Why we built Navexa: the story behind the platform

I’d been picking stocks for a few years when I realised I couldn’t answer a fairly basic question: how well was I actually doing?

I wanted to understand my portfolio’s performance and how it compared with an index fund. But I didn’t have a clear answer.

I’m a software engineer. So my response was fairly predictable: I started building something.

That project became Navexa.

I caught up with Owen Rask on the Australian Business Podcast to talk about how it happened. We discussed the assumptions that didn’t work, the years spent building the product, and why I still enjoy working on it.

It started as something for myself

There was no plan to start a business. I liked investing, I liked writing software, and I had a problem I wanted to solve.

That seemed like a good enough reason to get started.

Then I showed it to friends and colleagues. Some wanted to try it. Their feedback made me realise the questions I was asking about my investments were questions other people had too.

So the project kept growing.

I worked on it alongside my corporate job, then left to join another startup. Six weeks later, I was let go.

That left me with a decision to make. I could find another corporate job, or give the project I’d been working on a proper go.

My wife, who was my fiancée at the time, was also a software engineer. We didn’t have kids, and her support gave me the opportunity to try. I also started a separate business that helped pay the bills while Navexa developed.

Along the way, I roped in my stepbrother Thom. He’s a copywriter, and I needed someone who could explain the product properly on the website and in our marketing.

He’s still my co-founder today.

We thought being cheaper would be enough

We launched our first paid plans in December 2019.

We had some fairly grand ideas about how that would go. We’d offer a cheaper alternative, people would switch, and the people already using our free product would become paying customers.

We had roughly 1,000 people on our free list. From memory, about three became paying customers.

That part of the plan clearly needed some work.

I’d assumed that liking a free product meant someone would want to pay for it. But asking people to pay was a different test. We had to show them why the product was worth paying for.

We also learned that a low price doesn’t solve that problem. If someone isn’t confident the software will do the job they need it to do, being cheap doesn’t help much.

Looking back, the early version was missing capabilities customers needed. We hadn’t built much trust yet, either.

There was more work to do on the product and on how we explained it.

What does a portfolio tracker actually track?

This has been one of the interesting challenges with Navexa. You say “portfolio tracker”, and people can have quite different ideas about what that means.

For example, a tool might let you enter that you own 50 shares and show you what they’re worth today.

That answers one question.

But I wanted to understand how my investments had performed over time. To do that, the history of what I’d bought and sold mattered.

If you’ve bought an investment at different times and later sold some of it, those records are part of understanding your results. The current value alone doesn’t explain what happened along the way.

Navexa uses the investment records in your account to calculate portfolio performance and prepare tax reporting data. Your trade history is central to that.

Explaining this has been part of building the business. Before someone can see the value in a tool, they need to understand the question it helps them answer.

The slow years mattered

The first few years were tough.

At the time, I spent plenty of energy wondering why we weren’t growing faster. In hindsight, we were still building the capabilities people needed and giving them reasons to trust us.

That took time.

An earlier podcast conversation with Owen in mid-2025 became a turning point. The episode reached a much wider audience, and more people found out about Navexa.

By then, we’d spent years working on the product. So when that attention arrived, we were in a much better position to serve the people discovering it.

It’s difficult to attribute all our growth to one source. We’ve continued making YouTube videos and other content, and people find us in different ways.

But that interview made a big difference.

Before it happened, I’d wondered whether there might be one moment when lots of people suddenly discovered what we were building. It was easy to imagine. Much harder to make happen.

Then it happened, and it changed how I thought about getting our work in front of people. It also reminded me how important those less visible years had been.

A milestone for our team of five

When we recorded this episode, there were five of us working on Navexa, and we’d recently passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

For us, that was a big milestone.

We went go-karting and had drinks afterwards. Fairly low-key, but worth stopping to celebrate after the years it had taken to get there.

The day-to-day work is pretty straightforward. We have one weekly meeting to get everyone working towards the same objective, then plenty of smaller conversations throughout the week.

A big part of my job is keeping that objective clear. It’s easy to get interested in something that would be cool to build. The harder question is whether it’s the most useful thing to work on right now.

Owen and I also talked about AI and software development. We spent years working through performance and tax calculations before today’s AI tools became available. Having that background, then being able to use new tools to develop software faster, is exciting.

There’s a lot to explore. As someone who enjoys building things, that’s a good place to be.

Why I’m still doing this

Walking to work recently, I asked myself what I’d do if I had $100 million in the bank.

The answer I came back to was that I’d be right there, walking into the office to do what I was already about to do.

I like building software. I like investing. And I get to work with people who are interested in the same things.

Navexa has grown well beyond the tool I started making for myself. But the part I enjoy is familiar: working through a problem, building something to help solve it, and seeing other people use it.

Listen to my full conversation with Owen Rask on the Australian Business Podcast.