McLean watched buyers ask to try software during his years as an Oracle solutions engineer, and has built Navattic around that request.
Neil McLean is co-founder and CEO of Navattic, which makes interactive product demos for B2B software companies. He founded it with Randy Frank and Chris Hoyle, and the company went through Y Combinator in Winter 2021.
Selling Software at Oracle
He and Frank were solutions engineers at Oracle, running product demos for prospects every day. In a Navattic interview on the history of demo software, he recalled prospects saying a demo was great but asking to get hands-on before spending upwards of $100,000.
Building Navattic During the Pandemic
The founders spoke with more than 200 SaaS companies, brought in Hoyle, a college friend, and built a first version while quarantined together in Colorado, according to their 2021 Hacker News launch post. The goal was to turn anything that runs in a browser into a shareable, replayable demo with guided tours and analytics.
He has said that in 2020 only about 0.2% of websites had an interactive demo. Navattic now sells HTML demos with AI copilots, engagement analytics, and CRM integrations to marketing and sales teams.
