This is an interview with Alicia Navarro, founder of FLOWN
Can you tell us about your career to date?
I was the first woman to top a computing science degree in my university in Australia. I worked initially for big companies like IBM and Vodafone in product management, which was a real passion area of mine. Product management is just a great skill to have if you want to get into entrepreneurship later, so working for big companies doing product management gave me a real desire to start my own company.
I tried and failed to do a few startups while I was working for big companies, and then eventually I started the company that became Skimlinks. From that point onwards, for the past 18 years, I’ve been founding and running startups.
Can you share more about Skimlinks and how you scaled the business?
Skimlinks was a content monetisation platform that helped media companies generate revenues from writing about products: gift guides, product reviews, shopping listicles, etc. It became successful because it became a new category of monetisation that didn’t really exist before. Besides monetising their content, Skimlinks also provided insights that enabled them to make strategic editorial decisions about what to write and where to direct traffic based on what actually performed commercially.
A big reason it scaled was that we were very good at telling stories. When I spoke to publishers, most of what I did was share examples of how other publishers were using Skimlinks’ data to make meaningful decisions about content strategy and audience behaviour.
The more stories we told, the more customers we won, and the more stories we then had to tell. We also deliberately turned our customers into heroes, inviting them to speak at conferences and share their successes publicly. Over time, some of the biggest publishers in the world were openly talking about how Skimlinks had driven real strategic impact for them, and that credibility is ultimately how the business grew to the scale it did.
And also about the eventual acquisition – what was the process like?
By the time Skimlinks was acquired, I was no longer running the company day to day. After 11 years as CEO, I’d stepped down, as I’d come to a clear realisation: I’m a very strong founder, but getting a company acquisition-ready often requires deep focus on things like EBITDA maximisation, which was never going to be my strongest suit.
So I promoted our Chief Revenue Officer into the CEO role, got the board’s full buy-in, and then supported him over the next two years as he led the acquisition process. It was an emotional experience in the end, largely because the deal completed just two weeks into the first COVID lockdown — a very intense and surreal moment to achieve what had been a lifetime ambition, celebrated, as many things were then, via a Zoom party.
What advice do you have for going through the sale process?
In terms of advice, the biggest lesson is that your eventual acquirer is very rarely a stranger; it’s usually a company you’ve already done business with, so it pays to identify potential acquirers early and start building genuine relationships and partnerships years in advance.
You have now set up FLOWN. Can you tell us more about your vision?
It is clear to me that our eroded ability to focus and manage distractions is the primary existential crisis of our age, because every other existential crisis can be tackled if we can focus enough. So I felt personally driven to dedicate my time and energy to making the world better through focus.
FLOWN is a body doubling platform, providing focus and accountability to professionals when they work remotely. “Body doubling” is essentially working in silence alongside someone else, and it boosts focus and motivation by triggering the mirror neurones in your brain that encourage you to emulate the behaviours you observe. So if you see others focusing, it makes it easier to focus yourself.
I wanted to create the next great mental health brand like Calm, but centred around focus and a sense of real human connection.
As a serial tech entrepreneur – what is your view on founders celebrating raises, often ahead of celebrating product market fit?
Being a founder is genuinely hard. Most of the time you’re juggling employee challenges, market uncertainty, competitive pressure – and doing it in a role that can be surprisingly lonely and dispiriting. So I’m actually very supportive of founders celebrating the wins they get along the way, because there are plenty of moments that don’t feel celebratory at all. Protecting your own mental health and keeping your team motivated and buoyant really matters.
That said, I do think celebrations need to be held at the right level. A raise is a meaningful validation – it shows that smart people believe in you and your story – but it’s still just one milestone, not the destination. The danger is letting that validation turn into hubris. So for me it’s less about whether you celebrate, and more about moderation: enjoy the moment, acknowledge the progress, but don’t get drunk on the wrong wins.
Can you share your experience of having ADHD and how this has influenced you and your approach to business?
ADHD can come in many flavours, and I personally am not fond of it as a label or an identity for me, but rather a useful way of communicating some of the ways my brain works. I get excited and distracted by novelty and am not great at details; I’m great at selling a vision but not great at prioritisation; I’m a whirlwind of ideas and passion but that can be overwhelming for team members.
These are very much characteristics of ADHD-founders. I’ve learnt to mitigate the negative aspects of my approach to business by hiring great operators into my team, and together we balance each other out.
Looking back, what have been the key ingredients to your success and what advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?
I think grit and tenacity are really key ingredients because most people give up along the way when it gets too hard, boring, stressful, or scary. All you need to do is just hold on tight a little bit longer than others, and then, often, you win. If you’re able to do that and you’re able to create an environment that encourages your team to do the same, well, that’s kind of the key to success.
Entrepreneurs have a habit of getting on and doing it regardless but what is your take on the current conditions for business – considering much of the negative discourse?
The current conditions for business, in many ways, have never been better because there is so much now possible without having to hire or without needing to spend a lot of money. AI is enabling anyone that wants to become an entrepreneur.
So I think the challenge will not be having an idea or building that idea into a product. By far the hardest problem is going to be getting noticed because there’s just going to be such a flood of other people competing for attention, it’s going to be hard to stand out.
How do you see tech being an enabler for the next generation of entrepreneurs?
The next generation of founders will be able to experiment faster, learn faster, and build businesses that are more aligned with how they want to live and work. The challenge will be using technology to amplify human judgment, creativity and focus – rather than outsourcing thinking altogether – because those human qualities will be what ultimately differentiates great entrepreneurs from average ones.