When Savvy Navvy — the "Google Maps for boats" — needed capital to push into marketing, founder Jelte Liebrand had already been down the standard path. A Google pitch event led to VC conversations, flights, and a term sheet. But the friction was there before the ink: "They want one thing from the business, we want something else." Both sides walked away.
A year later, an angel-turned-customer asked a question that changed the company's trajectory: have you considered crowdfunding? With 10,000 boaters already using the app, Liebrand launched an equity crowdfunding campaign with a target of £125,000 and no idea what to expect.
"Within 24 hours we're oversubscribed," he says. "Within six days we shut it down because it was triple of what we needed."
Savvy Navvy has repeated the playbook several times since, with most rounds landing around the £1 million mark: two or three angels at six figures each, then a long tail of customers investing anywhere from $10 to hundreds of thousands. The result is 2,500 investors who don't just fund the business — they answer logistics questions, make marketing introductions, and jump on calls. "We basically have this army of investors who A, believe in what we do, B, can back us with money, but also back us with knowledge."
"It's not some magic money tree. You're selling your business."
For all the success of the crowdfunding rounds, Liebrand is blunt about fundraising itself. "I actually hate the phrase raising money," he says. "It's not some magic money tree that you put some water in and you're raising this magical free money. You're selling your business."
His advice to founders who ask him about crowdfunding is even blunter: "My first bit of advice is don't raise at all. If you can get away with not raising VC or crowd or angel or anything else, just don't." And for those who do: raise half of what you were planning to.
The numbers behind Savvy Navvy's rounds are public on the platform, and they're a useful reality check. The last round valued the company at £15 million against roughly $3.5 million in B2C ARR plus a couple million more in B2B revenue — a 3–4x multiple, not the 20x founders might fantasize about. As David points out in the episode, apps are typically acquired at around 4x trailing profit, which makes a 3–5x revenue multiple on a consumer app healthy, not stingy.
The 2-year subscription that transformed CAC payback
Asked for his biggest win of the past year, Liebrand doesn't hesitate: two-year subscriptions.
The mechanics are simple. Savvy Navvy's standard price is $129 per year; the two-year plan is $183 — roughly 30% off. Boat owners keep their boats for years, so the longer commitment fits how customers actually use the product. But the real payoff is timing: "The benefit for us isn't actually, ooh, that's more money. It's more money upfront... that's had a huge impact on what we're then able to do on the marketing side and the spend that we can have, because we get that back immediately as we spend it."
If annual plans were the industry's answer to CAC payback, this is the same logic taken one step further — two years of guaranteed LTV, collected on day one.
The signup experiment that left scars
Liebrand's biggest fail of the year is one many growth teams will recognize. Account creation is a friction point, so the team tested removing it entirely — "anonymous accounts" created silently under the hood.
"Initially the results were through the roof. It was amazing," he says. Then they rolled it out to 100%, and the success rate started to drop. Users who claimed to want privacy still wanted to sync between phone and iPad — which requires an account. Support tickets piled up. And metric issues meant the original uplift was overstated anyway. "Internally people have scars from it."
His broader warning: without a billion users, most startups don't have the sample size to A/B test properly, and it's dangerously easy to read into the numbers what you want to see while something further down the funnel quietly breaks.
Word of mouth, but not every mouth is equal
Savvy Navvy runs a large program for boating instructors — no affiliate codes, no kickbacks. Many instructors explicitly don't want them, because they don't want to be seen as sales reps. Instead, they get free access, purpose-built teaching tools, and first crack at beta features.
Liebrand explains the logic with a story from his own training: an instructor teaching him to keep his thumbs clear of a winch — while missing a thumb from doing exactly that. "I'm going to trust anything that guy says," he laughs. "Word of mouth is a great thing for any business, but not every mouth is the same value."
The same thinking powers Savvy Navvy's B2B flywheel: partnerships with boat manufacturers, starting with electric boat maker Arc Boats, now put the app directly on helm displays — and an announcement timed to this episode brings CarPlay-style navigation to pontoon boats. When a manufacturer that has been building boats for decades ships your app on the dash, that's validation no ad budget can buy.
In the full episode, Jelte and David also cover the clipboard-powered user research that revealed the real market, why running freemium in the US but not elsewhere gives the company two business models, and why "if your product comes with a manual, you've already lost." Jelte also joins the Sub Club YouTube livestream on August 6th at 9:00 AM Pacific / 18:00 CET to take listener questions.