Scaling tech ventures and helping workers focus: Alicia Navarro’s story

Who starts a business in the middle of a global financial crisis on a polluted London roundabout? Well, Alicia Navarro, now a serial tech entrepreneur with a successful acquisition plus a scaling remote worker focus platform under her belt, did.

“I never woke up one day and said, I’d love to start an affiliate marketing automation platform,” she quips of her first venture, Skimlinks, launched in 2008 and run out of an office on Old Street Roundabout in East London, because of the low price per square foot.

The area, as well as the rent costs, are very different today. It’s now known as Silicon Roundabout due to its high number of tech firms. 

The advent of Silicon Roundabout as a glamorous London tech hub mirrors Navarro’s own trajectory rather well, from the spark of an idea around affiliate marketing to a successful acquisition, (in 2020, Skimlinks was acquired for an undisclosed sum by multinational performance-marketing tech company, Connexity), to her second venture, which aims to change the world of remote work for the better, but more on that later.

Navarro begins by telling me that she is a fan of pivoting. After all, it took Skimlinks from a spark of an idea to a business worthy of acquisition. “The first version of the company was totally different,” she explains.

The art of the pivot

What had started as a social bookmarking site for customers to create moodboards, similar to Pinterest, of the products they liked, then turned into something else. “I found that it was really hard to make it work,” she says of the first idea. “Affiliate marketing at the time was still very manual, and even to create an editorially created affiliate link was complicated.”

“I think there are some business problems that you can only really understand when you’re in the middle of it”…

So, Navarro built her own tool that looked at user-generated content on their site that reversed-engineered affiliate links from the retailer. “It worked very nicely.”

In fact, it worked so nicely that investors and potential customers were taking note. “They were more interested in the monetisation technique we had come up with than in everything else I’d built. So we ended up making this bold decision to dump everything I’d built for the last two years and simply commercialise this monetisation technology that other websites could run on their sites.”

Ergo, Skimlinks was born, and suddenly, Navarro was in the affiliate marketing industry. “It was never my intention,” admits Navarro of the sector she found herself in.

Pivoting is something she has done again with her second business, FLOWN, launched in 2020 as a co-working community designed to create deep work focus, of benefit to ADHD brains in particular.

It started as a physical concept with sites across London and the UK. Navarro describes its initial phase as an “Airbnb for physical spaces to do focused work by yourself.” Unsurprisingly, the pandemic made securing physical spaces tricky, plus Navarro felt she could have more impact online, and so FLOWN became fully digital. 

“My investors used to say that you know you’re doing something right when you’re getting sued. Like you’re big enough now.” 

When launching a business, some entrepreneurs favour an unrelenting focus. For both of Navarro’s ventures, pivoting and change led to success. “I think there are some business problems that you can only really understand when you’re in the middle of it,” she summarises.

“Most investors who invest in a pre-seed stage know that it’s likely the product will end up being very different. When you’re in the midst of it, and once you’ve built something and you’re talking to customers every day that use it, you will uncover an insight that would never have been able to be uncovered if you had not done it.”

Pivoting, she adds, can aid problem solving, which is, she believes, the essence of entrepreneurship: “The goal of an entrepreneur is to win, is to get there. And if that means we’ll scrap that and let’s do it this way, you have to be willing to do it.”

In the twelve years between launch and acquisition, Navarro experienced a lot with Skimlinks, bad as well as good, but she believes these moments have made her more resilient and prepared for the tougher times.

Learning to be a leader

There was the patent troll and Craigslist killer, yes, killer, who alleged patent infringement against Skimlinks. “Even though we won each trial, he would then escalate it and appeal. And it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. But in the end, we managed to win.” She also painfully recollects a price-fixing entrapment situation from a competitor: “My investors used to say that you know you’re doing something right when you’re getting sued. Like you’re big enough now.” 

…”Your job is to regulate the emotions of the company through your own presentation of yourself.”

Part of the reason she wanted to start a second venture, FLOWN, is to take the lessons she learned the first time around at Skimlinks and put them to good use. “I wanted to be the beneficiary of my own life lessons,” she explains. Although she feels the lessons haven’t been as painful this time, “I feel significantly less stressed and more resilient to the storms that come because I’ve gone through so much, and after a while, you have confidence in your ability to weather any storm.”

Navarro has also learned lessons around how her leadership impacts her team; that the good or bad energy begins and ends with her. “Skimlinks was an in-office culture, so I knew that every time I walked into that front door, the energy I gave off would set the tone for the rest of the company,” she says.

“So I would prepare myself. I’d take a deep breath, and I would stride into that office with a bounce in my step and a smile. I wasn’t faking it, but it would mean that I would swallow the fear that I had about the investor core coming up and the fact that I’d had a relationship issue the day before. You have to hide that. And now with FLOWN, which is an entirely virtual team, I’m mindful that every time we get into a virtual meeting, the energy with which I enter it sets the tone for everyone else. And so you realise that your job is to regulate the emotions of the company through your own presentation of yourself.”

Another leadership lesson she’s learned? That not all founders are the best CEOs.

Despite wearing both founder and CEO hats at Skimlinks, she ended up stepping down from the CEO role and promoted her chief revenue officer instead. “I think they’re very different roles,” she says of the two positions. “While I could be a good CEO, it wasn’t as natural a fit with my strengths.”

Navarro, who calls herself a “creative, chaotic, charismatic figure,” says she is a  “great founder” because she loves the creation piece of business building: “I have a real vision. I’ve got real inventiveness. I’m great at finding the right kind of early team members, getting them along for the ride and creating a great culture.” The CEO role, on the other hand, which she aligns with “doing the actual day-to-day running of processes,” isn’t for her these days.

Navarro was fortunate that Skimlinks found success early on, after the first month and a half, in fact, when a publisher with a dedicated Black Friday website signed up. That customer made 300k that day alone.

Different trajectories

“It was a very defining moment,” she says. “We were very lucky in retrospect because a lot of companies go for many years before they have that moment of, okay, we’ve made it. We had ours very early at Skimlinks.”

That Black Friday moment was the litmus test for success: “That was the early growth trajectory, reaching these sites that had never before realised that they could monetise as easily. That they could install one line of JavaScript, which was a copy and paste into your global site, and the next day they were making tens of thousands of dollars without doing anything else. That’s what a big difference it was for them.”

FLOWN’s growth trajectory, Navarro explains, has been a little different. “It’s a really new concept that not many people have heard of. So there’s a real education piece. In the case of Skimlinks, we made money very easily. FLOWN is a bit more complex because it requires education. So there’s a different trajectory.” 

Although FLOWN’s growth journey has been slower, Navarro thinks mounting conversations around work styles have helped it gain momentum. “We started very early with this, but now there seems to be much more mainstream discussion and awareness about the issues of distraction.” 

…”If you turn up and you see a wall full of people that are managing to get to their desk and work, you feel like, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. There’s this group accountability thing.”

On that topic, Navarro reveals the inspiration for FLOWN and how it started with author and professor Cal Newport’s book on Deep Work, and achieving distraction-free periods of concentration for ultimate output. 

She was also fascinated by the concept of secular rituals and looked to brands like SoulCycle and Peloton, and how they created loyalty and engagement via “community rituals.” 

Today, FLOWN offers users virtual focus sessions led by “charismatic facilitators” underpinned by a strong intention to get work done and, importantly, to “create a sense of connectedness among strangers.”

FLOWN – remote workers and focus

Sign up for FLOWN, and you’ll see a calendar of different sessions you’re able to join; these include large focus sessions delivered by FLOWN’s facilitators, to ones led by community members themselves.

Users can follow other members and get notified when they join a session. The sessions are, to some extent, tailored. Users can use timers, play different kinds of music, and send messages. Click into any session, and you’ll see people working on things from all over the world and sharing messages of intention and support.

Sessions vary in duration, number of attendees, and even topics. From focus to accountability, timesheet advice, work-sharing for writers, and, it turns out, even a session on cleaning your house hosted by a community member. Whatever the nature of the session on offer, it seems the overall intention is to aid focus during workdays.

Underpinning FLOWN is the idea of body-doubling, where working alongside other people in the right environments can aid concentration and prevent distraction. “We’re programmed to mimic the behaviours that we observe,” Navarro explains.

“Then there’s just the pure motivation of it. If you turn up and you see a wall full of people that are managing to get to their desk and work, you feel like, okay, if they can do it, I can do it. There’s this group accountability thing.”

There’s proof in the pudding with FLOWN, as Navarro shares. Engagement is high, with the average number of sessions a user attends being six sessions a week. This, on its own, shows the extent to which remote workers need focused spaces to work, nearly on a daily basis.

FLOWN aims to get its users, whether freelancers or employees whose employer has paid for a subscription, into a flow state, rather than a shallow work state. 

Flow state vs shallow work

A flow state, Navarro explains, means total immersion in a task. She describes it as akin to surfing or skiing, when people are “so deep in that state it requires all of your faculties.” 

Aside from concentration, other benefits of a flow state include, she says, more learning abilities and higher job satisfaction. 

The opposite of a flow state, she explains, is shallow work. Think of this as answering emails, attending meetings or doing work which doesn’t require much focus. “Too often, many of our days are lost in a sea of shallow work, and you end up finishing your day going, I did nothing meaningful that day and I don’t feel good about it.” 

What FLOWN’s key offering seems to be is the refuge of focus it provides remote workers, with a supportive yet unobtrusive community helping them to feel accountable and motivated. 

“The great thinkers and inventors have always operated in a state of deep work,” she reflects. “You’ve got inventors and writers that go to their cabin in the woods for a week to read and learn and plan and strategise.”

Well, if you’re going to work, the idea that a digital space exists where you can produce the best work that you’re proud of sounds like something to consider…

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