Startup Spotlight #113: Navattic
Navattic helps sales and marketing teams create shareable product demos.
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I got the chance to speak with Neil McLean, co-founder of Navattic, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Navattic realizes that product-led growth is the future. However, not every organization is ready to become product-led today. Showcasing the value of your product can require complex integrations, data cleansing, and user training. Not all organizations have the engineering bandwidth to dedicate to these important sales and marketing efforts.
Navattic is on a mission to turn the product demo into a growth engine.
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Startup Spotlight: Navattic
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.
Recent Success:
McLean: While there are always areas for improvement, our ability to iterate has been instrumental in helping us get to where we are today. Once we identified a problem that our users were willing to pay to solve, iterating on the right product to meet those needs has been a continued focus in pursuit of product-market fit. To accomplish this, our team does a great job of using a metrics-based approach to prioritize feedback and product improvements to quickly roll out features and updates based on user input. This agility gives us the ability to move quickly and build something that people love.
Recent Struggle:
McLean: In the early stages of any company, there is a need to say “no” to certain requests and tasks and this can be very challenging. Prospects often will use “missing features” or “lack of integrations” as a way to politely bow out of the sales funnel, but it is a founder’s job to understand how to interpret these requests. Do you build features that could help win five more deals or build a feature that a subset of your customers wants? Engineering bandwidth is always a constraint so developing a concrete product development prioritization process was a challenge that we addressed with the help of YC.
Founder Advice:
McLean: Starting a startup is composed of many discrete phases. This includes customer discovery, prototyping, revenue generation, team-building, and beyond. It’s surprising how much of a mental and skill-shift excelling at each one of these phases requires. It is also hard to know exactly which phase you fall into at any given moment. I would encourage all founders to frequently take a step back and ask themselves what stage of their startup are they in realistically and think through the milestones needed to get to the next stage.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
McLean: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Josh Cohenzadeh, Founder of Emerge: Emerge is building tools to help developers reduce and monitor the size of their iOS apps.
Julian Colina, Founder of Haystack: Haystack analyzes historical git data to give you a clear (and accurate) picture on the health of your teams.
Sid Pallia, Founder of Sunny Day Fund: Sunny Day Fund enable companies to cultivate financial security and freedom in their workforce, starting with incentivized savings.
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