Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What is the purpose of Getiva.ai and who are its founders?
As getiva.ai launched just five months ago by Valvis and his partner, his co-founder, Zeno, four others on the team, they're bootstrapping so far. They've each put in several thousand dollars to help fund the business. They're about to land their two first paid pilots in the e-commerce and hospitality slash travel niches. One of them will be a flat fee 5K payment upfront.
The other will be 149 bucks a month as they test to determine what space they want to go down. They're focused on building a tool that helps these brands, these industries with great customer support using AI, chat, GPT, et cetera. We'll see what happens next. Hey folks, my guest today is Valgus Brogus. He specializes in business development, sales, coaching, and project implementation.
That experience helped his business clients achieve cost savings over a hundred million bucks. In his previous roles, he worked in team management, CRM and startups, scale-ups, unicorns, and elsewhere. Again, now building a tool called Eva, Eva.ai. Valgus, you ready to take us to the top? So where should we kick this off? That's correct. Great. Well, I'm excited that you're here.
Tell us what the company does and maybe do that through a customer example you can share. Yeah, so what we do is basically we're building an enterprise customer support solution that pretty much cuts the customer support costs by as much as 97% and ultimately delivers the response of any customer type queries in 10 seconds or less. And this is actually what we're doing and what we're building.
So this is for the industries and clients who need to kind of scale this at large and who need to cut costs on operational matters basically to serve their customers better, faster, and more efficiently. It's really hard to build a tool for everyone who's doing customer support because there are so many different people doing customer support. Are you building a specific niche or industry?
Right now, we're looking at the clients who basically have a lot of inquiries coming in. So a lot of basically requests from customers and the focus is going to be mainly in the beginning in handling the complaints. and kind of handling all the issues that are very tricky, where people need to kind of understand the context.
So the tool that we're building is also understanding the context, what the people are asking, and then basically getting the right answer, putting together it using the API, the automation, and AI, and getting back to the client. What about us? Are you targeting any specific sector, sales tools, the travel industry, hospitality? Yes, I know what you mean.
So right now, yes, we would like to ideally, in the beginning, kind of go hard on... Exactly, like travel space and actually, yes, hospitality, we would say this, and also the e-commerce as well. So these are kind of the three segments. Those are, again, three very different support systems, right? An e-commerce brand does support very different than a hospitality brand or a travel brand.
So I guess, do you come from an e-commerce background or why are you focusing on these spaces? Yes, we actually, we come from both of our cases, like Zeno, let's say, comes technically and from kind of the sufficiency side of things of the startups that have done something similar and built custom solutions to different industries.
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Chapter 3: How are the first SaaS pilots structured and priced?
The driving problem, although they're quite big industries, is the same. They have a lot of inquiries coming in in terms of complaints, in terms of requests, in terms of, let's say, Things that they need to amend, change, like e-commerce does with the products. And let's say the booking com, for instance, has the same with booking hotels and flights.
So it's the principle of what the customer eventually wants at the end to receive is somewhat similar. That's how I understand the systems and the process, like how it works in the back end. What are these customers paying you on average per month to use your technology? So right now we are launching our first pilots actually. So with the clients, so we're very early on right now. Okay.
So pre-revenue, no customers yet? Yes, exactly. So how are you structuring the pilot? Is it a paid pilot or free? This depends on kind of how big is the kind of ask what they want to do with us. So right now the two pilots that were lined up that we're going to do in November are So one is going to be a longer pilot where we're going to have a custom pricing.
So we're going to discuss because this will be an implementation of a project where the company will not hire anybody in the support and will solely use just us. So it will be a full automation right from the get-go. And what will you charge for that, do you think? It would be somewhere similar to what a bigger company would charge for licensing.
So we would put a flat fee for the beginning for integration. All the work would be $5,000. $5,000. Yeah, $5,000 in the beginning. And the other one, we are actually offering them to start off with a very kind of our lowest plan that we have in our pricing, which is $149 a month. And how long have you guys been working on this? When was the first line of code written?
So it was actually somewhere around May, June. So when we incorporated somewhere in that time. So actually, basically four or five months, we built from kind of a scratch on the paper and having an idea to actually building a functional MVP. And a lot of entrepreneurs, obviously, when they jump into their own thing, there's many months they go without pay.
And you've got to have some strategy to be able to pay your living expenses, right? While you're taking the risk on the startup. So you have guys who have been paid for four or five months now. How are you covering living expenses?
uh we have our savings and other means of getting the income so we're fully bootstrapping right now but we can do it for a little more while yeah okay are you guys doing consulting on the side or you're just slowly living off savings uh yes and and no so both i mean xeno has uh kind of a few things going on a couple of things so he's fine he can go on like that and i i have some consulting guests on the side as well and savings so are you are you taking consulting clients and converting them to the software that's how you got the two pilots
Not really. The pilots actually came from introductions and from clients that I worked and served earlier before that I worked in my previous jobs. So my consulting is more on the kind of individual level, not on a company level. Why has it taken five months to get your first signed and paid pilot?
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Chapter 4: What unique solution is Getiva.ai providing for customer support?
So we wanted to kind of niche down and that's why it took us a bit of a time to work through some sessions and brainstorm and and find out where we want to be. A niche focus to me would sound something like we're serving e-commerce brands that are selling between a million and two million per month with under a hundred SKUs.
But that's not the answer you gave me when I said, what are you focused on? You said hospitality, travel and e-commerce, which to me sounds very broad. Yeah, I think that's a journey we're on right now that we're narrowing down.
I think it's sometimes for startups in kind of the stage we are at, it's really hard to narrow down immediately the same customers because that kind of also limits your capability of getting those clients, right? So that means that we have to be very specific in what exact type of client we want. So maybe it might be even harder and take longer us to get it.
So right now we're going to spread that focus out and then we're going to narrow that down. Yeah. So are you waiting for clients to come to you and then you're going to pick one to focus on? Are you saying we're going to focus on this niche and you're going to go get the customers in that niche? Not really, actually.
We have ways of how we're getting to these clients that we're in the categories that we mentioned already. So we're exploring these options. We have the introductions. We have referrals. I'm tapping into the pool of clients that I worked before as well, like I said, in previous companies like InVise, for instance. So we're taking that approach first because it's easier to get these stocks going.
if you have one pilot though in travel and one pilot in e-commerce you're only two people you don't have time to build world-class solutions in both industries so why isn't there more focus on just one industry uh we're not actually two people only we have uh about five to six more people right okay but validus the the statements is still the same right there are teams of hundreds of people focused on support just for travel the point is you're a small startup and focus is how you win right so i guess why why have you let yourself sort of stay wide at the top of the funnel
Because we're going to start only on a small subset or a small segment. So I think this is how it goes in the B2B, at least. And also my previous experience where I worked at other companies, you start with a pilot, even in a bigger company, in a small kind of department in one place. And basically you prove that it works because we know it works. And then we go from there on.
I'm just saying that to maximize your, I agree with that, but to maximize your success, you would say, we're going to do what you just articulated, but only for e-commerce brands. But you're going to try to do this for e-commerce brands, travel brands, and hospitality brands. That's like you're diluting your ability to focus on building world-class in any one space. Yeah. No, for sure.
I mean, that, that makes sense. And that's what we want to try out because we have a feeling that even though we're on kind of on equal footing and maybe in all these three categories, we know that we're going to be definitely excelling in one more than we do in the others. And I think that's what we want to quickly test it out and just go for that one. That's the whole point.
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Chapter 5: Which industries is Getiva.ai targeting for its services?
Okay. So you've invested your own personal money and Zeno has to pay some of these folks. Absolutely. It goes without saying. How much have you put on the line? For my side right now, it's just been a few thousand. I think from Zeno, I can't speak for him. I would have to ask him, but I think it could be maybe a bit more from inside. Does that make you nervous?
I mean, I don't know how thousands of dollars is relative, right? Is that a lot of your net worth? Not a lot of your net worth? Relatively, it is. I mean, because, you know, I have family to keep up with as well, right? And now I'm also dependent on the fact that my wife has to work, right? And I have kids and stuff and I have liabilities. So of course it is.
And I mean, you have to kind of take out the, you know, the books and start to pencil everything down and think, you know, how long you're going to run and, you know, do you call it a day or you continue pushing it, right? Yep. Yep. Well, Valdez, we're certainly rooting for you. And thanks for being so open and transparent. In the meantime, though, here, let's wrap up with the famous five.
Number one, what's your favorite book? What's my favorite book? Oh, actually, it's The Compounding Effect. That's good. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? A CEO? I think, let me quickly check. No, you can say none. These are rapid fire. If it's not top of mind, we can skip it. I don't know. I can find that version. But okay, let's write down.
I think Arnold Schwarzenegger is actually CEO of his own company. So I would write him. I actually admire him and have been following him since forever. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Gideva? From the things that I've done, actually Canva. Canva. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?
So I would wish I would have more, probably around five, I think. Okay. And situation, you mentioned married. How many kids? I have two kids. Two kiddos. And how old are you? 35. Last question. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20 about this. that it's better to start working as early as you can before you go to study.
Because I think I realized that after I started studying, I should have actually started working for a few years and then went to study. Guys, Getiva.ai launched just five months ago by Valvis and his partner, his co-founder, Zeno. Four others on the team, they're bootstrapping so far. They've each put in several thousand dollars to help fund the business.
They're about to land their two first paid pilots in the e-commerce and hospitality slash travel niches. One of them will be a flat fee 5K payment up front. The other will be $149 a month as they test to determine what space they want to go down. They're focused on building a tool that helps these brands, these industries with great customer support using AI, chat, GPT, et cetera.
We'll see what happens next. Valdez, thanks for taking us to the top. Yeah, thanks, Aidan. It was nice to be here.
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