nauta turns every article into a prototype that can be tested
nauta writes about business and markets for young readers in Portugal. Its analytics showed what readers did on each article, never why, so the team put a short question inside every one.
Mário de Pinto Balsemão Co-founder nauta
Financial education · Articles · Since 2023
nautaportugal.com By Dino Correia, 10 November 2026 Ler em português
Mário de Pinto Balsemão
Mário de Pinto Balsemão co-founded nauta with João Ornelas Raínho and Nuno Martins. He holds a BSc and an MSc in Energy and Environmental Engineering, and he has followed the financial markets since he was a child.
His career has taken him through the energy sector, European institutions and space robotics, where he is a mission architect on robots built to explore Mars. Space exploration, the energy transition and artificial intelligence are still the fields he follows most closely.
nauta puts the essentials of business and financial markets in the palm of the hand. It goes past financial literacy, knowing the concepts, to what it calls financial intelligence: understanding the economy around you, making informed decisions and acting on them with confidence. A free subscription opens the whole website and brings a newsletter every Saturday.
The challenge
nauta watched its articles closely. Google Search Console and Cloudflare showed what readers did on each one: how many came and how long they stayed. They rarely showed why.
Two articles of similar length, one on SpaceX and one on Tesla, could hold readers for very different times, the Tesla piece about half as long, and nothing in the analytics said what made the difference. Nor could it point to the paragraph where readers gave up.
Every change was a guess, and checking it meant waiting days for the numbers to move. For a team that treats each article as a prototype to improve, that cycle was slow, costly and imprecise.
Finding Asklet
The team weighed the usual options. beehiiv's own polls are tied to subscriber profiles, so readers who only visit the website are left out. Surveys that rely on cookies only work in the EU once a reader accepts them. A separate form, such as Google Forms, adds a step most readers won't take, and a public comment box suits only some questions.
Asklet asks inside the article, with no account, no login and no cookies, and the answers stay anonymous. It speaks European Portuguese, and each article can ask its own questions.
How nauta uses Asklet
nauta's website runs on beehiiv. Each article carries the Asklet embed in an HTML Snippet block, and a short question appears inside the article that readers can answer in seconds.
The questions change from article to article. Some ask whether the piece was useful, with a yes or a no; some offer a choice; some leave room for a comment.
Asklet widget matches each survey to the article by its path, so the embed is the same everywhere and an article's questions change in Asklet without touching the post.
The answers come back grouped by article. The team reads them, analyse, and asks again.
What changed
- to the first reader answer on a new article
- 72 min
- before other analytics showed anything comparable
- ~40 h
- faster feedback, by nauta's count
- 32x
The first test came on 4 November 2026, with an article on the story of Junior Data Consulting published at 19:29. Its first Asklet answer arrived at 20:41, 72 minutes later. By nauta’s account, its other analytics had nothing comparable to show after about 40 hours.
nauta counts that as feedback 32 times faster, and has set 100 times faster as its long-term mark. The team now hears from readers on the evening an article goes out.
Lessons learned
Ask where the reading happens. A question inside the article reaches readers while the piece is in front of them, and the answer belongs to that article.
Give each article its own questions. A general survey tells you about the site; a question written for one piece tells you what to change in it.
Keep the questions out of the post. With one embed and the survey chosen by path, the questions can change as often as the articles do.
What's next
nauta keeps writing on business and markets for young readers, with a newsletter every Saturday and new articles on its website. Each new article gets its own questions, and the team keeps working towards feedback 100 times faster than before.
Furthermore, nauta is developing a platform to help young people improve their financial literacy, using a gamification approach.
More on how this works: one survey per page, from one snippet and reader feedback for publishers.
Dino Correia Founder of Asklet
A note from Asklet
I met the nauta team at the startNOW accelaration program, promoted by Startup Madeira, and they shaped Asklet more than they may know.
They asked for a setup that takes minutes, one embed that serves any question instead of a new form for every survey, and a way to change a page's survey without replacing that embed. That is why Asklet detects the page’s path and picks its survey.
nauta treats every article as something to test and improve, which is what Asklet was built for. Thank you, Mário, João and Nuno, for pushing us and for trusting us with your readers.