Latest / Behind the Founders / Inside Chad Vavra's Journey from Cisco to AI Founder

Transcript

Inside Chad Vavra's Journey from Cisco to AI Founder · Behind the Founders

• speaker-1: Hi everyone, my name is Carmen Verveld and I will be hosting today's episode of Behind the Founders. And today I will be interviewing Chad Bavra. Hi, Chad, welcome. speaker-0: Hey, hi. Nice to meet you. speaker-1: How are you doing? speaker-0: Good. I'm good. speaker-1: Good. Happy to have you here on the podcast. So to get us started, could you introduce yourself to the audience? speaker-0: Yeah, I'm Chad, ⁓ Carmen said, I'm a founder of ⁓ a called ChatAgency.ai. and it a platform that uses my 20 plus years of experience in working with major global brands and clients to design and build products. and it brings ⁓ all ⁓ of upfront and research and and context building. together using AI. And so it really accelerates kind of that entrepreneurial and intrapreneal process. speaker-1: Great. yes, I did have a look at your LinkedIn ⁓ profile as well. And I see that you've had quite a diverse experience. ⁓ as of April 2024, you decided to go from being managing director at Easel Bar, advisor at Cadence Solutions, advisor at Social Impact Studio. ⁓ you were also at some point a couple of years in Cisco. And as of 2024, ⁓ you decided to found your own business, which is of course Chat Agency AI. What made you decide to take that leap? speaker-0: Yeah, so so the timeline is actually I was last at Cisco and I was I was leading UX ⁓ for Cisco.com for a little less than five years. And we done a big dri digital transformation of the site. ⁓ we'd moved it to completely new architecture, completely new hosting, new design system, ⁓ everything, new strategy, and it was ⁓ and the job, you know, that I was there to do was was running as it should. And so moved on and I building chat agency because I had seen a challenge with the current AI chatbots in that they were to like a Google search box where you know they kind of said, Hey, you know, we can do anything for anybody. Just that just tell us what you want us to do. And I think for a lot of people, they didn't really know how to approach that. And so we saw companies going out and trying to train people in prompt engineering. what I thought about was, well, what would I want for my team? And it was a tool that is built for their process, a tool that is built to help them do the work that they are responsible for, not a tool that can do you know, that's just an open-ended question. And and so I started putting chat agency together in that regard. And then I was I was doing some advising and pro bono work with nonprofits like Social Impact Studio and kind of testing out, you know, how this was working. And I was getting feedback from the clients and they were telling me, you know, we're we feel like we just did three to six months of work in three to four days. This is incredible. Wow. yeah, and I mean, my experience is is that that that work that speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: process that chat agency kind of you know fills the the space the I don't want to call it a gap because it's not a gap but it fills a space. typically to hire a a big agency or consultancy and run that kind of process can take ⁓ up six months and cost well into six figures. You know, my my ⁓ teams, you when we worked at Google and Facebook, we were charging, you know, quarter of a million dollars and more. and and so ⁓ really did strike me that ⁓ that there was a market for it. ⁓ and so then it kind of became a process of well, you know, do I how do I make this my full time job or do approach this more like a, you know, a side project. ⁓ And ultimately led me to a full time job for the last two years. speaker-1: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Great. And I would say, of course, it is definitely interesting to see the power of AI. It's evolved so much. AI definitely playing a role, playing a part in day-to-day businesses and how streamline, automate processes. ⁓ And you earlier on that ⁓ from your ⁓ utilizing all these different AI tools, that you're seeing that there are, of course, some challenges with the way prompts are generated. Could you elaborate a little bit more about what does chat agency AI, what makes chat agency AI different from, let's say, Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini? speaker-0: Yeah, for sure. ⁓ the big thing is that it can help you either start you if you start with your own idea, that's that's great, or you can go in and say, let's do some research and we'll come up with an idea, it can also help you do that. So that's not that different than what you can get from a cloud or a chat GPT. but once you've settled what that thing is, it then is A structured process. we've just relaunched ⁓ our our application like organization and navigation so that it's a little bit more clear that that is a process that you can go through. And and it has the the system behind the scenes ⁓ are ⁓ are on of the experience that myself and my co founder Jeff have. so you don't need to know ⁓ to ask for, what details to go into, what what all of that is. What you need to know is you need to you need to be able to have a conversation, ⁓ you know, kind of a critical thinking exercise. The other thing that I will say is that it ⁓ we using a multi model approach. ⁓ So speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: We are constantly researching and finding the best tool for each of the components of ⁓ process. And than a person having to go out and subscribe to Claude and ChatGPT and Perplexity and and all these others, we ⁓ we care of all of that for you. So you just have one subscription. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: with chat agency and all of the rest of that is handled in the back end so that you know it's so that you're not trying to manage three, four, five, ten different, you know, subscriptions that have a monthly cost. so we try to what we try to do is we try to give you the best of everything ⁓ sort of like that single price point. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Okay. And in terms of like the prompts, the setup, how does it work? Is it really similar to Chat GPT where somebody just types in, okay, please help me support this process? Or are there already like different categories where you can choose and select? speaker-0: If it's okay with you, I mean I can just share my screen quickly and I can show you. so here's this is just our home page. You know, you come, you can sign up, have an account, you go to your dashboard, and on your dashboard you can see that you can either enter your own idea. ⁓ you can solve a problem. So say you know you have a problem in healthcare that you want to solve, or you can go in and you can research ideas with the platform. speaker-1: But in this case speaker-0: You know, we've got chat agency is the idea, right? And so I put in what the idea was for chat agency. And you see that what it's done is it's said, okay, I've worked with you, we've come up with a business overview, we've identified target markets to go after, some key benefits and features. And and as you work through the process, you start to generate some of these concepts and and inspirations. ⁓ and then you see over here on our left navigation, right? We work through foundational ⁓ Yeah. You know, information, foundational deliverables, market research, SWOT analysis, et cetera. Competit really cool stuff in here. Yeah. Like I said, you can build on concepts and you can then think about like tactically, how am I going to execute this with a BRD or a PRD? What are my finances going to look like? I can build out user stories based on the target markets and the problem statements we've identified. You know, and then ultimately you can kind of you can come down and start to do some exports like okay. speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: you know, evaluate the company for me and kind of tell me, you know, where are the strengths and gaps. Build me a full report as as a document, or even building, you know, ⁓ I haven't I have to ⁓ I'd have to generate one for this idea, but okay, you know, you can build a full PowerPoint deck, ⁓ and you can decide do I want a pitch deck or an investor deck or a kickoff deck. ⁓ you know, some of the cool things we do that others don't is is we you know we do a pretty deep competitive research, we look for videos. Out there in the world that are similar to yours, and then we break down how you can take your idea further. we look at adjacencies. So in the innovation advisor space, we're looking at not things that are competitive to you, but things that would make your idea stronger, like partnerships. So that's the the the the main kind of the background to the whole thing and speaker-1: Things like that. speaker-0: there's just a lot there's there's a lot there behind the scenes that it's doing for you but what it's doing is it's building validation and conviction speaker-1: Right, absolutely. Yeah, definitely like from what you've walked through, there's definitely a lot of different categories, different prompts to be able to really generate very specific guidance and tools to what you're looking for, which is of course really, really powerful, especially with how a lot of these different tools of AI are evolving today. I'd love to know a little bit more about your team setup. ⁓ what does your team structure look like? Who is doing what? Who who is supporting what in order to be able to Build this platform and make all of this possible. speaker-0: Yeah. So I think this might be interesting, but I think that this is very going to be very common in sort of the world with AI and with AI coding assistants. Right. ⁓ because I have experience building products with companies like Google and Facebook and the US Air Force and Samsung, et cetera, and so forth. I a deep understanding of how things get built. what I was able to do with that was I was able to then say, okay. I you know, I'm gonna sit down with a coding assistant. ⁓ in my case, I've really liked Claude more than like cursor or open AI. but I designed built, I I am doing all the dev and design with AI assistants. So I don't I don't have a team of people that are, you know, separate and and supporting what what I do occasionally do ⁓ Know for our logo, I did reach out to a graphic designer and you know, we worked on logo together and things like that. But but largely what it is is it's myself the as as the design developer. ⁓ and my co-founder Jeff is more on the business operations side of things. And between between the two of us and an army of AI, we've been able to build and run the entire company. speaker-1: Okay, nice. So basically it's you, co-founder Jeff, and also the help of chatbots or AI agents that are able to make this possible. speaker-0: Yeah, and and just to be clear, like we don't I choose not to do anything, I don't let any AI run autonomously. And I don't let AI make any changes to my production environment. And I think that what we're seeing out there right now ⁓ people got really excited about things like OpenClaw and other AI agents that could run in the background for a really long time and do these really sort of complex tasks. The challenge with that is is that you don't speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: know what they did. You know, a lot of times you don't know what the things they did behind the scenes were to get something working. ⁓ a result, if that thing breaks, you end up having to go through that whole process again because you don't speaker-1: Absolutely. Yeah. speaker-0: I think that's parallel to what chat agency AI does. So the idea being, like you can go to a vibe coding platform, you know, something like Lovable or Base 44, which I think they're great. But if you just say give me a you know, give me a website for ⁓ you know, a pet grooming business, you don't know what target markets it identified as a result to build this website. You don't know. ⁓ speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: You you you don't you don't know what the the financials look like, you don't know what level of subscription you might need, you don't know what your competitors are doing in the space, you don't have any idea what research that tool did. And and that's where chat agency comes back in and fills that space, is it says to you, Hey, put your idea in here. We're gonna give you all of that information that you need. So when you do decide to go use an AI assistant to build a website, can tell it. I want to build a pet grooming website that's gonna go after you know suburban soccer moms that own labradoodles, that you know, this, that like you can get really specific that way. And then you don't end up spending as much time, you don't have to iterate as much, and you don't have to you don't have to pay as much for the AI to get it right. and that's that's you know, the interesting thing for me has been that in developing the platform. I've been able to experience that firsthand. You know, and when I make a change to the platform, I'll use the platform to help me define that change. ⁓ then I'll take it back in and I'll run it through the process. And I have a really like the the great thing about it is I have this really, really strong understanding how the platform works. Nothing nothing in there ⁓ am I or worried about. ⁓ speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well. speaker-0: The the last thing that I will say is that you know, we paid a ⁓ early on, we we paid a technical consultant to do a security evaluation of the site. And was kind of surprising was he came back and he said, This is one of the best structured sites we've ever seen ⁓ a security standpoint. And I said, Well, that's kind of amazing because I didn't set out to do that. But but what I did was I made sure that the AI speaker-1: Okay. Mm-hmm. speaker-0: was very consistent. And so that consistent came back, you know, and and you know, we were rewarded in this review because we used the platform to build the platform. speaker-1: Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay. in terms of like team expansion, are you looking to looking for more support in order to be able to continue to grow to grow business or your platform to make it more automated and so on? speaker-0: Yes. and I I approached that mostly through consulting. Okay. But what I can tell you ⁓ is the space where Jeff and I will both openly admit ⁓ that were a little too optimistic about was ⁓ awareness and getting awareness in in marketing and in the market. And so the challenges is, you know, we went through, you know, we've tried a few different marketing kind of campaign sort of things. ⁓ we've tried cold email where we've used, you know, tools like Apollo and others to identify our targets and then to go after them that way. ⁓ with with ⁓ success. we've used LinkedIn and we've done LinkedIn campaigns because ⁓ LinkedIn you to be really, really targeted. in a really, really specific way. LinkedIn's cool in that, like, yeah, the targeting's great, but ⁓ you know, but but ultimately ⁓ didn't really grow our subscribers that way. The way that we the success we found was in newsletters. ⁓ have kind of come full circle in a way, and are now a really powerful tool. superhuman, right Zane Kane. ⁓ speaker-1: Okay. Yeah. speaker-0: That one was really successful for us. and I think that, you know, finding newsletters that are reaching your audience is is critical. the good thing is is that because it's a a tool that's powered by AI, we're able to kind of like latch on to the AI audience or the AI integration and and know, ⁓ future of work, management kind of audiences. ⁓ but yeah, like like That has been interesting for me to see that that newsletters have been the space where we've been really successful with. So again, going back to like growth and and and things like that, I think that in hindsight, we probably should have spent more time and money at like whether it's influencer marketing ⁓ finding a finding a salesperson that could have helped us sort of accelerate that faster. speaker-1: With our minds. Okay. speaker-0: As opposed to sort of bootstrapping that ourselves. The other thing I'll say is, you know, really the distribution of marketing hasn't changed much in the last decade. And I think that I think that that is both good and bad. I do think we're gonna see a change in it eventually, ⁓ particularly with how AI is sort of changing algorithms and changing search and all of those things. But speaker-1: Mm. Of course. speaker-0: But on the good side, I think that, you know, there are people who still ⁓ really, really understand how to get almost like that viral sort of accelerated audience and and it's worth, you know, pulling those people in early. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Definitely. would like to definitely acknowledge that ⁓ you mentioned, especially when it comes to starting your own business, it's also a lot about trial and error and seeing what works, ⁓ what blocking you and what is holding you back and what are the earlier challenges. And you clearly identified that in terms of okay, how what would be the best approaches in terms of marketing tools, marketing techniques, whether you have to involve someone else in to be able to generate the subscribers. And I think it's definitely key to have this level of awareness to be able to what is hindering you from growing and building ⁓ or from getting the subscribers. ⁓ be curious to know how many subscribers do you currently have? speaker-0: ⁓ right now just around two thousand. speaker-1: Okay. And do you have like a set goal or target of how many subscribers you would like to hit or achieve? ⁓ do you have certain milestones in your mind between you and Jeff? speaker-0: Yeah, I mean, I I think, you know, long term, I I think 10,000 a really nice goal to have in terms of like how we break down our cash flow and things like that. The the thing is, is that you know, we have subscribers that are at the twenty dollar a month, you know, space, and we have subscribers in the enterprise category at three a month. And so it's a bit of a balance. you know, the No, it's another thing to think about when you're thinking about like your market, right? Is that when you're doing SAS software as a service subscription model kind of stuff, individual subscribers are great. And I would say that they are ⁓ maintenance ⁓ doing enterprise like B2B sort of like you know, ⁓ accounts. And ⁓ but the B2B accounts, obviously, you know, you're gonna make more money per account. and and and so forth. ⁓ the thing with the B2B accounts is that you're also going to be doing a lot more customization to meet their very specific needs. You're gonna be at a higher level of security like SOC two. they're gonna you know, you to integrate with their their single sign on like authentication, things like that. And so, you know, that has been the other thing. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: that we've been really cognizant of is is we know that if we wanted to scale more broadly into the B2B space, we would need to bring on more, you know, more development help. speaker-1: Okay. And do you have a rough sorry, go on? speaker-0: No, I was just gonna say, I mean, we we've haven't we haven't gone that direction yet. because you know, we've all we've been spending a lot of time, you know, proving the platform and kind of saying like, hey, we wanna fine-tune this and we wanna iterate and tweak and make sure that this is really mature and healthy before we start going broadly into a more enterprise space where, you know, where mistakes and changes can be more expensive. speaker-1: Right. Right, right. No, that makes total sense as well. I was going to ask, so what kind of a support do you have in mind? I know we briefly touched upon it, but how many how types of roles or people are you looking to potentially ⁓ recruit the future to help you make all of this possible? speaker-0: Yeah, I mean it definitely would be ad hoc in the case of ours. But ⁓ like I said, you know, I think I think a sales and marketing, you know, could use a little more can always ⁓ attention, especially in the early days. Yeah. and and then, you know, separately on you know, security and dev. So, you know, as it scaled and as more people, especially enterprise clients, come on board, you know, the security and dev would need you would need some more attention. I think the thing that I'll say is like when you're using platforms like Stripe for your payments, yeah, they're taking care of like your global taxes. Like they're, you know, they're they're really taking care of like a lot of that financial stuff that you need. separately. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: You know, when you're using you know, ⁓ database solutions, in our case it's superbase, they're taking of a ton of like the architecture work that typically, you know, a company would be paying, you know, a of network developers to do. ⁓ We really haven't and we don't see where we need to grow a big, you know, ⁓ a big design team. speaker-1: Yeah. Bye bye. speaker-0: Because we've been really thoughtful about making sure that the architecture we choose takes care of those things for us. And I think that's the beauty of of the internet and the you know the the business, the the SaaS B2B model that's out there now. Absolutely. ⁓ you can do a lot with very, you know, with a very minimal team, you can do a a lot. we, you know, Jeff on the business side takes care of like, you know. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely. speaker-0: Our CFO role. So, you know, we don't we don't need to have an accounting team or we don't need to have a CFO role at this stage of the business. And you know, and I and I think that that's a really important note for entrepreneurs and business starters is that you can definitely start small. this is one of the things that kept me from thinking that I could start my own business for a really long time. I thought, I don't I'm I'm not a bookkeeper. I don't have a background in economics or anything like that. I don't know anything about tax law. I don't know anything about, you know, benefits and healthcare and, you know, and just all of the things that, you know, it takes to support a team of people. But if you can bootstrap a company and you can get something started with you and a friend or or a co-founder who you meet online or whatever, you you don't need those things initially. These things can come with growth and you can find them. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: who have that knowledge when you need those people. and so it makes starting a business a lot easier than I ever thought it was. I'll also say that you know tools like cloud and chat GPT can answer a lot of questions. ⁓ ⁓ it's just because a lot of those questions are you know very structured boilerplate answers. They're ⁓ not it's not creative thinking. you when you're asking it about New York tax law. speaker-1: Okay. Mm. speaker-0: It's not creative thinking, it's just looking something up. And yeah. So so I mean I think that you know the world is changing in that way very quickly. and it's allow it's allowing more and more people to to have their own side projects and have their own business. speaker-1: Yeah, we're just researching. Definitely for sure. Yeah. Definitely like I'm with you on this one when you're saying that the world is constantly evolving, changing, especially like during the age of AI as well. nowadays you see that there are clearly ⁓ opinions when it comes to the role of AI, right? ⁓ what do you think would be like a common misconception when it comes to AI? speaker-0: I mean, I'll I'll go back to a really big push right now from both AI companies and industry to do this this agentic approach. You where it basically is like AI is your is your your workforce, AI is your coworker. ⁓ And one of the things I'd written about in the past is when you think about a co working speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: relationship, think about hiring like a consultant. So you're bringing that consultant in and you're in and that consultant is coming from another company that trained them, you know, that instilled that company's culture in them as a person and as an employee. And you're you're bringing them in to do a very specific job for you. It's not that different with AI. You know, if you choose to create an agentic speaker-1: Okay. speaker-0: you know, autonomous AI agent that can be your coworker and you choose to use Claude versus to use Grok from Elon Musk's XAI, you're gonna get two very different employees. And and I think the misconception that people have is that is that is that AI is AI, you know, that AI is ⁓ speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Sure. speaker-0: know, it's just it's it's it's a technology and it's gonna answer the questions and I'm gonna get you know the results and et cetera and so forth. Like I think you have to think of it more like each of these foundational AI providers is sort of providing you both a tool ⁓ and some behind it. ⁓ And ⁓ and have to kind of orchestrate and decide speaker-1: Mm-hmm. speaker-0: what it is you exactly want and and what you're willing to, you know, and what what are the acceptable risks that you're willing to take. And so, you know, I I touched on it before. We don't have autonomous agents, you know, working on the platform. We don't have autonomous AI because see I still see too many companies having, you know, ⁓ bugs released into production or or or, you know, I went to bed and I woke up to a five hundred dollar usage bill or you know, and I I don't think that I don't think that it's really the the agent approach is necessarily where a startup would want to be quite yet. ⁓ know, so again, I think the other misconception could be like putting too much trust in AI as an speaker-1: Mm absolutely. speaker-0: On the flip side, I think like if you're an enterprise and you have a huge team and you want to bring in, you know, AI agents and they're gonna have a lot of you're gonna have a lot of people that are kind of keeping an eye on them and know what they're doing and you know, a lot of checks and balances, that's a different you know, but for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and and people with small teams, I think that you have to be really careful of you know of of the ⁓ what autonomy or you know, and and and by the way, chat agency, the name chat agency is is multi-meaning. speaker-1: Absolutely. speaker-0: ⁓ it is is that I worked in agencies as a consultant for a long time. And it it is going from that agency experience. The other side of it is agency the control you have over. And so chat agency AI is trying to give you more agency over your ideas. It's giving you more power, more control, more knowledge ⁓ your ideas. And so there's there's meaning there. And speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Right. Yes. ⁓ speaker-0: And I think that that's what you have to think about when you're thinking about ⁓ know, these tools and and you know, your conception of AI is how much agency are you willing to give it? How much agency are you willing to give up? and and you know, and not losing sight of that. It's really, really easy to I I I'll be honest, you know, it is it's really easy to kind of be like, ⁓ I just I'm gonna lean back and just let AI do everything. speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. There there's definitely a risk to that. Mm-hmm. speaker-0: I I have seen examples, not in my own work, but I've seen examples where a person has asked AI to give them precedent examples, right? So give me a, you know, I have a problem. I need, I want to know if somebody else has had this problem and if there's a legal precedent that I can refer to. AI will come has come back and it has said, yeah, there's a legal precedent, and it'll it'll say, you know, so and so versus the state of California. speaker-1: Mm. speaker-0: And then it will describe the the case. When you dig deeper, the title is real and the description of the case is real, but they don't fit together. speaker-1: Right. It doesn't fit. Yeah. speaker-0: It's gone and it's found a title that it likes and it's gone and it's found a description that it's like and it's made up it's made a legal precedent. And I think that, you know, and that that's where like that is dangerous. That's agency that you probably don't want to, you know, give up because the risk is too high. speaker-1: Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely for sure. And I think it's at the end of the day, it's all about finding the balance, right? Like how much agency you're gonna give over as well. ⁓ once had this conversation with ⁓ a colleague of mine, and we like to say or view AI as kind of like an intern, you're training them, but at the same time, you don't give full control or full autonomy as well, because there's of course this ⁓ there's a danger that it might also kill a bit of like creative thinking or analytical thinking as well. So I think what you mentioned is definitely spot on. I really value the name behind chat agency. It's definitely very powerful as well. And definitely there's a lot of layers of meanings as well. Chad, just one final question. ⁓ If you could give one piece of advice ⁓ a message to someone who thinking about starting a business or starting your own company, what would it be? speaker-0: Love the question. it allows me to work in my my favorite quote. so there's a woman named Maria Popova. she is a poet and an author. And years ago, long I mean, this is 2014, I think, she wrote an article and and in it she said, Critical thinking without hope is cynical. But hope without critical thinking is naivety speaker-1: Hmm. Okay. speaker-0: And so that's what I would the advice that I would give to anybody. And it's and it has it has served me very well before I heard the quote, after I heard the quote, to be optimistic about change and to be optimistic about the unknown and new things. Particularly right now, it's AI. But at the same time, to not be so optimistic that. speaker-1: Right. speaker-0: You know, I'm gonna go skipping down a dark alley and expect to, you know, not get mugged. You know, that's naivety. so you have to think critically. You have to you have to look at these things and you have to say, you know, ⁓ would I need to do to make sure that this is as big a success as it possibly can be? What are the risks? What are the challenges? Right. But not to be ⁓ and not to be negative, not to push back and not to fight it. Yeah. Rather rather to be optimistic and approach it in in ways that can help ⁓ become more innovative and more creative and more productive. speaker-1: Mm-hmm. Definitely. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, it is about to have this level of awareness ⁓ having knowing the risks, but at the same time also knowing, okay, what are you going to do to manage those risks as well? Because every business, there's going to be some setbacks, there's going to be some challenges, ⁓ that shouldn't discourage ⁓ from trying to build something different or tr trying to solve a problem as well. So I think. That quote you mentioned right there is definitely really spot on. And I'm hoping that for the listeners out there, they're going to be able to take that and inspire them to start something as well. Chad, again, thank you so much for being here. This is Carmen Dovad and Chad Bavra from Behind the Founders. Be sure to stay tuned for the next episode. speaker-0: with the same people that I have today, if I bring in AI, but I'm careful about the roles and responsibilities, can I grow 25% bigger