[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Navattic (YC W21) - Shareable demos for s...
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Launch HN: Navattic (YC W21) - Shareable demos for selling your
SaaS product
Hi HN! Neil, Chris, and Randy here, co-founders of Navattic
(https://navattic.com/). We help you create better product demos to
sell your SaaS application. With our software, you can create a
shareable copy of your application, add guided tours, and send it
out via a distinct link. Regardless of how you feel about Oracle,
they're masters of the enterprise sales process, yet we were sales
engineers there and even we were struggling to demo SaaS products
to customers effectively. Day in and out we delivered product demos
to prospects, but we didn't have a great response when the prospect
wanted to get hands on with the product. We then hit the phones and
spoke to 200+ SaaS companies and learned that this is a widespread
problem. Typically, SaaS companies are limited to the following
options: share an unguided sandbox that requires setup and
training, provide a trial (which isn't feasible for many
integration-heavy products), or send over a video or slide deck.
We looped in a college friend, Chris, as our third co-founder and
while we were co-quarantined in Colorado, hacked together an MVP of
our sharable demo platform. Our objective was to turn anything that
runs in the browser into a deterministic, replayable web app that
performs as close to the real experience as possible. We explored
this from multiple technical fronts, including: A) serializing
network requests by developing basically a cache.match() with fuzzy
matching on the edge, B) serializing the DOM state by hacking CSS,
patching Web APIs, inlining values, etc. We were lucky enough to
get some amazing early customers who were patient with us during
this early experimental phase. In the end, we are happy with our
approach that balances ease of creation, broad application support,
and maintains the integrity of the application's experience. We
allow any non-technical person to create these shareable demos in a
matter of minutes through a Chrome extension and our web app. With
this method, teams can create a replication of their app that looks
and feels like the real thing, but can easily be shared with
prospects without worrying about overwriting data in the
environment or juggling access credentials. Because our solution
relies on serializing the DOM state, it is framework and language
agnostic and can be implemented without involving engineering
teams. We also added tools like guides and user analytics to allow
teams to create step-by-step walkthroughs within the app and track
user engagement with the tour. So far we're seeing these
interactive product demos shared as a followup after a live product
demo, embedded on their marketing site or sent in outbound
messaging. We've seen some promising early results with customers
reporting a 4x increase in booked meetings when including
interactive demos in their outbound emails. If you want to see how
it looks for a generic product, check out
https://demo.navattic.com/, and if you want to try it out on your
own product, start here: www.navattic.com/onboard/plan. We would
like your feedback on all of the above, are happy to answer
questions, and look forward to hearing about your experiences and
ideas. We'll be hanging around in the comments - fire away HN!
Author : nrmclean
Score : 56 points
Date : 2021-03-16 15:35 UTC (7 hours ago)
| seism wrote:
| Cool! Bit out of my budget, but I can see this solving a pain
| point. I wonder what happens once the demo'ed app invokes canvas,
| WebGL or its own extensions?
| choyle wrote:
| We've taken different approaches to this in the past. Through
| serializing all network requests (from js bundles to api
| requests), you can reassemble an application on the client in
| the same way that it would typically appear. This allows you to
| use any browser tech like canvas / WebGL as normal. From a DOM
| serializing perspective, although less interactive, you can
| convert canvas elements into static images (.toDataURL()). This
| has proved to be good enough for most use cases so far, but
| we're continuing to experiment with new methods!
| mtufekyapan wrote:
| It is GREAT idea but your pricing is very interesting :( I think
| you should consider for bootstrapped new SaaS products.
| ericb wrote:
| Very cool!
|
| FYI, I would pay for this, but $8,400/yr. is a killer for a
| startup. You're leaving what might be a lot money on the table at
| the bottom that you could scoop up with graduated pricing. This
| might also protect you from competitors, because if you leave the
| low end open, you may get eaten by a copycat offering
| cheap/freemium. For example, Github vs. Gitlab and
| Mailchimp(freemium) vs. Constant Contact.
|
| You've made something very cool that I think people will want,
| and this price point won't be crazy for enterprise folks. Great
| work!
| jumpbug wrote:
| Agreed, at $8,400/yr I feel like I might as well just pay my
| devs an implement something like introjs. Granted, not as
| powerful, but still.....
|
| I did immediately think to myself that this was a needed
| product when I saw.
| nrmclean wrote:
| Definitely, thanks for the kind words and feedback here.
| Pricing is something we're still iterating on and a plan
| that's palatable for startups is in the future. Stay tuned!
| disiplus wrote:
| the building blocks are all there, take something like
| inspectlet.com and introjs.com and you are probably close. but
| somebody has to build it. i see the value but the pricing looks
| like crazy to me. then again maybe for VC backed startups thats
| nothing.
| michaelpb wrote:
| Awesome! Very cool approach -- I've written a few little scripts
| that do something similar in fact in terms of serializing the
| DOM. Feedback:
|
| We are actually working on a SaaS launch right now of a pretty
| bog-standard app. I was actually sold and ready to use Navattic
| from the landing page, but I was expecting a pricing model like
| Cypress.io, so I got some serious sticker shock. I feel your
| product is 80% of what we need, but we can get to 70% of what we
| need by just saving a few HTML pages and then using an off-the-
| shelf open source tour JS script (which is what we did in one
| case last week, and it took all of like 10 minutes). If we want a
| 100% interactive experience, it would again be just slightly more
| dev effort to create a new tenant in our demo database and
| sending the prospect an onboarding link, then just watching our
| existing analytics for usage. I guess this is all to say, I'd be
| okay with paying "pocket change" for a convenient platform with
| analytics for the same reason I like Cypress -- sure, I can set
| up an E2E dashboard with off-the-shelf FOSS libraries, but
| Cypress is more convenient at a reasonable cost -- but not $8k
| per year.
|
| That said, I could see products with very broken multi-tenancy
| AND no automated provisioning finding this useful (and with deep
| pockets). I just wonder if are enough of these to be sustainable,
| since not only would they have to be broken in this way, but also
| the "fix" to multi-tenancy or automated provisioning would have
| to be a worse ROI, since these are typically already on "product
| roadmaps" anyway. Just my two cents, and I understand you might
| still be iterating on pricing. Regardless, a really cool product,
| congrats on the launch!
| nrmclean wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! That makes total sense. Today we're
| working with slightly larger companies, but in the future we
| intend to roll out a pricing model that meets the needs of most
| SaaS companies. Thanks for sharing Cypress' model - it's an
| interesting one we'll explore we continue to think through
| pricing!
| inthewoods wrote:
| I think I'm being thick on this one - there is the first section
| with the guide overlay, and then a link to the full demo (hosted
| at demo.navattic.com). Does Navattic create both of these, or
| just the first section that walks the user through the product?
|
| Off-topic: did you use a framework for the demo app? It's very
| nice looking!
| soheil wrote:
| For a product that is meant to demo a product what is so sorely
| missing is a demo of your product. I do think, however, that I
| understand the concept and really like it. Props!
| raunak wrote:
| Why have teams create a replication of their app, rather than
| have your product work off of a dummy data version or even a
| static version of the team's app? I'm not sure I understand the 2
| reasons provided - "overwriting data in the environment" and
| "juggling access credentials"?
|
| I love the website design, btw!
| choyle wrote:
| Good questions. Chris here. Before learning about the space
| through user interviews (and from Neil and Randy), I had the
| same thoughts!
|
| For companies that want to build this internally, there's a
| couple of things to think of from an engineering perspective.
| A) Restore state: If users can manipulate data in the app, is
| there a "restore state" so that they don't modify the same data
| for other visitors. B) Privileges: you probably want special,
| more-restrictive privileges for users just experiencing a demo
| and not setting up a typical user account.
|
| So you are correct, that setting up a static version of a
| team's app could solve these problems and that's exactly what
| we help facilitate! It's a trickier problem to implement
| internally than you might initially think (imagine calling
| "indeterministic" web APIs like Date.now() for a time-series
| chart or Math.random() for uuids.) Through our customer
| interviews, we found that it's difficult to win the engineering
| team's time for such a task.
|
| Our no-code editor also allows you to update the overlays
| dynamically and easily update the (now) static demo to keep it
| up-to-date with your application.
| [deleted]
| thirstysprout wrote:
| Post it in facebook.com/groups/pitchback
| nrmclean wrote:
| Thanks for passing this along! We'll check it out.
| ftio wrote:
| I've had this problem in literally every company I've been at. As
| a PM I'd be asked by my GM or CEO or Sales VP when they'll have a
| 'better demo environment' and I'd say, 'give me two engineers for
| several weeks' and they'd say 'no' and it would never happen.
|
| This is sorely needed. Based on the problem alone, of all the
| companies I've seen in the W21 batch, this is where I'd place my
| bets.
|
| Good luck!
| rafrank wrote:
| Randy here. Thank you for the kind words! Engineering has bugs
| to fix and product to build and just doesn't have the time to
| spend on the demo environment.
| ftio wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| I'm curious about your pricing. $700/month looks like the
| right balance between weeding out the tiny/expensive to
| support customers and not constraining your market too much.
|
| How'd you land on a seat-based model? This feels to me like
| the kind of thing that, even in a company with a 100+ person
| engineering team, might be worked on by just one or two
| people, probably in Sales Engineering. Maybe one other person
| to handle the analytics side. Are you thinking that in larger
| companies, people from multiple product teams would do the
| demo for their portion of the product?
|
| I don't have a better answer, but this is the kind of thing
| whose pricing should track relative to customer revenue. The
| more deals they close (bc of Navattic, presumably), the more
| you should charge.
|
| I'm sure you've thought about this quite a bit. Interested to
| learn what your thinking is, if you care to share.
| nrmclean wrote:
| Yeah definitely, a conversion or revenue-based pricing
| model is interesting to explore. We landed on per-seat as
| we've noticed expansion to individual sales reps so they
| can share personalized demos with prospects. That said,
| it's still something we're working on refining.
| shodan757 wrote:
| Very cool! I was excited & shared this with everyone at my small
| SaaS company... then I saw your pricing. :( It's literally an
| order of magnitude out of our price range!
| nrmclean wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. At this point we are targeting
| slightly larger SaaS companies, though we hope to bring this to
| a price point that's feasible for every SaaS company
| eventually!
| theroo wrote:
| Smart approach, imho.
| Kaotique wrote:
| Cool product, but way above my bootstrapped SaaS budget.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > Because our solution relies on serializing the DOM state,
|
| In addition to the benefits you mentioned, this also makes your
| interactive demos accessible with screen readers and other
| assistive technologies, or at least as accessible as the apps
| themselves. That makes them better than demo videos.
|
| I also got a good laugh out of the fact that "Improve site
| accessibility" is one of the sample tasks in your meta-demo.
| Indeed, the popup dialog, which prompted me for my email and
| name, should be marked up as an ARIA dialog. I haven't checked
| out the actual Navattic app, so I don't know yet what
| accessibility improvements might be needed there.
| choyle wrote:
| You're completely correct. It's never too soon to think about
| accessibility, and this is high on my immediate road map!
| krishvs wrote:
| This looks great! Is it possible to capture the demo environment
| once and then create multiple demo variants by editing ui text or
| data using a wysiwyg editor later? Since this is a static
| version?
| choyle wrote:
| Yes! Although the feature is pre-beta right now, we're excited
| to release it to our customers in 2 weeks. Our current
| customers have requested it to personalize demos for individual
| prospects / customer segments, or to update old dummy data in
| their account.
| efangs wrote:
| In your demo, I got to the point of "Click Metrics to
| continue...", and "Metrics" was unclickable:
| https://imgur.com/a/i5LWFaa
|
| I'm using FireFox 86.0 on MacOS 11.2 (Apple M1 chip).
| choyle wrote:
| Thanks for the report! I'll fix this asap
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Pardon the second top-level comment, but I have a few questions
| about the product:
|
| 1. Have you considered making the guided-tour functionality
| available for developers to integrate into the live app? That way
| applications can guide the user through the process of getting
| started with real data in their real account.
|
| 2. What about applications that have different UI entry points
| for different kinds of users? Can you do a guided tour where the
| user starts at entry point A, goes through a couple of screens,
| then switches to entry point B and sees what that side of the app
| is like? Maybe we can get into more specifics privately; I don't
| want to make this thread about _my_ product.
|
| 3. Do you support dynamic, server-initiated page updates, e.g.
| sent via a WebSocket in the real app?
| choyle wrote:
| 1. We do believe that this is a big opportunity, but it's quite
| a developed market (it's formally known as Digital Adoption
| Platforms). In order to compete in the space, there are a few
| more critical features that we need to develop. We would like
| to provide this for our customers so they can use the same
| guides throughout the early customer experience.
|
| 2. Yes. You can accomplish this by triggering guides to appear
| on pages matching certain patterns (such as url). You can also
| use guides to link between each other.
|
| 3. If that update results in an update to the UI, then it can
| be captured with DOM serialization.
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(page generated 2021-03-16 23:01 UTC)