew
10	Jira + Confluence	Engineering	38	$14,820	Oct 11	Renew
11	GitHub Enterprise	Engineering	38	$9,600	Oct 11	Renew
12	Gong	Sales	12	$19,200	Jun 30	Review
13	Expensify	Finance	180	$9,720	Sep 1	Cut?
14	Okta	Security	180	$16,200	Nov 4	Renew
15	Calendly Teams	Scheduling	20	$3,840	Mar 14	Review
16	DocuSign	Legal	10	$4,800	Dec 1	Renew
17	Committed			$260,580
18	Cap FY26			$275,000	$14,420 left
19	AI note-taker	9 vendors pitching	?		Demo?
20	AI SDR agent	14 vendors pitching	?		Demo?
21	Close automation	6 vendors pitching	?		Demo?
22	Revenue intelligence	11 vendors pitching	?		Demo?
23	AI support desk	8 vendors pitching	?		Demo?

Competition for the attention of human beings in charge of software procurement budgets is becoming much more intense¹.

There are only so many people on earth in control of such budgets. There are only so many hours in a day.

These people will be increasingly looking for signals that a newly-launched app or other piece of software is worth exploring.

¹ Software released worldwide was up 60% in Q1 2026 on Q1 2025. Appfigures, via TechCrunch, 18 Apr 2026.

B2B customer acquisition cost

+40–60%

more per customer than in 2023, for results getting worse every quarter

2023

2026

Every channel costs more. Buyers are starting to tune out almost everything.

$500–$1,500per acquisition, organic (SEO, content)

$802per acquisition, paid search

AI outreach is a race to the bottom. Everyone has the same tools, so every channel is flooded with polished, generic AI content.
Buyers have tuned out. “Acquisition immunity”: they stop clicking, so every lead costs more.
Ads are climbing. Google Ads cost per lead hit $70.11 in 2025, up 5.13% on the year, partly owing to much less ad space given the need for AI responses.

Source: Lillian Pierson, “Rising B2B Customer Acquisition Costs in 2026 & Why It’s Happening,” LinkedIn, 25 Mar 2026. Cost per customer acquired, by channel.

What if there was a Book a paid demo button?

The Tallyroom landing page, with a Book a paid demo button

Or just a link you send to those already in the pipe.

DODaniel Okaforonline

Good to meet you at the conference. Send me something on Tallyroom when you get a chance.09:14

How about 20 minutes with our lead, and you'll get paid for your time. Should cover a venti latte there in Zurich. I hope!09:16

Book a paid demo with Tallyroom20 minutes · you get paid $30breadslice.com/tallyroom09:16

Wait, you pay me to watch the demo?09:21

Yup. By the second, like money streaming. It's fun.09:22

Lol, okay! Booked for Thurs.09:25

PRPriya RamanHead of Finance Ops at Northwind

SK

Sam Keller10:02

Hi Priya, thanks for connecting. I know you get a lot of these, so here is a different kind of ask.

Book a paid demo with Tallyroom20 minutes · you get paid $30breadslice.com/tallyroom

PR

Priya Raman10:47

First vendor to offer to pay for my time. I can do 20 minutes on Friday.

SK

Sam Keller10:49

Great, the agent on that link there will book you in and also explain where the money ends up. Looking forward!

A live demo, with a real person, and you, as the prospective buyer, get paid to join it. That tells you the team behind the product:

Is confidentenough in the quality of their product that they're willing to put their money where their mouth is.
Has trainedpeople that can actually run the demo, answer questions, and generally show a human face.
Feels respectfor the time and energy spent by other humans exploring their product.

That kind of feels like a genuine and useful signal, no?

Edward Frost's ornithopter: a man standing in a tall metal frame with huge feathered wings, on a field. — Edward Frost's ornithopter, early 1900s

Truth is paid demos are like powered flight in the early 1900s.

The question is not whether this would be a useful thing to popularise. It obviously would be. The question is how to execute it.

For paid software demos, this means how to execute them in a way that is:

Smooth
Fair to both parties
Instantly digestible
Resistant to fraud and agent-based system gaming
Legal in most countries
Not immediately killed by transaction fees
Private and max-secure
Scalable
Has an actual moat going into 2030

And so on.

Let's start with fairness.

Ours are paid out as the demo happens.

Every 10 seconds, an irreversible USD stablecoin transaction from the demo-presenting side to the demo-viewing side.

Presenting side terminates: payments stop.
Viewing side abandons: payments stop.

Paid out every 10 seconds (irreversible transaction)$0.17

Or pick one

What everyone else is doing

Paid beforeGift cards to get a meeting in the diary.The seller carries all the risk: the buyer can take it and not turn up, or leave after two minutes.

Paid afterDemo marketplaces, research panels: paid once the session is confirmed, often days later.The buyer carries all the risk: they give the time first and trust they'll be paid. Leave early and it's disputed.

Paid via agencyAn agency is paid for the booking; the buyer may or may not get a little or a lot.

What makes per-ten-second payments in the range of cents possible in 2026 (micropayment streaming)

Tempo and Open USD

What they are: Tempo (tempo.xyz) is a Stripe-invested blockchain and Open USD is a US dollar stablecoin issued with the blessing of Stripe, Mastercard, Visa and others.

What they do: remove transaction fees, provide a trust basis for all parties in the mix.

Killer unlock: Open USD is being deeply integrated into Stripe checkout, meaning the receiver doesn't even need to cash out into anything; if they pay for stuff using Stripe (who doesn't) they've got an easy way to spend it as it is, no conversion.

AI-assisted formal verification and enclave Rust development

Privacy-preserving, securely executed B2B2C blockchain apps are now a reality without a large team and $100m in initial backing.

General acceptance of passkeys

Passkeys for anti-phishing are finally coming out of the shadows, and becoming something an everyday user has heard of, can create and use.

Ours are also private. Verifiable.

Many businesses are worried about losing their moat. This means they'll be much less willing to share data with vendors, since data is one of the only sure moats left.

Breadslice embraces this and cannot see any information about who is joining compensated meetings, even if we wanted to.

The businessits pipeline, its buyers

Googlesign-in, Calendar, Meet

Customer acquisition data

Sealed serverGoogle Confidential Space runs the booking agent and the payouts.Verifiable: the running code is attested by Google and AMD hardware.

No way to look in.
Even for us.

Breadslice

Realtime and private: something nothing else offers.

	Breadslice	LeadrPro, Sagetap	Pitchfire, Fozzie	Sendoso, Reachdesk	Pay-per-meeting agencies
What it is	Paid demos on the seller's own links	Marketplaces of buyers paid to take demos	Buyers paid to reply to a pitch or take a meeting	Gift cards to get or thank a meeting	Outsourced SDRs
Who gets paid	The buyer	The buyer, from about $75	The buyer, from $25, or a charity	The buyer, $5 to $50 in gifts	The agency
When	Every 10 seconds, during	After the demo	After the reply or meeting	Before or after	Per meeting held
If they leave early	Payment stops	Paid per completed demo	Paid per reply or meeting	Gift already sent	The meeting still counts
Whose buyers	The seller's own	The marketplace's	The marketplace's	The seller's	The agency's list
Who sees the pipeline	Only the seller	The platform	The platform	The platform	The agency

Sources: leadrpro.com and its G2 listing; Sagetap community and reviews; pitchfire.com FAQ; fozzie.io; Sendoso and Reachdesk product pages. Checked November 2026.

We have good answers to these ones too.

Just tell us how technical you want them and we'll fire them back.

What if people get AI agents to pretend they are them on the demo and fool you out of money that way?
Can this really scale, given all the country-by-country red tape around licensing and digital assets and all that?
What if payout is small, like only 1 cent every 10 seconds? Won't gas fees kill any profit?
What's your business model anyway? Is it like Stripe, where you take a percentage?
Where do people keep the money? Are we finally getting close to abstracting all that key stuff away?

Paid demos are the thin end of the wedge.

The ambition: the world's largest human-to-human payment-streaming platform.

Paid demosB2B software, the seller's own linksNow

Group demos, webinarsevery attendee paid, seats cappedBuilt

Onboarding, expert and support callsany time a customer gives a business

Customer researchinterviews without a panel in the middle

Payment streaming for anything by the secondany use case that requires paying people for their time, in real time2030

Same rails all the way: a verified person, a wallet of their own, and money that moves every 10 seconds.

Even so, the left side of the wedge is a massive market.

Don't discount paid demos as niche. They simply have never been executed properly before.

TAM: ~$105BSpent every year by software companies on winning customers: $299B worldwide SaaS spend (Gartner, 2025) × 35% median share on sales and marketing.
SAM: ~$12BOur estimate: what demo-led B2B software companies on Google Workspace spend to book first demos, at $300 to $800 a demo today.
SOM: $1.05B1% of TAM moved to paid demos: $1.05B a year paid to buyers, and $52M to Breadslice.

The dual moats.

The A moatWhy our customers won't build this themselves

The B moatWhy a fast-following competitor will have a hard time

Hot-potato fintech infraThe whole premise falls apart if the transactions are not instant and irreversible. But payment rails, especially on a privacy-enabled blockchain, are a business in themselves. Few “normal” companies want a part of it.

Demanding securityWallets, smart contracts and enclaves are a standing target, and the ability of frontier models to do pure math means cryptographic agility is a must. Guarding all this is a job that never ends.

“Three-body problem” supportA company will support its own team, and that's it. In-house, you'd also be the help desk for every prospect you pay: every question about what a stablecoin is and how to move it.

No cost savings (the reverse!)You can't do this without sealed servers (TEEs), and TEEs are only efficient at scale. Running a handful for one company's demos costs far more than the average Breadslice bill.

Network effectsPrivacy-preserving reputation sharing means every account screened sharpens the screening for all. A fake buyer caught once is caught for every seller, a genuine buyer is known as genuine to all.

Email and OAuth reputationSending domains and verified sign-in take months to warm up. A newcomer starts cold, in the spam folder, in the unverified application bucket.

Rules, in every marketMicropayments are still payments. Knowing how they're treated, country by country, takes years. Getting licensed for more advanced features can take years per market.

Reputation, in a world of hacksEvery payment is public, so our record grows daily. A newcomer starts with none, and money forgives nothing.

So far, and next.

Sept 2025Pre-seed fundingFrom Antler, Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam. One of 6 startups funded from a cohort of 40 founders.
Sept 2026Alpha completeThe booking agent, payouts by the second and wallets, working end to end.
Jan 2027Soft launchThe first sellers live with paid demos on their own sites.

Solo founder and founding hires.

**Joe Ruelle**Solo founderFounder of multiple startups. Several years at Google APAC in Singapore (Google Cloud and Google Ads), strong business relationships across Southeast Asia.

**Duyen Vo**Head of complianceFifteen years in corporate M&A and banking regulation. A clear understanding of currency controls and local nuances when scaling in the region.

**Nam Bui**Tech leadVersatile software engineer with a deep foundation in cryptographic protocols and cloud enclaves.

Prediction

Direct human-to-human sales is going to make a massive comeback.

As human buyers, we want more than “correct answers”.
We want to make new relationships.
We want to smile at morning jokes.
We want handshakes.
We want to be persuaded, coddled, needed.
We want warmth.

Post by Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut), 7 Oct 2023: if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you're gonna have a bad time. 9.9m views. — View on X ↗Ilya Sutskever, 7 Oct 2023.

Thank you.