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Name: Javier Ailbirt
Company: TheEye
What are you building, and who benefits most from it?
Our mission is to help humanize companies by de-robotizing people.
TheEye is an open-source, low-code orchestrator designed for automation. For five years, we have helped multinational companies automate their business processes, generating savings and increasing productivity as a result. At the end of 2022, we created two specific solutions to address 80% of the problems we found in companies. One of these AI-powered SaaS products is for automating reconciliations, and the other is for digitizing structured documents. They are designed to be scalable and usable by SMEs.
What is one of your startup’s most impressive accomplishments?
Our greatest accomplishment has been creating automation solutions that ensure companies in Argentina get a return on their investment in less than six months despite the context of 100% annual inflation and two years of pandemic lockdowns.
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To achieve this, it was necessary to develop a process that we validated under ISO 9001 and gather a team of highly skilled developers and analysts to understand the business. We have achieved a talent retention rate of 96% and a churn rate of 4%.
What has been the biggest challenge so far, and how did you overcome it?
Our biggest challenge has been to create scalable and accessible solutions for SMEs and startups with short delivery times. Others include adding internal operational efficiency while being very careful about expenses, being smart about spending on Amazon (AWS), and automating all our operations using our own technology or productivity tools.
What tool or app could you not live without and why?
The AWS products have allowed us to reduce costs and automate everything.
Currently, we are making good use of ChatGPT, with techies using it for research, marketing for posts, and sales for writing emails.
What marketing strategies have worked for you?
Being decent and customer-focused. The best marketing strategy has been to advise our clients and only offer profitable solutions without vendor lock-in.
In the automation industry, marketing is doing great harm by promoting and recommending hyper-automation. Automating end-to-end is extremely costly and not very beneficial. With the same investment, many parts of various processes can be automated, generating greater benefits. This has allowed us to gain the trust of even multinational companies.
Can you share any financial data about your startup?
Our expected revenue for this year is $3.5 million, 80% ARR SaaS. (Reported on March 17, 2023.)
What has been your biggest business failure to date? What did you learn from it?
I’d say scalability issues. At first, we created custom automation solutions, which required a lot of time to develop and understand the problem and were not scalable. Now we have products that address 76% of the problems, and we pivot our automation solutions toward them.
What’s the best specific piece of advice you have for other entrepreneurs?
Figure things out and grow.
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