MyRighty, a company that provides human virtual assistants that use artificial intelligence to help you get your to-do list done, began with its founders trying to solve a pain point for themselves. Eithan Martinez and Joseph Levy, currently students at Georgia Tech; high school student Ariel Martinez , and Michael Seidl, a student at UChicago, wanted to help manage their own busy schedules.
Turns out, they weren’t the only busy ones. Over the past 4 months, the team has built a team of international Righties to meet their demand of over 500 customers. Now anyone from an entrepreneur to a busy mom can get their own Righty to manage their calendar, grocery list reminders, enforce goals, and help with virtually anything else that they could use assistance with throughout the day.
By developing their own AI algorithm and digital tools, Martinez says that they are focused on enhancing the experience of their assistants, the Righties, because he believes that will directly translate to excellent customer service. Righty favors communication by text or call, and Levy, who designed the training process around superior customer service, says that ideal will always remain at the core of Righty.
Here, the MyRighty team shares more about scaling their 4-month old startup following their growth, how they balance their studies with being a startup founder, and what kind of funding they’re looking for.
What’s your pitch?
We are a virtual assistant for the masses. We take away stress from people’s lives by providing them the security that there is someone to help organize and manage their daily schedules, keep them on task, schedule their meetings, and help them with menial tasks. We do it all for only $35/month.
How did you get this idea?
When we conceived the idea, the three initial founders were all in school and were looking for a solution to help manage it all. Between school work, preparing for college, extracurriculars, and attempting to manage a previous startup, our schedules were too filled up to efficiently handle it all. We began to look for options feasible for a busy individual that was even affordable for a student’s budget.
Sadly, we were unable to find anything. We saw a glaring hole and realized an opportunity to create something to help both ourselves and people like us, making it so that not only CEO’s, but rather anyone, can have full-time secretaries.
We use software to make our assistants more productive, allowing them to manage more clients and that way offer a price of just $35 per month. Now the masses can have someone to schedule their meetings, help them manage their time, and maintain a peak of productivity.
Who are your competitors and how are you different?
Although no one will manage your calendar, help you with your to-do lists, schedule your meetings, and perform basic concierge tasks for $35 a month, our competitors would be the standalone AI companies that help people schedule their meetings like x.ai and Clara Labs. Interestingly, our pricing model is still less than these stand alone AI companies when we leverage both the human aspect and many more services.
What’s your current funding situation?
We have self-funded until the present moment. We aimed to prove our concept on three main aspects: ability to scale, proving a marketing sales funnel and achieving an incredibly profitable CPA, and customer satisfaction. Today we have seen incredibly promising result on all three and are ready to seek seed funding in order to ramp up our ad spend and hire a few resources to help us speed up the process of adding more machine learning features to the software. We want to provide our assistants with a more powerful way to manage their clients, and also invest in customer service reps. We are looking to raise $450,000.
What are some lessons you’ve learned as you grow your business that may be helpful for others?
The single most important lesson we have learned is to always aim to create something great. Don’t be too focused on the competition; rather, learn from your customers and make a product that helps them on a fundamental level.
What are your goals for the next 6 months?
Over the next 6 months, we want to improve our software, add features our assistants are asking us to better serve our clients, and serve more of them. In essence, we consider the next 6 months the first phase of our business model where we prove the concept by reaching $300,000 in revenue. After this, we will begin phase two which will incorporate powerful machine learning algorithms in order to scale to millions of paying customers with a relatively small workforce, while maintaining quality service.
Muriel Vega contributed to article development.
