Artist & Mother of 2 Turned AI Startup Founder in 12 Months

I didn't have anything left and in that moment I kept going so it was really tough for me to have to be dealing with all of these problems and then also have to take care of you know my kids I was mainly a visual artist right before this and then once chat GPT came out I just became obsessed it's actually pretty simple like I never imagined that I would be here in a million years it's really easy to think that you are set in stone and that you only have this Direction with your life because of what you know that's not true hello everyone

and welcome to the channel today we have a special guest Bianca who many of you may recognize from my community she has been an original member of my Discord accelerator on the $59 plan when we released that and today she's going to be sharing her extremely interesting story from being an artist to being an AI entrepreneur and startup founder raising a preed capital to fund her idea and we're also going to get to see a little bit of the demo at the end of what she's built so I think this is a great opportunity to bring a woman on the channel which is something I've been critiqued for in the past so Bianca knows that we're uh we've been in touch with her for a long time through the accelerator and through the Discord and I think this is really cool not only for other women looking to see an example of what they can do but just anyone generally in the space showing how you can take an idea that you find and I'm really interested in learning the process you went through for finding the person to fund the business that you've started now so I think there's a lot of important stuff to cover um and of course thank you for coming on and giving us your time of course I'm happy to be here sweet so we can uh we can jump straight into a little bit of your background and uh where you're from where you came from before the AI space I think is pretty important to touch on yeah so growing up I was always an artist involved in all of the Arts um I was mainly a visual artist right before this and I also had day jobs as an artist you have to have a lot of jobs to get by um but I made a solo animated pilot and then I also have um an augmented reality children's book that I made so that was kind of my introduction into technology in general um and then once chat gbt came out I just became obsessed started learning everything that I could and realized that it could actually help me completely streamline all of the things that I actually have to do on a day-to-day that I do not enjoy doing so

that was the artist side of things you were doing that as a supplement to your other business right or to your job as a property manager right so if you want to go into that and how that experience and also understanding chat GPT revealed the uh the opportunity for you to build this business that you're now running yeah so years back um we bought our first rental properties and we were really thinking that this was going to be like passive income it's going to be so great and it just wasn't it was so much work than what we had expected um like I was waking up in the mornings with all of these M calls all of these text messages and all of these tenants who had real problems and real needs with like maintenance emergencies complaints um and then they also just wanted to tell me about their lives and I would have to you know be their therapist in many instances um and it just was a really big time I won't say waste um but it was a lot of time spent on that maybe didn't need to be spent there and then I also have a family so it was really tough for me to have to be dealing with all of these problems and then also have to take care of you know my kids and handle real life yeah and for those of you who haven't been part of the Discord and in my accelerator uh you'll know you won't know that uh when Bianca comes on the call she's often got kids climbing all over them all over her looking after them um so I've always admired your ability to juggle not only the property management responsibilities you have but also being part of the community and being so active and also being able to be a great mother to the kids you have so uh it's a big kudos for me because it's more than I could handle for sure so now that we know a bit on the background of where you've come from um you want to tell us more about where you're at right now and the story of how you came from sort of this idea coming to the accelerator and then being able to jump on this opportunity and it's been so awesome seeing you go from strength to strength in this I remember when I first heard about you getting the raising the capital I was like wow it's I can't believe that there's someone that accelerated doing this so quickly um and you've just gone from strength to strength so if you want to dive into where you're at right now and how you got to this point more recently awesome yeah so I have a lot of stories learnings from this time it's crazy how much you can do in a whole year um I think we underestimate ourselves and if you just work hard keep going day it's a consistency right yeah it's really just consistency and even I want to say like an hour a day will lead to something great um when you start a business it is not an hour a day it's more like 24 hours in the day and seven days a week it really started with this initial idea I first um started working with people I made like some initial prototypes and I would say I've had a lot of lessons in discernment um in working with people you won't necessarily know who's good to work with and who's not until you have some hard lessons um I initially had uh like an IP theft situation which was really tough on me um it almost felt like I didn't have anything left and in that moment I kept going I talked to a friend I asked to be in contact with a lawyer um and then I spoke to an IP lawyer the more that I spoke to this lawyer that I had met uh the more we got to know each other the more that we really clicked and she actually ended up becoming my co-founder so that was like first win she is an exceptional woman uh her name is Mira balul and she is uh an IP and corporate attorney she is just exceptional uh she's also on her second AI company and she's an experienced executive um and a strategist so that was number one great Partnerships um so then I had already applied to a whole bunch of like accelerator programs um a lot of these will expect you to have an MVP made um an MVP is minimal viable product so just some something that's functional that you can show off at this stage we didn't have any just for the people who

may not have the context do you want to give them a little bit of like yes we know the property management but what how exactly you identify that as a problem to solve just in case people aren't fully up to speed so like you on the dayto day is the the use case around completely automating a job or just so we' got a bit of context on what exactly it is here yeah okay so when I started my company years back I had no idea what I was doing um and I would face all of these issues all of these complaints all of these things and you just have to figure it out and if you own these properties your property is at stake because things break and you need to fix them quickly so that your property stays up to date and if there's a leak or something it needs to be fixed immediately or there could be damage to the property um there's also a lot of like emotional distress that tenants go through like if they can't pay their rent or if they are just having stuff go on in their lives that they need to offload um a lot of times that also comes to you as a property manager you're kind of handling all these things that people cannot handle on their own they look to you for help and so this is

distinct from the short short-term rental of abbs where you have like the managers who are juggling like the property that I'm here there's someone who kind of manages me this is more just regular rentals and that it's like you have a longer term tenant so you have more time to build a relationship with them right because I was like I wouldn't really be going to my Airbnb host and completing so it's proper rentals and longer term Tendencies okay yeah so these are long-term Residential Properties uh most properties in the United States are like single family rentals and most landlords in that space are from like one to four properties so they're not like larger landlords they're more like Mom and Pops who have bought a few prop properties and they want this to be like their retirement yeah they actually just sign themselves up for another job yeah so without knowing it they are signing up for something that's way more intensive than what they had imagined and that's what happened to us and so

that led you to now we sort of come full circle and you go through the process of I mean you came into the accelerator and you looked at the agency model but I think you're more interested in solving what I highly recommend everyone else to do is if you've got a problem right in front of you then that's the best you know that problem and that pain inside out so if you have experienced in a role or you're doing something currently I think the way that you've done it is excellent and trying to go straight to the source and saying I know everything about how to solve this where I know basically all I need to know to get this thing started what made you make that jump and how did you really get into reaching out to these accelerators and trying to get the funding what was that switch in your mind was like I need to go and get money to start this rather than trying to do it from scratch on your own so my original goal was to replace myself I didn't want to really have to do everything that I had been doing it was very stressful for me um and granted it's not at a place right now technologically where you will be able to fully replace yourself the legal system in the United States is also a little bit further behind where everything is still manual you still have to send certified mails go in person um but aside from those things everything can be automated um and since I know what I do on a daily basis and everything that I need to be uh doing it was easy for me to say okay I would want this to be automated here I would love to be able to you know not have to coordinate between maintenance and tenants and that takes a lot of time out of my day like if that could be gone then I could get a lot of time back and then I could spend it in another location where I feel would add more value to my life and so the funding

process what did you actually have to scrape together you said that they expect an MVP but you said you got funded at the idea stage so can you walk us through the process of you getting that money and going through I remember it was quite a laborious task you so can you walk us through the process of one finding the accelerators and finding ways to get money your research on that side then also the process of actually going through and getting that and what it was really like to now have this was it paid in the lump sum that you suddenly have to like hire this team or they watching over your shoulder because I've always been very standoffish well more recently standoffish about raising money because I don't want to have someone telling me how to run my business so what's your experience been like with all of that I think my experience has been awesome I wouldn't have changed it for anything um so let's just go back the original the first time that I ever heard about any type of accelerator programs was actually in the community in the AAA I went to a meeting in the morning I had just like woken up and decided to join one of the meetings and someone was talking about how there's something called the Small Business Development Center and that they would set you up with a free adviser and I was like what I didn't know that this was available to me so the next day I looked for the Small Business Development Center in my state I got connected to them and I got my free adviser who is still my adviser today and he is phenomenal he always shares all of the resources that he can with me every time I ask him for anything um he is always willing to help and it's free like there's nothing I have to pay for this which is wild um so then through him I got information about other accelerator programs and I've also been going out to networking events and the Chamber of Commerce and other things to be affiliated with the community so from him I got some resources and then at my first Chamber of Commerce meeting I met a guy who told me about another accelerator program which I also applied to um and now there's just there's so many options and we apply monthly for these things so well so it's just a never it's

not like you once you're in one Camp you can't go anywhere else you can just continue to put yourself out I mean as especially as you've got like an MVP to some degree now right you have more bargaining chips to go into these things and say hey look this is what we've done so is that well not only that but we have a term sheet we have already uh a partial investment well it was a full investment but it was a small investment right um for a company like this it takes a lot of money you will be surprised at how much all of this

costs trust me I wouldn't be after the stuff of them in my S I know full well but those of you watching this may be surprised about how much you have to pour into to get something the ground so um so now the plan is to keep raising money as we're going to see in a bit we'll see a little bit of demo of it um but what is the current stage you've gone through the funding uh you've got that got the key amount of money that you needed to get started one how did you determine how much that would be and then how have you determined how you spend that because I know you've hired a CTO and a development team um what was that process and then I've got some other questions to follow after that yeah so let me actually go back because I didn't actually explain how we got this opportunity and how we got funding so we were uh admitted not admitted that's a weird word it's like a patient so we applied for the i2e bridge 2 program in the state of Oklahoma has a lot of incentives for business I think where there is a lack of um a lack of businesses and then uh a place that is incentivizing or pushing for business they will give you a lot more help than other places where there's more competition so for example if you're doing this in California it's going to be a lot harder for you to get anything because there's you know a ton of people applying for the same things if you go to like a Midwestern State like this and you know there aren't that many people applying for these programs um especially not for AI businesses I don't know now that I'm in this it just feels like everyone is doing it co cool but yeah maybe it's rare um I actually I saw a statistic recently that only 1% of all companies get uh venture capitalist com uh funding so maybe we've just been really lucky but I think it's yeah it's more perseverance than anything sure so we went through the program yeah car on sorry and they actually deposited in a lump suum throughout the program strings attached uh there are strings attached we owe them quarterly reports we have a term sheet so we do have to we have agreements that we've made to them um this is something that either it's a convertible note so it either converts or it um or we can pay back aome sounds

like you've learned a lot this been quite a deep learning curve all of this VC jogging cuz I mean a lot of this stuff's even over my head like I my business partner Josh looked into it heavily for us but uh it's even quite far outside of my understanding so how have you found that learning curve of getting into this world and knowing all the terms and how to play the game has it been uh difficult or have they made it quite easy on their end well that's what's great about joining an accelerator program these accelerator programs actually teach you all these terms there's lessons it's like going to class but with people who are really there and also giving you this funding and you're building relationships with these people and you're able to ask them questions have uh more advisors it's honestly it's been amazing like I never imagined that I would be here in a million years awesome

okay so you've got the idea you've taken it to them you've got the funding now you're actually spending it and your and sort of where you are now of having to put that Capital to use and creating an MVP um where have you been spending that money and what's the process been like for the past couple of months since you got that money the first thing that we did with this money is hire a CTO our CTO brought along her development team and it has been just phenomenal working with all of them um it's a local company that also has offshore resources and I'm going to say they're a Wonder wonderful team and we have been able to like stretch out this uh initial investment for quite a while which is awesome um and now we have like a full product it's there it's functional you can see it you can use it um and now we're actually at our uh beta program testing awesome my next question yeah so

you're rolling it out getting into people's hands now and getting feedback and I suppose you're going to use those the MVP that you've got and also the feedback from users to roll into another round of raising because you're probably quite far off being a of monetized or stuff right yes so goal is to raise at the seed level um and this is kind of like an in between raise because we do need a little bit more Capital to be able to actually develop a more comprehensive road map we have like a full Road map ahead um but we also want to take in this feedback and kind of focus on what is most important to people and I think that that's like something that people forget when they're making something um it's not about you and it's not for you it's for the people you're serving so actually listen to them when they're telling you something and I mean of

course that's it's a key thing I think a lot of people Overlook the customer surveying the Founders get scared of talking to the people that they need to talk to about the product even we get scared to some degree talking to the people CU you feel like they're going to when you know your your thing's not where you want it to be when you have this Grand Vision for what you want a product to be um and you know that it's falling short of it you get scared about asking for feedback because you know they're going to say it's not that good it's like I know but like I just need some kind of feedback so um actually talking to your customers and in your case the BET testers are going to be really key um so you got M to set expectations it's okay to say like hey we know that there's this and this missing we are working on those things um if you can give us feedback on what we have and just let us know what you think is missing and what you think would be better to add please let us know you know like for sure it's actually pretty simple if you honest there's nothing to be worried about cuz you're just telling people honestly where you are and you're just being trans AR with them and those people will in turn have respect for you because you are being transparent with them nobody wants to be lied to sold to exactly if you want to give us a look

see at what you'd be trying to do over the next year so where's Bianca and the team a year from now is it is that you're rolling this out and you've got monetization sorted or you've raised a big ground or you're on the front of a newspaper like what do you want to be doing in the in 12 months from now oh I haven't even thought of anything personally or anything like that no but the goal would be to have brand recognition you know 150,000 ARR for the first year uh after pilot of course so another goal would be to have um at least 250 people on the platform at maybe five property each um you know one to five each and to continuously grow it and to get traction on like a national level with this product yeah so you're going to keep it

within the states um for the foreseeable future I guess you don't really you got a big enough market there you don't really need to be trying to go to n with it just yet yeah so the goal is really we've segmented so we're in a Oklahoma and Texas initially and we're going to kind of Branch out into like the Midwestern states the midwestern regions and then go out towards the edges uh and then expand internationally there's different laws and regulations when you go International there it's a different process for handling properties so um that would also take a learning curve and we would need people on that side and in those countries to help facilitate that okay a yeah I guess you're if you're going through the Midwest and you're going for areas that may not be as highly competitive because there's probably a lot of other eyes on this particular kind of AI for property management but if you can get a solid foothold in the market with those perhaps less attractive ones initially the big companies may be trying to get California or Texas or the big States um if you can soak at their markets here and be kind of Grassroots about it as well I think you could uh could get a significant Advantage before they even bother getting in there yeah I Texas is a huge Market actually Texas accounts for like 26% of the midwestern region like it is or midc Central Region my apologies um so it is actually a huge market and it actually has the largest number of property managers in the entire United States okay well sounds like you got your Market aside from California awesome um well with

that in mind just to keep this short um I think a good time now would be to get your tips for beginners who are looking into the space into the a space as a whole and not sure maybe where to start or how to get off in the best foot you've gone from an artist to someone who is tinkering with AI and being very familiar with it to seeing an opportunity in your own life to apply it um to going out in there and finding the money to get the money that you needed to get this thing off the ground um and now you're going at a at a great Pace towards your goals here so from what you've learned if there's anyone who's started stting out maybe back where you were how would you recommend to follow a similar path to you yeah so I would say have a growth mindset it's really easy to think that you are set in stone or that your skill set is set in stone and that you only have um this Direction with your life because of what you know that's not true you can always add on to any skill set you can learn new things and if you just persevere and you just keep going in those new learning curves you will make something happen one more thing look up all of the resources that you have in your States in your vicinity look up the Chamber of Commerce look up the Small Business Development Center any kind of resources for small businesses that you have in your area go out and meet people go out and talk to people and really determine exactly what you want to do and solve a real problem get clarity on that problem

yeah because it sounds like you've found a as a added benefit to this whole journey that you've been on as a former community and the startup ecosystem within your state and that's like the community that you get from I mean the friends that I've made yourself and others is really what's made this giving me staying power in the space because I have people to support me and other people that I can kind of share with and learn from um so guess that's a it's a unique added benefit and how do you think that's impacted you as a as an entrepreneur does it give you like the people around you to be bouncing ideas off of to keep your brain in the game um what's the impact of that Community being like for you since uh since getting into it gives you so much encouragement really like when you're working with people who are good people who are also understanding of all of the kind of pitfalls and challenges that you have when growing a business or when starting a business it makes a world of a difference um when people have been there and then they can advise you through difficult situations or you can bounce off ideas um with them in those difficult situations literally will be game-changing for you um I would say join online communities if you have a like a small town or you live in a small space like for me the AAA was really my start point it was the best place where I gained a lot of initial knowledge and community and that made me feel confident enough to be able to go out into my local community and look for the same things there I mean that's

why we do it and I can't believe we've gone from I think we're basically at a one-year anniversary today since we uh since we launched a program we started off with obviously you and a bunch of other people at $59 for basically having access to a bunch of developers in a Discord um and we've come so far from then we've got a team of 20 people that we're working with now um uh it's been great to have you long and I'm so happy to see the fruits of our labor and the fruits of your labor now being evident and uh in stories like your own so uh it's been awesome to see how far you've come Bianca like seriously you have come from it's incredible it's incredible and I'm so excited to see where you go in the next 12 months so um I think on that note um we can probably jump into a little demo of your project so people can see what you've been doing um and love to sure all right let me show you so this is vzy smart I've already logged in so that I don't have to relog in while I'm on here but and is this intended to be mobile app this is the version this is a right now a web application and our mobile app is going to be launching September 1st so in about 15 days um or so okay so this is the property manager this on the left is the tenant and this on the right is the maintenance provider as a property manager first you will go to this property icon and you can add your properties here so we are on uh test servers right now and they're running a little bit slow so just to preface this uh our production version doesn't include these last updates so I really wanted to show it off here M um so these are our properties we're going to be working with this property so if you go into this property here you have your tenants that are associated with the property and then you have your vendors you can add a preferred vendor here or you can open it up to vendor bidding so there's an entire bidding system when you have a maintenance issue it could be sent to one vendor or whoever's in this list or multiple venders and this will be based on uh the geographical region that they're in and how long or how far they're willing to travel all right so already this is a lot considering how much money you got and it's only been in development since ail mid April mid to late April so it's been like what 3 months now mhm yeah four months now um okay so conversation let's say you have a maintenance issue like um my toilet is

flooding and if you as a manager would like to send a message to either your tenants or your vendors you can open up the chat and there's an AI toggle which will turn the AI off and you can input any message you'd like to send your tenants will receive it just like any other message so first and

foremost they're going to be getting immediate responses on things right so that's the immediate benefit to not having to work with the Legacy system you get immediate responses and in this case stopping them from flighting the rest of the place yeah so usually um as a property manager if you're in a meeting or if you're doing something there's no way for you to check your phone in that moment but now there's a way for your tenants to get an immediate response and to get immediate coordination like it's going to be gamechanging and I will show you exactly how that works so please shout off the water valve um could you provide a picture of video no I don't have one right now all right so then I'm going to provide my availability let's say today at 6 p. m. well that was clean just selecting dates and times like that can be a pain and again we're on test servers right now it's much quicker when we are on uh production mode so this right now what it's doing it is creating ticket now I've received a maintenance ticket here and I can see it and there's an approval process so as a manager I am going to decide if this is worth it or not okay yes obviously this is a very important issue let's approve this ticket and so that was all AI generated based on like what the ticket classification the urgency level Etc that's all from awesome so then as a maintenance provider you will also receive a maintenance ticket once it's been approved yep approval has to happen before this is sent out so I'm going to say all right I'm going to charge you $100 and then I'll be there accept that and it goes to the maintenance provider or property manager again property manager sees and if there are biddings set up multiple vendors who have submitted uh quotes for this you'll be able to see multiple of these and choose which one you want so for now this is fine I'm going to approve this so now he's assigned as the maintenance provider he has the option to accept it or reschedule it MH so let's say you know 6 p. m. doesn't work I need 7 p. m. um let's do like a 7:30 p. m. mhm so I can res schedule that and the Tenant will also be receiving this and all of these are also sending uh emails out to you to check it it's a workaround until we have like the actual app and push notifications well then just accept it and then it's all done yeah so now okay that's fine accept so now it's been scheduled and the maintenance ticket is scheduled for him as well and now he can actually go into that ticket and there's a maintenance report wow so let's say he found a whole bunch of uh unflush wipes in the toilet so it was actually the tenant's fault because they're not supposed to be flushing the toilet with unflushable wipes he had to buy a snake it's I don't know $200 to buy the snake he had to buy some Drano that was maybe $30 so his total is $230 and he'll submit that and if I want to as the property manager I can actually offload this expense I can offload this expense to the tenant because M they had un flushable wipes in there and that's basically where we are right now I'm Blown Away I seriously

think you wouldn't have got that much functionality out of the money you got that's incredible and like people need understand that's MVP like that kind of process that flow back and forth is showing CU I assume you can add in like add in Billing to that you can add in all sorts of I guess Beyond maintenance tickets there's other communication and requests that can go in there as well there's so much more you can add to that I'm I'm very impressed and I'm excited to see where you can uh when you get the this into the hand of the beta tsts and get feedback yeah I'm really excited about it it's a really great Foundation to what we have in our road map and when I say that we're going to have a full like autonomous property management system it's coming okay I won't get you to reveal too much about that now because you'll have people snapping at your heels but most importantly out of all of this is Ban and that's why I like having people on the channel is to shine a light on the stuff that people are doing in the space and particularly our acceler members so anyone is interested in getting in touch with Bianca about joining the team providing additional Capital coming on board bringing more EXP um I love this example because it's You' you had a problem that you've wanted to solve you've gone it there and You' found the resources and this is really where the AI space is special because you can M marry up the development Talent with these unique problems and there's a lot of money to be made in these and these solving these problem so if you know wants to get in touch with bian there'll be links down below um and of course uh thank you ban for your time this has been awesome to check in with you properly and get an in-depth report on what you've been doing and uh yeah I'm looking forward to seeing as are everyone else on the channel um we're looking forward to seeing you continue to grow in the space thank you oh and if there are any property managers or landlords that you know who this could serve connect with us there you go we'll leave some kind of form where you can connect with that up um that'll be a great way to get some people in the hands of you so yeah bian thank you so much and we'll be talking to you very soon awesome thank you Liam