What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?
This is my 4th startup – I’ve been in startups my whole adult life. Previously I worked with my co-founders in a previous startup that failed, due to how we managed our time. It’s when we were trying to figure out what to do next, where the inspiration of Maya was born. We never wanted another founder to go through the same experiences as we did when developing a business.
What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?
Founders are the busiest people on the globe, the average founder can spend up to 70% of their being drowned in administrative work. Maya is a productivity assistant for founders. She helps to facilitate up to 50% of administrative work for founders, giving them the necessary time it takes to run a company.
It literally keeps us up at night at how many founders are out there with no help, alone and in need of acceleration of their business. we are incredibly passionate about reducing the number of business failures by 3%
Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?
One of the biggest problems we faced was a lack of network and users trusting Maya. We overcame our networking issue by putting ourselves out there for the world. Hours upon hours a day is spent on talking to founders, talking to partners, and at events promoting Maya with founders (doing things that don’t scale as some would say). We overcome our trust issues by using our Partners’ credibility (large trusted partners) at the forefront and working individually with each founder as we build Maya intelligence throughout our journey.
Where do you see your company headed next?
We have a mission and have laid out certain milestones to hit in order to get there. We are in our private invitation-only beta, so next will be releasing Maya to the public with universities, ESOs, and accelerators/incubators. We are currently raising our pre-seed round to fund the next 12 months of revenue growth.
Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.
You need to really put yourself out there as the founder. You are the seller of your idea, and networking and validating your idea is crucial to its success and growth. I no longer believe in building in stealth.
Why Tampa Bay?
Two of the founders are Tampa-born natives, which means this is home. By the nature of our product, Maya creates and inspires founders to build great things. So why not bring our Tampa Bay community up with us in the rising of Maya?
