Alicia Navarro and the business hiding inside the business

Alicia Navarro had spent years building a product when people began asking for the bit underneath it. Skimbit helped people gather things they liked online and make decisions together. It also contained a less conspicuous invention: software that could turn ordinary shopping links into links that earned a commission. The first idea had consumed her attention. The second began attracting everyone else’s.

There is a particular kind of entrepreneurial embarrassment in this situation. You have brought the entire dinner, and your guests want the recipe for the sauce. Navarro listened. The supporting technology became Skimlinks, a business that helped publishers earn money when their readers bought products they had written about. The discarded plan had done its job: it had brought her close enough to a problem to understand it.

Years later, after handing over the running of that company, she found herself with another problem. She had work she wanted to do and nowhere satisfactory to do it. The next experiment would involve a car called Lancelot, a dog called Lumi, and a Spanish garden equipped for concentration. By then, a detour was familiar territory.

Lip gloss, code and borrowed clothes

Navarro grew up in Sydney, the daughter of a Spanish mother and Cuban father. She asks people to pronounce Alicia as her mother does: “A-lee-the-a”. Leithy is the shorter option. The preference fits someone who pays attention to how a word feels as well as what it says. Product names, brand names, the atmosphere of an office: these things would all become part of her working vocabulary.

Her early business education included lip gloss. Through Australia’s Young Achievers programme, she became managing director of Pout, a range intended for men and women. She later recalled that the venture made a 320% profit in six months and won its programme’s enterprise award. A teenage cosmetics company was a useful introduction to the pleasures of making something people would pay for.

Computing supplied another education. At the University of Technology Sydney, she studied information technology and won the University Medal for Computing Sciences in 1998. Corporate work followed, including IBM, Vodafone and Fairfax Media. Product management gave her experience of translating an idea into something a team could build, and something another person might actually use.

There were smaller ventures along the way. Fun & Fearless Computing offered help to older computer users and lasted only a few months. Skimbit began in Sydney, developed with engineers in Romania while Navarro still had a full-time job. It asked people to adopt a new way of collecting and comparing things online. Getting them to do so proved difficult.

Travel gave her room to reconsider. In London, a friend suggested offering the technology to publishers under their own branding and introduced a possible wedding-industry customer. A prototype had to be ready in two days. Navarro borrowed suitable clothes from friends; her travelling wardrobe lacked the necessary boardroom range. The customer agreed to an upfront payment and a subscription. Suddenly the experiment had a buyer.

The business inside the business

The eventual change went further. Making affiliate marketing work had required connecting with multiple networks and handling a fiddly process around links. Navarro’s team had built automation for its own use. Investors and potential customers showed interest in that mechanism. Commercialising it meant putting aside much of the product she had spent so long developing.

With co-founder Joe Stepniewski, she built Skimlinks around the more specific opportunity. The company dates its founding to 2007; the monetisation product launched in 2008. A reader could follow a product link from a publisher’s page to a retailer. If an eligible purchase followed, the publisher could earn a commission. Skimlinks handled the machinery that made those relationships manageable.

The appeal was practical. Publishers were already helping readers decide what to buy. Their recommendation might lead someone to a retailer, yet the publisher would receive no income from the resulting purchase. Affiliate technology offered a way to connect that commercial value to revenue. Automation made it easier to apply across a publication rather than arranging every link by hand.

It also gave Navarro a product she could explain through other people’s results. In 2026, she described growth as a cycle of customer stories: show how one publisher used the service, win another customer, then have another example to share. Publishers were invited to speak about their own work at conferences. The customer got the stage; Skimlinks got a convincing demonstration.

A company with its name in lights

The business grew into infrastructure used across millions of websites. Navarro’s account of her tenure records an 80-person company and $50 million in annual revenue. Those are company figures from that period, rather than a valuation or a measure of her personal wealth. They describe how far the operation had travelled from a Sydney living room.

She cared about the experience of working there, too. The culture acquired its own name, #skimlove, and the name acquired a neon sign. Affiliate infrastructure is a demanding subject for office romance. Navarro’s answer was to make the people and their shared experience part of the company’s identity.

Her leadership reference points were equally personal. Asked who inspired her, she chose Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The explanation focused on delegation, commitment to a mission, friendship and wit. It is an unusually entertaining answer to a question that often produces a list of chief executives. It also makes her priorities fairly clear: competence should leave room for a personality.

Her work outside Skimlinks carried some of those priorities into other companies. She advised founders and worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at firstminute and Breega. Testimonials from founders including Provenance’s Jessi Baker describe specific, practical help. She also served as a Young Enterprise trustee, returning to the kind of organisation that had given her a teenage taste of business.

Handing over the keys

In April 2018, Navarro made a decision that required assessing her own place in the company. She handed the CEO role to chief revenue officer Sebastien Blanc and became president and a board member. Stepniewski also stepped away from daily operations. The business had reached a stage where different strengths could serve it.

The distinction between founder and CEO can disappear when both titles sit under the same photograph. Navarro has since spoken about enjoying the invention, the vision and the assembly of an early team, while recognising that the detailed running of an established organisation asks for another set of abilities. The handover gave those abilities more room.

Connexity announced its acquisition of Skimlinks on 28 May 2020. Blanc had led the company for the intervening two years. Navarro’s public reflection on the sale dwelt on colleagues: their work, their careers, the relationships formed over the years. She thanked Stepniewski for carrying the venture with her. A transaction had supplied an ending; her account was full of people.

“I love inventing things.”Alicia Navarro, reflecting on Skimlinks’ acquisition, May 2020

A desk somewhere else

By then, the next venture was taking shape. After leaving the office routine, Navarro discovered the drawbacks of working at home. A large Apple monitor was an unwelcome addition to the dining table. Shared offices offered energy and company, but those qualities did not always help her concentrate. She had courses to take, ideas to develop and projects she wanted to finish.

She took to the road. Her early FLOWN experiments included a retreat in Galicia, where she arranged workspaces around a stone house and its gardens. Tables, supportive chairs, monitors, whiteboards and power cables were part of the equipment. Lancelot carried the kit. Lumi supplied the canine company. Her mother helped find the property.

The physical details mattered: somewhere to sit, somewhere to think, somewhere to return to a project without immediately being pulled away. Guests brought work such as planning a first book or solving an operational problem. The experiment let Navarro observe what people needed while living with the service herself.

FLOWN subsequently moved towards digital coworking. The pandemic complicated a business built around physical places, and online sessions offered a different way to reach people. Participants could work on their own tasks while sharing a session with others. The company calls these gatherings Flocks, extending the sense of movement and company contained in its name.

The next thing worth making

Navarro’s interests have never been confined to software. She lists maps, countryside walks, dancing, oysters and Bill Bryson among her pleasures. Her personal writing has space for travel and her dog as well as business. That mixture helps explain the early FLOWN experiment: a working environment could be useful and still have a garden.

Her ambition now centres on helping people focus on work they care about, with other humans providing company and accountability. In her recent interviews, product design and culture remain closely connected. How a team works, how a customer feels using a service, and how an idea gets revised all belong to the same set of questions.

The recurring move in her career is to give an inconvenience enough attention that it becomes instructive. A troublesome revenue process became Skimlinks. The search for a workable desk helped begin FLOWN. Neither arrived in its final form. Navarro kept making adjustments, sometimes substantial ones, while staying interested in the person trying to get something done. There is a certain freedom in that: the first plan gives you somewhere to begin, and experience gets a vote.