The Challenge
Navi needed to prove a safety-first consumer product fast. The team had no mobile app yet, no market validation, and a narrow window to show investors that a trusted, real-time experience was both technically feasible and desirable—without spinning up a large team.
The Approach
- Built v1 personally: Owned design, architecture, and implementation end-to-end to move quickly and keep IP in-house.
- Validate while building: Instrumented the app for usage and retention signals, ran live pilots, and used those learnings to map the v2 roadmap.
- Design for handoff: Structured the codebase, patterns, and documentation so the core team could iterate immediately after validation.
Technical Execution
- Safety algorithm (custom IP): Implemented a scoring system that monitored signals like location stability, check-in cadence, and context cues to trigger proactive safety states and notifications.
- Real-time friend tracking: Built low-latency location sharing with presence indicators, battery-aware updates, and graceful degradation when signal quality dipped.
- Reliability guardrails: Added background task handling, offline queues, and alert retries so critical safety flows worked even in spotty coverage.
- Privacy-by-default: Scoped data retention, minimized payloads, and made sharing controls explicit to earn user trust from the first build.
Validation and Handoff
- Ran tightly-scoped betas to observe real-world behavior, measuring adoption of safety states, alert response times, and engagement with friend tracking.
- Captured a “keep/drop/change” matrix for v2, highlighting what users valued and what could be simplified before scaling.
- Delivered playbooks (release steps, alert testing scripts, analytics taxonomy) so the team could ship v2 quickly without me in the loop.
Outcomes
- Clear product direction: Real-world usage validated the safety algorithm and live tracking as the core differentiators.
- Faster v2 velocity: With a proven foundation, the team moved straight into refinement and go-to-market instead of debating fundamentals.
- Ownable IP: Custom safety logic and platform patterns remained with the company, ready to extend into future features and partnerships.
Navi went from zero to a validated safety experience with a single builder, then parlayed that foundation into a v2 launch on a tighter, clearer roadmap.