Case Study: Navattic Is Finding Product-Market Fit Through Building Strong Customer Relationships
Case Study: Navattic Is Finding Product-Market Fit Through Building Strong Customer Relationships
Your earliest customers can have a huge positive impact in your search for product-market fit if you look beyond the immediate transaction.
Introduction:
Navattic helps sales and marketing teams create shareable product demos.
Problem: As former Sales Engineers at Oracle, we saw first-hand that prospects want to get hands-on when evaluating software. However, most B2B software isn't designed for trials and this creates a serious friction point in the sales process.
Market: There are 2M SaaS sales and marketing professionals globally. Combined with our average revenue per user, this brings the total market opportunity to around $5B annually.
Solution: Navattic helps SaaS sales and marketing teams build, send, and track interactive product demos without needing engineering support.
Team: Neil (CEO) and Chris (CTO) met at William and Mary where they studied Data Analytics and Computer Science and worked on entrepreneurial ventures. After graduating from Duke with a graduate degree in engineering management, Randy (COO) met Neil at Oracle where they worked as sales engineers building and delivering product demos.
Neil (CEO) and Chris (CTO) met at William and Mary where they studied Data Analytics and Computer Science and worked on entrepreneurial ventures. After graduating from Duke with a graduate degree in engineering management, Randy (COO) met Neil at Oracle where they worked as sales engineers building and delivering product demos.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Figuring Out What To Build Based On Quantifying The Customer’s Pain
There are a variety of things you can spend your time building, but what’s most important is that you’re able to quantify what pain points your customer faces and prioritizing solving the highest-value problems.
Market: The Greater The Pain Point, The Better The Customer
The co-founders specifically focused on customers who were losing deals due to not having a product demo as a part of the sales process. The customer pain point that causes monetary loss is the one you should focus on solving.
Solution: Treat Your Early-Customers Like Personalized Consulting Projects
Neil, Randy, and Chris took extra time and care with their first few customers, as it allows them to focus intimately on each specific problem a particular user faced, and then hone a solution that a larger subset of future customers needs.
Team: Rely On Accurate Data Resolve Disagreements
The three co-founders inevitably find themselves disagreeing, but they rely on collecting data for their decisions to be the tiebreaker.
Takeaway: Prioritization And Developing Strong Customer Relationships Will Drive You To Product-Market Fit
Your earliest customers will help you prioritize your product development if you are proactive in building more than a transactional relationship with them.
Case Study: Navattic
Problem: Figuring Out What To Build Based On Quantifying The Customer’s Pain
Tell me about a problem or set of problems that you’ve had to solve on your journey to product-market fit.
As we understood where customers would most frequently use our tool, one of the first problems we had to solve was determining the right market positioning. We initially started referring to the demos built on our platform as "self-guided demos," but this led many users to think that our product was intended to be used in place of a live demo. We heard from prospects that they weren't interested in replacing their live demos with automated ones. It required detailed explanations to share that our tool was designed to supplement the live demo, a post-demo follow-up, and a lead generation solution, rather than a full replacement for live product walkthroughs.
To remedy this, we spoke with customers, and they often described their creations as shareable demos. We learned that this language resonated with our customers and we made this change everywhere - from our company description to outbound sales messaging and even internally to ensure consistency.
Why were these problems so critical to solve? What was it like personally struggling to overcome these challenges to achieving PMF?
Finding the right use case for your product and the matching language is essential. This is especially challenging for new technology in a category. In the world of demons, there wasn't a strong precedent to inform the use cases and positioning of our platform. When we shared the term self-guided demo, there was little market interest for such a tool. As soon as we started sharing the use cases at different parts of the sales process - from prospecting to demo follow-ups, we felt a strong pull from the market and saw revenue jump accordingly.
When we spoke with users in customer discovery calls, we asked what tasks a user completed in a recent week. This helps tease out their actual day-to-day responsibilities but can also be a great point to ask an expansion question around why they're completing certain tasks and start driving at pain points in their day-to-day workflow. In conjunction with the question about the level of pain, "on a scale of 1-10, how large of pain is this for you?", you can start teasing out a strong problem customers face. Through this process, we found that many sales engineers were spending a lot of their valuable time training prospects on sandboxes and conducting routine check-ins. This is largely because they didn't have an effective way to share their product with prospects.
Lessons:
Talk to your customers to understand how they would describe your product in their own words when shaping your market messaging.
Not every use case for your product will matter in the long run. Talk to users to understand what use cases and positioning resonate the strongest.
Understanding a customer's workflow and degree of "pain" around a task is critical to honing in on the problem to be solved.
Market: The Greater The Pain Point, The Better The Customer
Let’s get deeper into the pain point or points you were trying to solve. Imagine I’m a customer thinking about using your product or service. How do you go about understanding my pain and creating a solution to address it?
To better understand our customer's pain points, we talked with every user to learn about gaps and shortcomings in their current sales and marketing processes. This is helpful because no two sales organizations are the same, and therefore they have different needs and constraints when it comes to the product demo experience.
When talking with prospective customers, we ask them to walk through their current sales processes, which helps us understand the role of the product demo in their existing sales funnel. In keeping this line of questioning open-ended rather than focused on a single issue, the conversation naturally draws out pain points around shortcomings with the product demo experience (or lack thereof).
As we continue to grow, this data collected is incredibly valuable as we learn how different types of sales organizations bring their products to market. Talking to a wide range of customers helped us understand the needs and constraints of a variety of teams and organizations looking to adopt a product-led selling motion.
Assuming you’ve managed to address the pain points I face as a customer, what additional information did you discover in your journey to PMF that there’s a large market in need of a solution to the existing problem?
The way we buy enterprise software is fundamentally changing. Traditionally, the sales process to buy business software includes detailed qualification calls with sales reps and an eventual product demo that comes days (and sometimes weeks) later.
When we are buying consumer products, like Spotify or Netflix, we can access a solution in a matter of seconds to evaluate the value and make a buying decision right then and there. Modern buyers want this same convenience when evaluating solutions in their B2B lives as well. However, not every company is suited for this shift towards the consumerization of B2B software buying. Many organizations require time-intensive integrations, user training, or engineering setup before a prospect can effectively see the value of a solution. We saw this gap as a big opportunity to help organizations reduce time to value and deliver a great product experience earlier in the sales process.
How did you narrow your scope of what portion of the market you wanted to tackle first? Who did you decide would be your first beachhead customers and why?
Our solution can be applied to a wide range of organizations across different verticals and company demographics. While this gives us a large addressable market of potential customers, it also led to challenges as we were initially getting started. Our goal was to find a core group of potential users that felt the pain around demo creation and management ten times more than the typical B2B SaaS company. This led us down the road of connecting with organizations that were actively losing deals due to the lack of a viable demo solution. We targeted this group because we knew if we could find this initial group of high-impact users and validate our initial hypothesis, we were on to something.
We personally reached out and interviewed over 250 customers in the sales and marketing space. We reached out to folks in our personal network as well as cold contacts at a targeted set of companies to ensure we spoke with a representative cross-section of sales and marketing teams.
We've been amazed by the generosity of folks in the sales and marketing space who spent their valuable time with us as we further explored this problem space.
Lessons:
Talk to a wide variety of potential buyers (even those who may not fall in your ICP) to collect data points as you continue to refine the product and find PMF.
Looking at shifting trends in buyer landscapes can uncover big opportunities even in seemingly stagnant markets.
Find an initial group that feels the pain 10X more than the average buyer before you get pulled into different directions from low intent prospects.
Solution: Treat Your Early-Customers Like Personalized Consulting Projects
How did you build your solution to maximize its relevance with the customer and ensure product-market fit? If you haven't found PMF yet, what have you learned? What are the blockers for getting to PMF?
It's interesting because the "Demo Tech" is a nascent and newly emerging part of the sales stack. While we haven't achieved PMF yet, we have learned that getting B2B products into user's hands is a large friction point in the sales and marketing process.
As we built out the best solution for our customer's needs, we have identified some key qualities that we believe to true:
Customers want to build out demos quickly.
Our customers want their end-users to have great experiences in these demos so they can move them toward the desired action (e.g., closing the deal)
Even as the product matures, we can still prioritize our product roadmap around these essential ideas.
As we continue to seek PMF, we've learned that understanding the degree of "pain" customers face is critical. While doing customer interviews, we often ask, "On a scale of 1-10, how big of a challenge is this for you?" While some users may express minimal pain around a certain process or area (4-5 out of 10), the best products solve a need that is a 10/10 problem for users. Inertia is usually the biggest blocker in purchasing new software, and if you solve a critical enough problem for users, buyers can quickly emerge to champion your software.
What are some of the things you did that “didn’t scale” to shape your solution today?
For our first customers, we treated each new customer as a personalized consulting project. Since we didn't have a fully self-service platform yet, we spent dedicated effort for each customer building out a shareable demo for them and training them on the platform's self-service components.
This was critical as it enabled us to deeply understand use cases for shareable product demos and build out commonly requested customer features.
What did you learn to best engage with your customers? How did you build a tight feedback loop with your customers to rapidly improve your solution to their problems?
In addition to offering customer support and performing regular customer interviews, we built an effective system for capturing and triaging customer requests.
In line with Michael Seibel's Product Development Cycle, we have a weekly product development meeting. In the meeting, we review the top customer requests and features for the week. We then categorize them according to priority (high, medium, low) and development difficulty (easy, medium, hard). It allows us to find the easy wins (easy dev difficulty, high priority) and allows all team members to have a seat at the table as we build out the product.
This has helped us iterate quickly and, in many cases, meet customer feature requests in just a few days. We think this approach will be really helpful as we seek to continue to build a product our users find valuable.
Walk me through how you landed your first few customers as you were building your product or service.
As former sales engineers, we experienced challenges around sharing the product first hand. We connected with a few teams that resonated with the problem through our personal networks and email outreach. Our customers were B2B platforms where customers wanted to get hands-on with the tool but didn't have an easy way to share their product with prospects in the sales process. They saw Navattic enabling prospective customers to get hands-on with the solution earlier in the sales cycle without needing to involve engineering. We secured early customers who we've been fortunate to work within our journey with this value proposition.
We first built a semi self-service product. The initial version of our product had the frameworks in place so that the platform was usable and valuable to our early customers, but it wasn't entirely self-service. This allowed customers to form their desired product. We incrementally built their feature requests one by one into a functional, rich platform. Rather than make assumptions about what users wanted, we used their feedback and requests to guide our product development.
Team: Rely On Accurate Data Resolve Disagreements
If you have a cofounder, walk me through a time that you two had a conflict. What was it about? How did you handle the situation? What was the resolution, and how did it impact your working relationship with your cofounder?
Conflict amongst co-founders is healthy and respectful disagreement should be embraced. We recently had a debate around product direction. We were trying to determine the order of priorities with customer requests and directional product roadmap items. There were many important features on the list, and we were having a hard time assigning priority.
To resolve this, we went back and gathered data. We aimed to answer the question: how many users would benefit from each feature? We created a categorized list of the customers that would find value in us building these requests. This allowed us to see the features that would meet the majority of our customers' needs and adjust priorities accordingly.
Personal development is critical. At each of the many distinct stages a startup inhabits (customer discovery, pre-revenue, post-revenue, expansion), the founders require a different skill set.
While we are often self-aware of our strengths and weaknesses, it is often helpful to have a third party share their candid feedback. To formalize this, we've set up recurring "personal syncs" to have candid discussions around how we're feeling things are going and areas where we can improve.
What key qualities did you look for in key early hires to increase your chances of discovering product-market fit, and how did you prioritize what types of hires you needed to make first?
Especially in a startup environment where priorities are constantly changing, self-motivation and ownership are essential to enabling employees to be self-sufficient. Also, passion for the problem space and product is essential. We want employees to have a genuine interest in the space and, ideally, have experienced these challenges first-hand in prior roles so they can better empathize with our customers.
If there was a potential employee of your startup reading this Case Study right now, how would you convince them that joining your team is the next best step in their career?
If you look at the sales stack, every part of the sales process has a unicorn startup: ZoomInfo for prospecting, Outreach & Salesloft for email automation, Gong & Chorus for call recording. However, demos are noticeably absent from this list. We're on a mission to help teams take back control over their product demo. Owning your product demo means increased demo conversion, and it enables all teams to become product-led. We're always in the market for great talent, and if anyone would like to discuss joining the team, they're welcome to get in touch with us at team@navattic.com.
Takeaway: Prioritization And Developing Strong Customer Relationships Will Drive You To Product-Market Fit
What are the key lessons have you learned so far from your journey to achieve product-market fit?
Build strong relationships with your early customers to the point where they will naturally advocate for your product to their peers.
Getting caught up in the operational details is an easy trap. Find a regular time to step back and reflect on the bigger picture to ask yourself, "Is this working?"
Saying "no" to a feature request can be hard. Prioritizing your engineering time is a skill that early product teams need to master quickly.
What’s the hardest problem you’re facing now after solving the prior one(s)?
Determining the highest return on effort is a constant challenge. As we gain experience and repetitions in our role, it's easy to fall into a set of established habits that may be "good enough." In reality, there is always the opportunity for growth and more efficiency. One step towards improving this is understanding what an ideal state is and then working backward to figure out how to get there. I.e., If we find that we're achieving a 26% conversion at a stage in our marketing funnel, painting a picture of a 50% conversion and working back to determine what processes could help you get there could be beneficial for moving beyond a local maximum.
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