Aaron Lee

So one of the reasons why I started SmithAI is

was the fact that the pain point for the SMB, which US has about 30 millions of them, is they don't have the time and money to build up their own team.

And as a matter of fact, they even approach me and say, hey, Home Depot had huge call centers.

Can you guys handle my customer calls and texts and SMS and Facebook messengers?

And of course, home people couldn't do it because the call center was built for the corporate use and not built for the pros.

And that was really the genesis of the idea that came from.

It's like, how can we build something that serves this very large underserved community?

It was like we hatched the idea in 2015 with my co-founder, Justin Maxwell.

And he was at Google.

And I said, I have this amazing idea.

Come join me.

We both are very passionate about SMB.

And I think we launched towards the end of 2015 with just a few beta customers.

The full launch was in 2016.

I think we got more not because I think we have a similar idea.

It was just like we bootstrapped the company.

So in the first few years, we actually didn't take any salaries.

Like all the entrepreneurs out there, we put in our own money.

It's not, not small amount.

It's significant.