Victor Raessen wants to provide “signal instead of noise” for managed service providers and resellers who utilize MSP Navigator, a curated smart catalog that recently launched after being in development since last August. Raessen, who is founder and CEO of MSP Navigator, says the goal is “to be the place for MSPs to go to when they’re looking for a product to improve their technology stack or a set of services they sell to their customers,” saving them many hours of research and filling out forms to get information.
In addition to products, MSP Navigator includes a dashboard (pictured) for MSPs to manage their offerings and keep track of new and relevant products. The platform also has community features for engaging with peers for product insight, potential assignments, and partnerships.
The platform is free for registered MSPs and VARs, who can also pay for a premium profile that enables them to add more information about their company as well as access marketing materials. The platform’s revenue model is based on vendor memberships, which allow them to upgrade their basic profile page with additional material.
MSP Navigator is a global offering that today includes more than 700 products from 400-plus vendors, 70% of which are U.S. based. Raessen, who is based in The Netherlands, says most of the registered MSPs and resellers to date are from the U.S., U.K., Australia, and the Benelux countries.
A former MSP himself, Raessen has also worked for Autotask and Datto, and has used that industry knowledge to develop MSP Navigator, which he says is designed to solve several challenges MSPs face, such as the explosion of products coming to market over the past decade that channel pros have to sift through and keep track of.
Another challenge for MSPs, he says, is determining if a product is the right fit for both their business and their customers, and if it integrates with other products in their stack. “We map integrations between the different PSA systems and the surrounding ecosystem of products,” he says about MSP Navigator.
Finally, Raessen says it’s often difficult for customers to find MSPs based on criteria such as location, domain expertise, services offered, and product support. “You can’t really go anywhere and say, ‘I’m looking for an MSP in the New York area, which has a focus on healthcare, working-from-home support … and has support for Office 365 and Salesforce.’ So that’s something we built into the platform.”
While Raessen says there are other software and product aggregators on the market, MSP Navigator’s differentiator is that it’s built exclusively for MSPs. In addition, he says, “We allow [member] vendors to take ownership of the page. You log into the portal and add all kinds of data points MSPs want to learn about before they buy, which is a win for the MSPs because they can self-educate on the same page and it’s a win for the vendors because if they do have an MSP that’s interested in their product, they are better prequalified.”
He adds that the platform is not intended to compete with distributors. “We don’t sell anything. We provide insights.”
MSP Navigator does compete somewhat with individual vendor partner locators, Raessen says, but because the site is vendor neutral the search is not restricted to MSPs that only sell that vendor’s products. “So you go to big vendors out there, like Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Veeam. They all have a partner locator that will tell you the MSPs that sell that product. And what we do is provide a service where you can select all your mission-critical partners and find an MSP with that [expertise].”
For industry groups, Raessen says MSP Navigator can be “an extension for them as a power tool to talk about technology. So it’s not that we are replacing them, but we find that members of the peer groups like ASCII want to talk about technology. So we provide them with a space where they can create a tech stack, restrict the access to the tech stack for their members, and talk about specific products online as an extension of their discussion that they have in their forums.”
Raessen says it’s simple for MSPs and resellers to register and onboard. “We have a single sign-on with Google G Suite and Microsoft Active Directory, and most MSPs are either A or B, and they are up and running with a free profile in five minutes, and they can then start to add themselves to the service catalog.”
Going forward, Raessen says the platform will open its API to vendor members who will be able to add updates and integrations to their products on the catalog.
To date, MSP Navigator has 60 registered MSPs, and “we’re now moving from building the product to growing the word and the brand awareness and making sure everybody can find us,” Raessen says. “This is the way we want to grow until the end of the year.”
In addition, Raessen, who funded the startup, says MSP Navigator is currently in talks with venture capital firms to do a round of funding.
For more information on MSP Navigator, go here.
