[00:00:00] David: All right. Here we go. Let's see here. $10 million tomorrow and never work again, or run your company for another decade? Putting you on the spot right there. That's a brutal one, right?

[00:00:11] Bobbie: Oh my gosh. But I can't ever work again

[00:00:16] David: No, that's the rule. If I'm gonna give you $10 million, you can't work again

[00:00:21] Bobbie: Nah, it's too low. I'm building a billion-dollar company. 10 million's for chumps.

[00:00:31] Bobbie: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the "BizDev Podcast," the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined per usual by Mr. Gary Voight, who's wearing some sweet merch.

[00:00:40] Gary: Yep,

[00:00:41] David: What's up, man? Big Pixel swag. It's very good. Very good. He did that. That's the only thing I'm gonna give him credit for.

That's a really nice shirt, and the rest

[00:00:50] Gary: He won't let me sell them retail though.

[00:00:51] David: make fun of him

[00:00:52] Gary: I don't know

[00:00:52] David: Well done. All right. More importantly, moving on. No more compliments. We are speaking today to Bobbie Shrivastav, who is the co-founder and CEO of Solvrays. Welcome. Welcome. You can make fun of Gary too if you want.

Yeah.

[00:01:09] Bobbie: I was like, "Where's my swag?

[00:01:11] David: Oh, we, if only... We should make BizDev Podcast T-shirts. Come on, Gary, get on that.

[00:01:17] Gary: Yeah, no

[00:01:18] David: In your spare time

[00:01:20] Gary: I'll just have Claude do it

[00:01:21] David: Just yeah, that's fine. Yeah, what does good AI bot do? What could possibly go wrong? So we like to start the show out, Miss Bobbie, with some this or that kind of opener questions. You ready?

[00:01:34] Bobbie: Yes.

[00:01:35] David: I've got I've got to start...

I'm gonna start off with some founder stuff since you're a founder. One of these is specifically for Gary. You know you're not allowed to answer, Gary.

[00:01:43] Gary: Okay

[00:01:44] David: All right. Do you name the company in five minutes or five months?

[00:01:49] Bobbie: Okay. Five minutes.

[00:01:51] David: Five

[00:01:52] Bobbie: And I have a story, I have a story

[00:01:54] David: I love stories.

[00:01:55] Bobbie: But so

[00:01:57] David: it.

[00:01:57] Gary: Go

[00:01:57] David: me

[00:01:58] Bobbie: so I will take you back, what was it? late 2024, I think it was like late October. It was late October. My daughter was performing in a Diwali festival, and Sovan and I are such great parents that we will support our kid.

But when we see all these repetitive performances, kinda tune out. So what we did was we, while everybody else was performing, we were like, "What do we name our company that we're gonna start?" And we started bouncing ideas in Diwali, i- in our, in a Diwali event, and we came up with Solvrays, and we ev- we did actually go to name.com and buy it.

It was like, "Such a good name, we gotta buy it right now." So that

[00:02:43] David: Oh, I'm-- 

[00:02:44] Bobbie: our

[00:02:44] David: that's actually one of my biggest pieces of advice for brand new founders. Once you think you have a name, even if it's not the final name, buy the domain.

[00:02:52] Bobbie: By the domain,

[00:02:53] David: domain. It's 20 bucks, 'cause if you miss that, and I'm the guy who's coming at from with bigpixel.thebigpixel.net because I, there's squatters all around us for the last

[00:03:02] Gary: say definitely go for the .com first and then get a couple of different ones around it.

[00:03:06] David: or it depends. Nowadays, I would say if there's a couple of other ones that you could get .ai if you're an AI company dot what's the other one? IO sometimes says I'm an app and I'm cool. But if the com is available, always get the com. Anyway, all right. This one's Gar-- for Gary. For your very first logo, do you go to Fiverr or a real designer?

[00:03:26] Bobbie: Fiber. I would never go to a... I, once again, I have stories for, for all my lessons learned. So

[00:03:34] David: tell me it's about Fiverr, please, 'cause I want Gary just to crawl under his desk

[00:03:37] Bobbie: it's actually about a designer. 

[00:03:40] David: Oh, okay. 

[00:03:41] Bobbie: So this is, this is-- I love a good design company, but this is funny. This is a story that happened to me in my first company, and we really liked our DocsMore logo, which was we had this cloud, and we had these dots of Excel and PowerPoint and all this fun s- PDF and stuff like that.

So we were, at that point, we were looking for a, a marketing company to help us get our word out, and the very first thing they wanted to do was change our logo. And we're like, "Okay." We went that, but that's the only thing they did in the five months. So I always say, when you're picking a designer, it's okay for them to change your logo because the logo is so beautiful.

I love our new logo. But also get your meat and potatoes because designers are expensive. That's why just grow to a level before you find a design firm. Fiverr is awesome, and that's what we've been doing for the last few companies,

[00:04:42] David: Oh, so she is a fan of Fiverr. Oh, good. Good. Gary is a designer by trade. He's a very good one. I didn't say that. We're gonna edit that out. But he-- me and him argue about Fiverr like all the time. Is that even a thing now? I don't ever hear about Fiverr was like hot for a minute.

[00:04:58] Bobbie: Now you

[00:04:58] David: don't

[00:04:59] Gary: No, 'cause now everybody just, ChatGPT

[00:05:01] David: That's true.

[00:05:02] Bobbie: Yeah. The only thing is that ChatGPT

[00:05:05] David: Fiverr or AI, which is worse

[00:05:08] Bobbie: You have to hack your way

[00:05:09] David: I think my, the

[00:05:10] Bobbie: designs

[00:05:11] David: We did for an internal tool, much to Gary's chagrin, we used just to play around, I used an AI logo. He is just chomping at the bit to redo it. But we did start there. Did you already redo it and I didn't know

[00:05:23] Gary: Oh, yeah.

[00:05:24] David: Oh, yeah. Okay. I just haven't pulled his

[00:05:26] Gary: I changed.

[00:05:27] David: Is it? All right. I'm looking forward to seeing it.

That's what we're gonna do after this. All right. Here we go. Let's see here. $10 million tomorrow and never work again, or run your company for another decade? Putting you on the spot right there. That's a brutal one, right?

[00:05:41] Bobbie: Oh my gosh. But I can't ever work again

[00:05:46] David: No, that's the rule. If I'm gonna give you $10 million, you can't work again

[00:05:51] Bobbie: Nah, it's too low. I'm building a billion-dollar company. 10 million's for chumps.

[00:05:58] David: 10

[00:05:58] Bobbie: Plus I will go insane, I will go insane if I was to not work right now. I have too much energy. I like doing st- I'm a builder. If you asked me if I was 70, I would say 10 million, but

[00:06:13] David: 70? Yeah, sure. Okay. All right. That's... No.

All right. So tell me about Solvrays. What are you guys up to?

[00:06:21] Bobbie: So we are-- So I'll give you a quick story. I'm a story person. So when I became a mom 11 years ago, this is how I started my first company. I learned that my maternity benefits was tied to a disability product, and my only digital option was a fax machine. And I became very curious 'cause I worked in corporate.

I was working in mega IT shops where we were doing a lot of this type of transformation. So that curiosity of why an industry so large and so big, I'm like g- you're giving me a fax machine as the only way to submit 'cause I know what happens in a fax transmission. I know what happens if I mailed you a document.

It's gonna get lost, and then I'm not gonna get my benefits. So that was the reason that got me excited about being an entrepreneur. Started my first company. Second company was all in insurance, focused on claims. But this third company, Solvray's, what we realized is when we look at our industry, and I very much love our-- the mission of insurance, right?

If you start to peel the onion, it's not what the news says. It's really like good products to help protect people. So when you take, when you look at when work comes into operations, it's still we're spending i- in an industry $300 billion a year, but still there's people running the integrations.

So it's kinda like my request. My request would've gone to a person. That person would've sent to another person to say, "Hey, is this your team?" And then they would've said, "Yes. Now let me give it to another person to approve it. Let me give another person to key it into a system." Now we're, now we've got a, a system that should've been done, that process should've been done like that, right?

Seamless. And that doesn't happen. Like there's, industry is still 70% is manual. So our goal with Solvray is how do we connect the do- the data and the work? How do we make it understand? How do we decision the work? And then how do we execute the work all on top of systems you already have? 74% of insurance is legacy.

You don't wake up one day and say, "AI's gonna solve all my legacy." It just doesn't happen that way. So we, w- our goal is how do we sit on top of these systems to like really orchestrate the work

[00:08:49] David: Nice. So you're bringing-- So we have some clients in the insurance world, so I understand Epic and A- AMS360 and all those fun guys. And I also know they're, they can be difficult to work with. Love you. And so I can imagine adding AI into that process has been eye-opening

[00:09:06] Bobbie: If you-- what it's done for our industry is created a very expensive workaround. As a... It, it really is. It's like now I've got another tool to my list of tools that I have to look at. And our type of insurance that we focus on is more on the life and annuity side of the business, as well as on the commercial insurance side of the business.

But I can imagine when you think about our workflow and pattern, it's similar whether it's health, it's similar if it's the type of insurance, like kind of we're niche-y and focused in, in, in that vertical

[00:09:43] David: H- I, may- I know what you're saying and what you have said is insurance is a difficult industry in that, but there's a lot of them like that. How do you bring the, the newest of the new, the cutting edge into an industry that doesn't wanna change? What is, what's the trick there?

[00:10:01] Bobbie: I think what what we've been doing that's fairly successful is we are not the type of founders-- First of all is founder market fit that we talk about, right? So as a found- we have been innovating in insurance for the last 11 years of our life, so we know the intricacies. We know where change management needs to exist versus a process redesign.

And I think we work with our customers to really look at it and say: How can we s- how-- What is the most stickiest-- What is the most painful problem that we can become sticky at? Is our mission, right? So we're not the type of founders that get huge funding from Silicon Valley and say, "I have tech. Now let me go find a market where I can apply this tech."

And we used to say, "I built a product. Now I need to find where to solve it." That's what AI g- AI world has become. A lot of these founders have no clue what the industry is. They get a few mentors that are like, "Ooh, insurance is a huge trillion-dollar market. Go disrupt that." They don't come from that space.

But what I would tell those founders is, if you find out that you are in love with insurance and solving these problems, that's your industry because nobody wakes up and says, "I'm gonna go innovate insurance." You fall into it, right? But once you fall into it, it's like the onion. It's like the Shrek episode, right?

Like it, you, it has layers, and once you peel one layer, you get to the other, and it's that curiosity that's gonna keep driving you. And I think that's what an industry wants to change. That's what I'll tell you. But you need people that can work with them at their pace, at their temperature to create the change.

You can't just slap AI and say, "Go." 

[00:11:53] David: No that's fair. So when you have these messy workflows and stuff, what is the best way to, for the, in the pr- to eat the proverbial elephant, right? You're gonna have a lot of resistance there. How do you get around that resistance, and how do you work with what's there now and add something new?

[00:12:14] Bobbie: So you don't eat an elephant at one bite, right? You chunk it up. That's so bad.

[00:12:20] David: Yeah. That, that, the analogy falls apart when you really start to take it, when you

[00:12:24] Bobbie: know. It's

[00:12:24] David: ' Cause I

[00:12:25] Bobbie: you-

[00:12:25] David: all the time and it's boy, you can really torture that thing

[00:12:28] Bobbie: I know. So what we do is, it's something a bit I talk about a lot, right? In, in my past company, even this one, is crawl, walk, run. Let's crawl into understanding, So this is why we built 75 use cases, right? So when we look at a carrier landscape, whether from a value chain, whether it's the beginning or whether it's reconciliation for, of financials, like there's-- we've built a lot of that, those use cases, and we literally go to a carrier and say, "What is your hardest pain points?"

And we listen first. We listen first, then we crawl, walk, run. And what we're finding is we're early in our journey, but when we find that when we seek first to understand than to be understood, it's that principle works over and over again because we listen, we solve a problem, and we go to the next problem.

We go to the next problem. And our whole mission in SolveRaise is how do we allow carriers to run their operations and not their systems? 'Cause we're that connective tissue, and we can start to visualize that we can be in a situation where we are helping them run their operations by just applying very simple principles of crawl, walk, run, good design thinking principles as well.

Let's not boil the ocean. We even get overwhelmed, right? So think about insurance in-- I was talking to a carrier. In one-hour meeting, they gave me 60 opportunities. That's overwhelming. But if we can chunk it down to a sliver, those 60 could be grouped into a five that we can go solve right now.

[00:14:15] Midroll: We believe that business is built on transparency and trust. We believe that good software should be built the same way. Big Pixel is a 100% US-based, fixed-fee, custom software design and development agency built on transparency and passion. No offshore handoffs, no surprise invoices, just a team that treats your problem like it's our own.

UX and design are core to everything we do. Not a phase that gets handed off, but a discipline that runs through every decision we make. We bring the expertise to build what your business needs and the clarity to know when AI and technology help and when they get in the way. We provide our clients honest assessments of where they are and how they can get where they want to go.

Your idea deserves the right team. Let's talk, plan, and create something that truly works for you.

[00:15:16] Bobbie: I would say when we launched our company or launched commercially in April, we had our first customer in-- paid customer in June, and then we have built a very healthy pipeline, and now we are about to onboard our tenth customer. So that I would say for an industry like insurance, we've been doing pretty good, but you don't sleep on your laurels.

You gotta act every day is a slog. Every day is a slog. So you build content, you talk to people, you don't give up. Even if you've got 30, 40, 50, 60 customers, I wake up every day thinking, "If I don't do this, my competitors are not gonna be happy that I'm a slog," right? They're gonna be-- Actually, they will be happy that I'm operating in a slog-like pace because they can move on.

I treat every day as I, I'm never happy with our-- I'm happy with our momentum, and I'm very proud of our team, but every day you wake up like we-we've, we've gotta go. We gotta-- We can't we can't feel too comfortable. We can be proud of our journey. We are. But we can't wake up comfortable right now.

[00:16:34] David: So how did you get those first 10 customers? Was that your network? Did you already know these people? Was it strangers? How did that come to be?

[00:16:43] Bobbie: Honestly, it was the network effect, and I'm a very big believer of you do good work and good things will happen. It's also a good mindset. You like attracts like, right? Like that's my that those are the core principles. So yes, a lot of it is through my network. A lot of them one of my last customers came through an investor intro.

This is why I love investors. No, I'm just kidding because-- No, no, I'm just kidding. No, but I'm grateful because they they weren't a fit for us because we don't fit their thesis, but they heard a problem, made a connection, in two months we had that deal closed. That's pretty good. For, and you just have to bui- this is why your network is your net worth, and you just have to keep growing that.

And it's a network effect, especially in enterprise, B2B enterprise, it's heavy relationships. And most of these, most of the-- You have to look at marketing in a little bit different way, especially in this AI phase. And you guys know this. You guys are trying to be, you guys are also working with your customers on how to be creative in this era, because how many emails do you get that is AI slop?

How many now LinkedIn messages that you get that's AI slop? How many LinkedIn messages are AI slop? So now content, it's so easy to create content that people are abusing these channels. The only way to stick out is by relat- building your relationship and is seeing people. And in this era, in, especially in our industry, that's highly risk-averse, conservative, you gotta be where your customers are at.

You've gotta see them. They gotta know you're real and you're not hidden behind a screen or behind a bot. And you just, you, that's, that has been what we have been doing. We host our own events. We do podcasts. We attend, we become guests on other people's podcasts. People have to hear what we're doing and see who we are, and it has to match your, your...

You can't look like a different person on screen versus in real life. If I'm an asshole in real life and beautiful on screen they're, they'll figure it out, 

[00:19:02] David: that's fair. One of the things we keep hearing is that the traditional go-to-market strategies of emails and cold calls and LinkedIn are being overwhelmed. They're snapping at the seams. And so I'm kind of-- and we see that even in our own marketing. I'm curious what people are doing to get around that.

What is it that you guys are using, knowing that no one's gonna write you back on that email, knowing that 5% of people might connect with you on LinkedIn and might write you back? What are you guys doing for that? Is it-- Are you still at the stage where your network provides enough, or are you guys stepping outside of that?

[00:19:41] Bobbie: Oh, no. We will always step outside. We host our own events. That has worked out really well. Or we partner with different event organizers to use the network effect to get people into rooms that, A, help them, and also, B, help us. Hosting our own events has helped so much. And then having podcasts, even your own...

I started a new video series, and I do a podcast with another collaborator. We've been doing that now for the last two and a half years. So now you build-- content is not a short-term game. It's a long-term game because you can't look at it as, "I start a podcast series or a video series, and immediately I'm gonna get a lead."

If you do, awesome.

[00:20:32] David: Boy, that's the truth

[00:20:32] Bobbie: If-- But it's a long-term game, and it's being consistent, it's being persistent, and it's A/B testing your messaging. That's what we've been doing on our side. Because guess what? We don't do, we don't do email marketing. Email marketing to us, unless they're vetted people, it's dead. 

[00:20:54] David: Yeah

[00:20:55] Bobbie: can't...

i'm going to a conference next week, 11,000 people. Everybody has the same AI tools that can scrape the people now, can get the same email addresses, and the ratio of people like our ICP versus w- what the attendees are, it's less than 10% of the people that are coming that belong to our ICP. But I'm, I serve operations and tech.

Guess whose ICP is operations and tech? And guess how many email messages they're being sent out? Guess what they're doing? Delete delete, or they don't even log into the app. So that's why you have to find different ways to stand out, host your events create content, build these relationships, maybe not this year, but next year, 'cause when you come into a market, it's never a one-year game.

It's, you have to look at it from a five, 10-year, longer timeframe. So this, you-- It's just being consistent. And when we go to a show, yeah we get good traction because we've been, we put in the work before. It's just you don't put in the work before the show.

[00:22:10] David: Fair enough. All right. As promised, here's my f- my, my green fields question. So where are you in five years, assuming everything goes well?

[00:22:19] Bobbie: I'm sipping margaritas at a beach. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just

[00:22:23] David: That's it, she's sold. Aha!

[00:22:25] Bobbie: No. So we-- So this is... Part of being an entrepreneur is you have to think about the long game while you execute in the short. So my long-term view is how do we build-- Everybody talks about, in Raleigh, we were at Venture South, everybody was talking about 20 billion or bust, right?

How do you create that outcome? You create that outcome by creating a, not a fake Claude financial model, but just really thinking about, and then putting it in Claude, about a, a model of what that reality looks like, and then you scale it back. Our goal in year five is we're approaching, we're at that ARR count that somebody would say, "Ooh, this is worth maybe not 20," 'cause it's insurance.

Maybe it is worth a nice penny, but you have to continue to execute that. I'm a big believer in five years from now, I wanna continue to do good work, create impact, have an abundance mindset. And if I'm doing that, I'm happy. And if that means that I continue to serve using SolarWinds as a vehicle, I'll do it.

If it means that I've sold it to a partner that has the same mindset, I'm happy with that too. So as, as long as we, as, as I do those three principles. I-- Number one thing is customers. You have to treat your customers as gold. They're the reasons that we're not going to build a company and then just disappear.

We're gonna keep building more companies, so how you exit is also what future outcome do you want, right? So I wanna keep building. That means any step I take has to be towards that future

[00:24:11] David: All

[00:24:11] Gary: All right, so as an entrepreneur and building what would you say along this journey you'd discover as your top three pieces of advice you would give a new entrepreneur?

[00:24:21] Bobbie: Follow-- I followed this framework called DAC. It comes from Center for Creative Leadership. It's direction, alignment, commitment. You do that with yourself, you do that with your team, and you do that with your customers and partners. It's the best tool, and the minute things don't go as pl- like directionally we're not aligned or we're not committed, you have to look at what's causing that imbalance and fix it.

And sometimes there's things that are not able to fix, and then you have to pivot. But that's how I... My three advices looped into one is I use that framework that I've been very successful at in my life, in my business, and how I work with customers.

[00:25:12] Gary: All right. Bobbie, if anybody wants to learn more about you or about Solvray's, where's the best place to find you?

[00:25:20] Bobbie: I'm on LinkedIn Bobbie Srivastava, or you can find me at soulraise.com

[00:25:26] Gary: Great. And we'll put those links in the show notes as well for anybody to check it out

[00:25:30] David: Very good. Thank you so much, Bobbie, for joining us. This has been a lot of fun

[00:25:34] Bobbie: Yeah. Thank you, David. Thank you, Gary. Thank you for the opportunity

[00:25:38] David: On that note, we are out. We will be back next week, everybody. Have a good one

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