No try before you buy

Reps used to have to travel onsite to demo live. Six years ago, there was no such thing as try before you buy. Today, people can walk through a product straight from the homepage.

While Neil McLean and Randy Frank were solutions engineers at Oracle, they kept hearing the same thing from prospects. Neil remembers it as some version of: This demo was great, but we're about to spend upwards of $100K with you guys. Can we get hands-on with the product? More often than not, the answer was no.

"Giving prospects access to a proof-of-concept environment was a ton of work," says Randy. "Besides getting them credentials, you had to think about training and enablement and seeding relevant data, all so that they could maybe see a spark of product value."

Keeping prospects removed from the product added friction and put more pressure on SEs to prove the value was there. From the outside, Chris Hoyle, then leading a design and development studio, saw the same gap.

"It made intuitive sense that prospects would be able to try the product," says Chris. "But no one was doing it because of the tremendous amount of engineering resources it would take to get there."

The three of them knew there had to be a better way, and teamed up to build it. Navattic came out of Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch. See an early slide from their pitch deck below.