How IVA CEO Valdis Sprogis grew IVA to $660K revenue with a 6 person team in 2025.

guys GI ia. launched just 5 months ago by valdis and his partner his co-founder uh 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 trvel niches one of them will be a flat fee 5K payment up front 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 gbt Etc we'll see happens next hey folks my guest today is valgus sprogis he specializes in business development sales coaching and project implementation that experience helped his business clients to achieve cost savings over 100 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 valis 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 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 of queries in 10 seconds or less and this is actually where what 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 this specific Niche or industry right now right now we're uh looking at the clients uh who basically have a lot of inquiries coming in so a lot of basically requests from customers and uh the focus is going to be mainly in the beginning in handling the complaints and kind of handling all the issues 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 but vas are you targeting any specific sector sales tools the travel industry yes I I know what you mean so right now yes we would like to ideally in the beginning kind of go hard on uh exactly like travel space and actually um yes um Hospitality we would say this and uh also e-commerce as well so these are three segments those are again three very different support systems right an e-commerce brand does support very different than a hospital or a travel brand so I guess why I guess do you come from an e-commerce background or why are you focusing on these spaces yes we actually we come like from both of our cases like Xeno let's say comes technically and from kind of the deficiency side of things of the startups that have done something similar and build custom solutions to different Industries and specifically yes to e-commerce and kind of also uh travel comp companies and I come also from the background where we worked with a lot of clients basically in terms of business uh what they what they were doing was the span was pretty wide in terms of uh yeah their travel it was Hospitality it was uh making also payments internationally so I understand kind of we both understand the space equally well so we understand what's kind of the driving problem there 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 um things that they need to amend change like e-commerce does with the products and let's say the booking G for instance has the same with booking hotels and flights so it's that the principle of what the customer eventually wants at the end to receive is somewhat similar that's why understand the systems and and the process that how it works in the backend what are these customers paying you on average per month to use your technology uh so right now we are launching our first Pilots actually so with the with the clients so we're very early on right now okay so so pre pre-revenue no customers yet H yes exactly so how are you structuring the pilot is it a paid pilot or free uh this depends on kind of how big is the kind of ask what they want to do with us so right now the the two pilots that were lined up that we're going to do in November 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 use will not hire anybody in the support and will solely use just us so it will be a full automation right from the go and that's and what will you charge for that do you think um 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 it's $5,000 yeah $5,000 in the beginning and the other one we're we're actually offering them to start off with a very that kind of our lowest plan that we have in our pricing which is 149 a month oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 287 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your 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give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and how long have you guys been working on this when was the first L of code written so uh it was actually uh somewhere around May June so when we incorporated somewhere in that uh time so actually in basically four or five months we built from kind of a scratch on a paper and having an idea to actually building an functional MP and a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs obviously uh 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 haven't 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 Solly living off savings uh yes and and no so both I mean Zeno has a kind of a few things going on a couple of things so he's fine he can go on like that and I 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 uh not really the pilots actually came from introductions and from clients that I worked and served earlier before uh that I worked in in my previous jobs so my Consulting is more on the kind of an individual level not on a company level why is it taken five months to get you know your first signed and paid pilot because in the beginning we wanted to narrow down what we're doing because right now this you know the whole kind of when we talk about AI space automation space it's very saturated so there's a lot of noise right now but everybody's doing everything and it's kind of maybe hard to discern where's the focus and so we wanted to really pin down where we want to focus like where we going to be best at it's just like you said before building something for everything is not the point 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 100 SKS 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 we got I think that's a journey that we're on right now that we're narrowing down I think it's some sometimes for startups in 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 so are you waiting for clients to come to you and then you're going to pick one to focus on or 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 we're uh 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 in Wise for instance so I'm I 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 worldclass Solutions in both Industries so why isn't there more focus on just one industry uh we're not two people only we have about five to six more people right now okay but Val the statement 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 uh we gonna because we're gonna start only on a on a small subsect or or or a small segment so I think this is how it goes with B2B at least and also my previous experience where I worked other companies you start with a pilot even in a bigger company in a small kind of Department in one place and to basically prove that it works because we know it works and then we go from there on I'm just saying though 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 that's like you're Divi you're deluding your 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 we want to try out because we we have a feeling that even though we're on kind of on equal footing maybe in all these three categories we know that we're going to be definely excelling in one more than we do in the others and I think that's what we wanted to quickly test it out and just go for that one that's the point now that we obviously want to spread out you know and be everywhere and then we're eventually nowhere I mean that's you mentioned six people you're pre-revenue how are you how do you convince the other four people to do work for you without paying them uh well we have means we are actually paying something to those people so they're not entirely working for free and that's why I'm saying with your bootstrapping and and leaving off of savings okay so you've invested your own personal money and Zeno has to pay some of these folks absolutely goes without saying how much have you put on the [Laughter] line I don't for for my side right now it's just been a few thousand I think from Zeno I can't speak for him would have to ask him but I think he could be maybe a bit more from him side 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 uh 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 gonna run and you know do you call it a day or you continue pushing it right y y well Valas 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 [Music] um now I oh actually it is it's the it's uh the compounding effect um forgot that's good number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um a CEO um I think let me quickly check there was no we can say none if these are rapid fire if it's not top of mine we can skip it no no I can find that person but uh okay let's let's write down I think Arnold Schwarz is actually CEO of his company so I would write him I actually admire him and he've been following him from since forever number three what's your favorite online tool for building gadiva um from the things that I've done actually canva canva number four how many hours of sleep to get every night oh I would wish I would have more uh 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 uh 35 last question something you wish you knew back when you were 20 Valas uh that uh 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 GI ia. a launched just five months ago by valdis and his partner his co-founder uh Zeno four others on the team they're bootstrapping so far they've each put in several thousand do to help fund the business they about to land their two first paid pilots in the e-commerce and Hospitality trvel niches one of them will be a flat fee 5K payment UPF front 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 gbt Etc we'll see what happens next bis thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks Aiden it was nice to be here one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every 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