Navetta
Airport rides for offsites, minus the spreadsheet
Navetta coordinates shared airport rides for company offsites. The buyer is whoever gets stuck getting a few hundred people from the airport to the hotel, usually someone in People Ops or an EA. They are busy, they are not browsing Product Hunt, and they can smell a cold pitch from a mile off. I know because I used to be one of them.
So I'm testing a different move.
Instead of pitching, I took the actual spreadsheet I used to build these ride groups by hand, swapped in fake names, and gave it away for free. No email gate, no demo. The post is a story about doing this job at 11pm the night before, and the tool is a footnote at the bottom.
The bet: lead with something genuinely useful, and let the product sell itself to the handful of people who feel the exact pain it removes. Nobody shares a pitch. People share a spreadsheet that saves them an evening.
Too early to call it (posted it this week, still watching the numbers). But it already feels less gross than any cold outreach I've tried, which counts for something.
Curious how others here handle it: when your buyer isn't an indie hacker or a builder, how do you reach them without turning into the thing you'd never respond to?
2 Comments
The fake spreadsheet with real workflows is the detail that stuck with me. Anyone who's organized an offsite knows exactly what that 11pm scramble feels like without you having to oversell it.
Reading this I couldn't shake the feeling that this is the kind of product that could naturally be getting a lot more organic traffic than it probably is today. At this stage even a small shift there can change how quickly you validate the idea.
Have you started seeing any signs of that already?
Interesting experiment.
The spreadsheet isn't really the product here—it's the artifact of doing the job manually.
Curious what you're seeing from the people who actually download it so far.