The End of Fitting Rooms? AIUTA’s Virtual Try-On Is Changing Fashion

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, here to take you behind the scenes and share what it's like to be a founder or a CEO, problems they face, the products they build, and an effort to make our lives better. I'm excited to have with us today Maísa Benatti, CEO of AIUTA. Maísa, welcome to the show.

Maísa Benatti: Thank you so much, Jake. It's lovely to be here and thank you for having me.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, I'm excited to have you and we'll talk more about your background and kind of what you're building and why it's important. But before we do that, where are you joining us from today?

Maísa Benatti: I'm joining you from London.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: When I started this podcast, I had this vision to go behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder in Silicon Valley, where I'm born and raised. And weekly, we dive deep in the trenches to find the wins, the losses, and the lessons learned with the hopes that it helps you run a better startup. But here's the thing. If you've gotten any value out of these conversations or been inspired at all, hit the subscribe button. And I get it. Your podcast feed's probably overflowing. But to stay up to date what's going on in Silicon Valley, stick with us because at the end of the day, we're all just trying to build something that matters. And we're better when we do it together. So, hit that subscribe button and follow us wherever you find your podcasts. Now, let's get back to the show.

I love that area. Wow. Really cool. Well, we're a global show and have people calling from all over the world. I'm from Silicon Valley, but Silicon Valley is made up with everybody. So excited to have you join here. A little bit more about Maísa: she leads the company, which is an AI fashion tech organiz-, company or revolutionizing visual content generation and immersive experiences for global fashion brands. With a product background in Amazon Fashion and Farfetch and a master's in fashion and technology, she drives innovation at the intersection of AI, commerce, and style. So, a lot going on here with you, Maísa. Before we jump into the company, give us a little bit of your origin story. What were some of the experiences that you went through that kind of helped shape where you are today?

Maísa Benatti: Of course. So, I'm from a super tiny, tiny town in the countryside of Brazil, bordered with Argentina. And I was born in a family of entrepreneurs. I mean, my, my mom is an entrepreneur. My dad works in a multinational company. And even though I'm from a very small town, I always had a huge global perspective growing up and the way that I was raised. I then had studied in the US for some time during high school. After that went back to Brazil, studied international business, economics, and fashion. Then wanted to spend some time in Europe. Moved to Portugal where I did a master's in fashion as well.

And studying fashion was quite interesting because I was in the middle of a bunch of creative minds and incredible people, creatives, and I always had more of the business mindset. So I felt like a fish out of the water in, in the middle of, of my colleagues. And usually when they were designing collections and thinking about their creations, I was thinking about how do I monetize this or how can I make production efficient and how can, what types of technologies can I use for this collection? And so yeah, it's been a very interesting journey in, in fashion school.

And then when I was writing my thesis for my master's about 10 years ago, I decided to write about fashion and technology. At the time this was 10 years ago, I was writing about how the fourth industrial revolution was going to change the, the industry and fell in love with it. And, and then I ended up joining Farfetch because I was looking for something that could connect the two passions that I had, which was business, technology and, and fashion. And so feel that everything I've done up until, I mean since I was born, kind of took me where I'm at right now.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, that's great. And you know, coming from Brazil and then coming to the US, and you speak great English. And I think the best way to do that is to immerse yourself in you know, a country if you're going to learn a language. But in terms of companies and leadership, you know, there's always an inspiration of what leads you to create a new product or a service or leads you to join a company. Walk us through how you connected with AIUTA.

Maísa Benatti: So with AIUTA, well, I've, before I joined, joined AIUTA, I worked both at Farfetch and at Amazon Fashion. In these two companies, my background is product management, right? And in these two companies I was working with generative AI technologies, virtual try-on, personalization, helping those, helping the two companies reduce return rates and also customer satisfaction. So that has been mostly my background. I launched AI Stylist before I think probably one of the first virtual try-ons experiments ever six or seven years ago as well. So my experience connected a lot with what AIUTA was building. And I was then brought in from a product perspective as a subject matter expert in, in the company. And the pro-, I mean, the products we do, we build right now are, are very connected to what I've built before. Now it's a completely different scale. I just feel that I have a team that is now capable of executing a lot of things I was dreaming about in the past. And yeah, so here I am.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well you know, teams are really important and talent is incredibly important too. Talk a little bit about the teams. AI is huge today. It's disrupting a lot of industries. But connecting with the team and connecting with the vision of what they're building... leaving bigger companies like Amazons of the world, is like, we... it's a pretty clear value proposition of what you could do there and what would help reduce returns or maybe just improve the experience from a consumer to go ahead and look at a product that you could visualize in yourself before you make the purchase, things like that, all AI focused or maybe computer vision based. But you placed a bet to join the company you're at today. What was it that you saw that you felt like, "I believe in this team. I believe in this company. I think we can make a big impact in the world"? Walk us through that a little bit.

Maísa Benatti: 100% the team. So at the time I was interviewing with Big Tech again. I was looking into opportunities and this was the smallest company that I was talking to. And first I fell in love with the product. I think the product was extremely impressive. They were able to build something that I was trying to build with much bigger budgets and we just couldn't. And then when I started interviewing and talking to the, our CTO, who's brilliant, and, and more people around the team, I realized, "Okay, I really want to be part of this group of people." And I think that's also exactly why our investors invest in us is, it's really the team. It's a very special crew that I have here.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, uh, you know, technology is evolving and, you know, walk us through how AI plays a vital part of what you're building and where's the focus for the product? Because when I think of fashion, I think of, you know, models putting on clothes, and then having pictures that you could look at and make a decision: Can I see myself wearing that outfit? And then, you know, you click buy. And that's a product... that's a consumer-focused product. But you know, there's corporations, there's big brands, there's organizations that also have a value that they might have needs for that too. So just kind of walk us through where the product started and where it's evolved, where it's at today.

Maísa Benatti: 100%. So when the company started, they built, before I joined, they built an AI stylist that could help you generate your wardrobe from outfit of the day photos. And you could then mix and match different outfit combinations with things you own, with new things that you want to shop, and so you would get styling ideas. It was a really fun experience and the app was actually quite successful. It had over 1.5 million downloads. We reached 430,000 monthly active users. So quite of a nice engagement.

But when I joined the company and I saw the caliber of the technology they, they built and how much corporations really needed that, we decided to serve corporations as well. And that's mainly, it was a strategic decision for a faster route to monetization. So we changed, so we adjusted things basically using the same platform. We have our own proprietary models, over 11 models. I think we... last time we counted, we were at 11, now probably at 15. And we then repackaged the solutions and we first started selling... helping brands improve personalization and immersive content generation.

Mostly because new generations for example, Gen Z, right, they're really expecting fashion brands to be much more visual and, and deliver mo-... even motion experiences. So you can think of TikTok Shop, the rise of TikTok Shop. The, the rise of TikTok Shop, sorry, the rise of Instagram Shop as well. And in the meantime, fashion e-commerce remains exactly the same way as when it was invented. So the regular grids. And so the first products that we launched was really bringing the AI Stylist that we created for consumers to fashion, to fashion houses, to fashion companies as well. And everyone loved the product. So brands really, really liked it. We launched virtual try-on with our clients. Now, with the, the, our ideal customer profile are fashion companies that generate over a billion in revenue. So they're quite massive. We then launched our product and we have amazing metrics on engagement, on people coming back more because they see themselves on clothes. And 8% of customers shared the content generated on social media, which also shows a lot of super interesting engagement.

But the reality is that that product was really a "vitamin" product. So a product that was helping our clients generate better customer experiences for them. But it was not a product they could, they couldn't live without, right? And we started listening to our customer feedback and they all started asking us, "Can you help us generate content?" And then I'm thinking, "What type of content are you looking for?" They said, "Really content like operational content, creative operations content." And we then started playing around with that area and it has been a huge success. So brands are very, very excited about what we can achieve.

But essentially that content means generating content for marketing purposes, generating content for detail pages, generating videos, showing more angles of a product. So letting customers either see things on themselves or on a model that looks similar to them. Being able to personalize the experience with a model. So right now if you go into any fashion website you will see that models are either skinny, tall and usually Western-looking. Now with the types of solutions that we offer, you can actually, if you are a customer in Asia you can see an Asian model. If you are a customer in Brazil you can see more of like a Brazilian model with like body shapes and, and facial expressions that, that the customer is expecting. So there's a lot of really nice potential on, on scaling now content. And that's the journey we have, we have been in lately and has been a huge, huge success.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, when we look at companies, when you look at the products, it's solving a problem that's either saving you money or making you money or serving more value to their customer base. Walk us through who you're selling to in a company and what's the value proposition sound like? What are they getting? What are you delivering that maybe isn't out there today?

Maísa Benatti: Perfect. So what we have at AIUTA, so our AI solution, we are positioning ourselves as the operating system of fashion and we have different buckets of solutions that serve different personas within a fashion organization. So we are very vertically focused on the fashion industry. So we build our models for fashion, but then those models, they are very... they can be reused for multiple use cases. And right now we have two buckets, and I can talk more later about how we're thinking about our roadmap, but the two buckets of solutions is this "vitamin" product that I mentioned to you which helps a lot with retention, with personalization. And then we have our "painkiller" product which is studio production.

So studio production is a big pain for companies right now. There's huge cost, a huge cost line in the P&L of companies. And what we want is to enable creatives in fashion, in fashion companies to actually generate more with spending less, or at least spending the same but generating more, more content. So the value proposition really of studio is that, is, is scaling content and also delivering content at much faster speed. So our personas for that product are really creative operation leaders. Usually the leaders that would own the studio production or editorial production for a fashion house or a fashion company.

And then our other buckets of products that I mentioned around AI Stylist and virtual try-on, there we're targeting product people that are looking into optimizing different parts of the journey of "How can I help customers? How can I increase my AOV?" so increase basket size by mixing and matching different outfits and showing customers different way that they can style things, or for example "How can I reduce returns because customers can see how something's going to look on them?" So depending on the metric that this product managers want to shift or to change, we have different ways of integrating our solutions in a white label way. So their customers don't know it's AIUTA, so it's purely white label, and we're just the AI visualization provider for, for that. So that's, those are the key, the key value propositions.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, you showed me the product, and when I looked at it, it was amazing. I mean, I could see you. It was really you as the model, and looking at the different products you were, you were trying on. And visually, it looked as if you were like in person, and the technology has come around so quickly, and it's accelerated. It's incredible. When you look at the landscape, you know, of competitors, like how do you... like you talk... you take like an Amazon who's got thousands of employees, but it really doesn't really matter if the talent's better at a small company versus a big company. You can maybe move quicker, you can, you know, change direction faster. What, what is kind of the, your moat, or what is it that you have a head start in that you feel really good about?

Maísa Benatti: That's a great question. I have a very strong opinion about competitors. So let's... So our moat is we're vertically optimized for fashion. So we build for fashion. Fashion is not an afterthought. So when you look into this big GenAI models or base models that are out there, or that even our, that smaller competitors use and they optimize on top of it, uh usually you will see things for example, and I showed you visually before, before we came to the podcast, which is for fashion companies: logo preservation, details of prints and lace, and the texture... that's extremely important. And state-of-the-art GenAI really loses that in, in the process of the generation. So texture can change, prints can change, even logos can change. And if you're selling a product online, it needs to be exactly identical of what you're going to get when you receive the product at home. So those little things, they're actually very big things for companies.

So when we were entering studio, I actually thought it was a very saturated area because if you look at it, there are so many companies in this space. And when customers were asking for us to enter this area, I wasn't so sure I really wanted to invest. And then we started speaking with very big names, so luxury brands, huge retailers in the US, here in Europe. And they were all hyping us and saying, "Your quality is incredible. We've never seen anything like it." I said, "Well, but isn't this place, this market saturated?" And they said, "Not at all. I mean, not with solutions with this quality." And that's when we decided to invest.

And honestly, when we think about competition, right, which you asked me... and this was something I learned at Amazon. So at Amazon, we don't do competitor analysis. So there's no competitor analysis at Amazon. There's only customer obsession. And in a startup, and I'm sure a lot of founders and CEOs are going to relate to that, in a startup you, if you read the news or if you open LinkedIn, you will see a startup race. Like when your competitor raised more money than you. Your competitor launched this new feature that you never thought about, and... but you don't even know if they test it or if there's really a need. You don't know. And it's such a big distraction to look at what's happening out there, and you can actually start losing energy by reading everything that's happening in the competition and you're like, "Oh, is it really worth me doing what I'm doing?"

And when I realized we were actually doing a lot of competitor analysis at, at AIUTA and even the team was getting demotivated because I was like, "Oh, we have a competitor that is not better than us in this." And I'm like, "Guys, let's stop. We're not looking at competitors anymore. We're obsessing with what customers are telling us, what's important to them, and that's it." Of course, we need to have an idea of what's happening. Of course, we need to understand what Google was starting to do or what other companies are bigger. But I, I'm a firm believer, and I think this was something really good that I learned at Amazon, that compet-... like competitors will only distract you from what really matters, which is solving your customers' problems. And so that's what we do right now. We're extremely obsessed on that. And since we shifted, and this, this shift hasn't been long, we actually did it in the beginning of the year when I think I started to get overwhelmed. And in a startup, you have so many ups and downs. And a lot of the success you have comes down to your energy, especially the founder and the CEO energy. And so if you start getting distracted and your energy goes down, you're, you're done. So you can't, you can't let distractions bring your energy down. So that's, that's my, my positioning on competition as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm a firm believer in, you know, as a leader, it's not just what you say, it's how you look and how you feel and the energy you bring to a meeting, to the table, for any event. It's so critical. And, you know, where your energy goes, you're, you know, or wherever your, your focus goes, your energy flows. So, if you're focused on the competition and you're feeling bad about it, it's going to drain you. So, I agree with you there. It's such a critical aspect of leadership. And you know, leadership isn't only about leading people or leading a company. It's also about making sure that you're finding the right people to join your company.

Maísa Benatti: Yep.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, you know, companies have different stages of growth, and as a leader, you have to evolve to manage that company at that stage they're in and find the right people that bring value to that company at the right time. Talk, let's switch gears a little bit here. Talk about what you've learned as a leader of adding people to your team and finding talent and recruiting and making sure that it's working out for you. And what have you learned?

Maísa Benatti: This is such a great question. And I think I have also a lot of opinions about this and also learned with experience because I worked in three very different stage companies in the fashion tech space. So at Amazon over a million employees. Then Farfetch, I think last time I was there it was, we were close to 8,000 employees. And then AIUTA, we're tiny, less than 20 people, very small startup. And you know, skill set, especially a lot of people that worked, work right now at AIUTA, so I, I think 100% actually worked in bigger corporations. And so the skill set can be the same, but the relative weight of the skills in different stages of companies completely changes. So what's important, or some types of muscles you need to flex more in one size of the company versus the other, that, that's very, very different spectrums I would say. And you could have people that can adapt. So people that work at AIUTA, they've worked in corporations, big corporations before, and they are able to adapt to the startup reality, but it's not always the case.

And so when I'm looking for talent, sometimes I think about people I worked with in the past and they were absolutely brilliant in the Amazon context, in the Farfetch context, but it's just very hard for me to imagine them in the startup context. And that doesn't mean that they're not talented. It just means that the type of skill set or the weight to each of the skills they have changes. So I'll give you an example. At Amazon, I launched an A/B test, which was a copy A/B test. We just changed on the detail page an A/B, the copy, like a small string from passive voice to active voice. So we were... it was a personalization test, and we wanted to instead of say something in the passive way, we changed to active voice. Very simple. And that test brought to Amazon more than my annual budget for my whole area at Farfetch. So it's just like, any single like tiny thing you do there will have super massive impact. Now the thing is, when you're doing that, or anything that you want to change at Amazon, you need to involve a lot of people, make sure people are aligned. You need to have a lot of data. You need to be able to have a lot of research, convince all your stakeholders. Um, there was another feature there that I wanted to launch, which was so tiny, was in search, was like smaller than the size of a pea. And I remember I think I had to speak with over 100 people to convince them. And from director to VP levels, to every sort of like different stakeholders because so many different teams touch on search. And, and then I left Amazon. Eventually yesterday I was browsing, I was actually needed to buy some stuff and I saw it and I'm like, "Two years later, it's here." And so, and Amazon is known for moving fast within the FAANGs, right? So it's, it's known for, for actually creating mechanisms to move fast. But the reality is that it's such a responsibility launching something in a product that is so mature that you have to go very deep. So you have to have like a profile of being a deep diver.

While when you're in a startup, you really need to build trust with your team and you will not have all the data. You will not have all the answers and you'll have to make a decision. And you will need to be comfortable sometimes with making a decision with not having all the data, and the team will have to trust that you're right and that your gut is right in order for you to move. And maybe what three, four customers are saying, it's going to be enough for you to actually go and build something. And, and that's uncomfortable for a lot of people, especially if you're coming from a corporate environment. For me it was, in the beginning, was a little bit of a shock. I started doing documenting and doing research and... but things moved so fast that documentation didn't even make sense in the startup, while at, at Amazon documentation is everything. And so you start learning how to flex different muscles for, basically for, depending on the stage you are.

And then I think another super critical important thing when you're operating in a startup environment is you need to be very comfortable people doing things for the first time. Um, I had more than one employee actually when I asked, I gave them a task, they came to me and they said, "Well, I've never done this before." And I said, "Me neither, so we have a problem. Thank God ChatGPT exists because now we can just figure it out." And in a big corporation, if you've never done this before, there will be a person you can ask for help, right? And so you just kind of have to be comfortable with a little bit of chaos. And, and so I would say really the skill set will vary a lot. And so hiring is a challenge, because most of my network for example, especially even coming from corporations, are corporate people that, some of them may be able to flex muscles like I was able to on you know, just being okay and comfortable with not knowing everything and just moving, but other times no. And so you need to be able to assess it on an interview or in a case study. And yeah, so that comes with, with some challenges, I'm sure.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well we always look, we call it the three C's. It's the competency, the character, and the chemistry of that person. And you look at the resume and you think about, you know, can they bring experience to the table based on where we're at as, as a company or the size? And then like what have they really done? Like what's their competency level like? Once we understand that, then we dive into the character. Can we see ourselves working for this person? Like do they have the right trust factor that we believe that they can be a good team member? And then the chemistry. Do they fit our culture? I think it kind of strips out a lot of the distractions when you're interviewing people if you can just keep it focused there. And I know Amazon has an incredible hiring process, too, like Bar Raiser, Razer, and all sorts of stuff. So, I'm sure you bring some of that to the table, too. But as, as you look at your company, you're hitting market fit. You are seeing demand from your customers and prospects and you know Fortune 500 companies that have an interest in your product. And you know, there's also the challenge of delivery. And as you look at your company today, what, what would you say is like kind of the focal of your biggest challenge right now?

Maísa Benatti: My biggest, my biggest challenge right now, I think part of it is what you just mentioned, right? Is really building the, building the right team and attracting the skill set that we need for this next phase of, phase of growth. And so that's, that's definitely one of the, one of the key things that we are currently focusing on. Yes, we found the fit like I said, and, and it's, it happened really quickly. So we launched the, the product that I was just mentioning to you that has been very successful, Studio. It's basically a repackaging of our existing solutions about, I think it's going to be four months now. So four months ago. And I think we have eight times more active customer calls now or... exactly. And, and the team wasn't prepared for that. So just for example this week, I onboarded, I mean this past two, three weeks, we were onboarded almost five people to help with the load, to prepare for September and for everything that needs to be launched before Black Friday. Because the Black Friday... Black Friday is also a big thing that is coming up. And so now we need to make sure that everyone is ramping up and prepared for that, and the training.

So, and another challenge that I'm facing right now, which I'm sure a lot of other founders will connect, especially B2B founders, is we were in the beginning of our B2B journey and you know, CEO sales fully. So I was leveraging my network, I was leveraging my connections, and also my experience speaking the same language as the customers. So mostly I was driving sales. And so there's a lot of the sales process that was in my head that now we have to build a playbook. So we're onboarding sales people. I need to be able to build a playbook. I need to be able to scale. So, how do I replicate what I do with clients to be able to attract them with a team? And so, that's, that's something that I'm hands down, have a bunch of like documents in front of me here. And yeah, starting to, to work on, on building the foundations and the mechanisms so we can actually start now onboarding all the clients that are coming our way.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Well, what I like about your product, and we work with a lot of AI companies, is that it's very focused with a real deliverable, and it's technology-driven, where you're seeing demand from big well-sized companies as well as, you know, the consumer side. You have kind of both sides of the market, which is really, really cool, and I think companies look for that and hope to build it. What's on the roadmap? What are you excited... I mean it sounds like you've got some really good technology now that is, you're executing on, but if you look forward 12, 18, 24 months from now, what do you see there that's coming?

Maísa Benatti: So many exciting things. Especially you know, because my, my background is product, I'm so attached to the roadmap and to how we're going to build it in the next step. So we... like I said, the proprietary technology that we have, so our own models, they are quite flexible in terms of how we can use them, right? And so we need to build now this proposition and how we sell each one of them. Of course there are, there are some technology elements as well to it. But one of the two of the... the two buckets that I mentioned to you, we already have, we're selling them. But now the next stages are entering marketing as well. How can we support content marketing, social media marketing, and help the marketing team scale content? The other super interesting area that we're looking into is design. How can we help designers actually design faster, create more, and scale their designs? So, that's another very interesting area that we're looking into. There's also resale. How can we help resale companies help customers list faster with our technology? Because you can from, you know, a very scrappy photo create a full listing, create all the descriptions. And I, I have a lot of items in my wardrobe that I wish I could sell, and just because, just the fact that I have to think about listing all of them, I just don't. And so there's a whole new proposition there that we want to help. So there are new use cases that we want to use our technologies to launch.

But then there's also something else that I'm planning more towards the end of next year. We're now starting to think about it, which is building tooling to scale for not only the ICP we have now. So, right now we're focusing on companies that generate over a billion revenue. But to provide tools like Canva, for example, that anyone can go create an account and use our technology for content creation on social media, content creation for fashion e-commerce. Smaller brands actually that have, they have much higher content costs. So for you to have an idea, bigger corporations like, you know, Farfetch for example, or even Amazon, for you to produce an item, so an SKU, for it to go live, it costs around between $40 to $100. Okay, that's the normal cost per photo, per item. And with smaller brands, because they don't have this process super optimized, it can go up to $300, $400 per item to actually list a product depending on the level of quality they want to have in that listing. So our technologies can help smaller brands even more, right? So we need to now start building tooling to be able to reach different customer types. And so this year, next year, we're fully focused on our ICP, which are enterprise customers. But then in our product roadmap, we're already preparing to start serving other customer types as well by end of next year with automation.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's incredible. Well, as a company, I like the direction you're headed as a leader. And you're building this company, we like to say you're flying the plane as you build it. What is it that you have, how have you evolved as the leader as the company's growing and continues to grow? Like what are some of the lessons you can share with others or some of the findings that you've gone as you've continued to, to grow the company?

Maísa Benatti: You know, I'm a person, I think especially having worked in product before, I listen to everyone. I like to listen to everyone's opinion and I like to understand perspectives of everyone and why people think the way they do. And I, I'm blessed to have an incredible board of advisors. They are extremely high caliber entrepreneurs. They were ex-CEOs of companies of over 100,000 people. So I'm very, very blessed to have them around me. And each of them... and so my advisors and my board members, but also my employees and my team members as well, my reports, they all have different opinions of where should we, should we take the business. And I feel that in a big corporation you usually have like path A and B. In a startup you have path A, B, C until Z, right? So there are so many options and so many places you can take the business. And so you... well, throughout the whole journey I, I receive a lot of advice, a lot of feed-, feedback, a lot of directions.

And what I learned as a leader throughout these months that I've been working on this, is that advice is incredible, especially from people that have a lot of experience. But you're the only person as a CEO that has the full picture and that has the understanding of everything that is going on. It's only you. No one else knows everything that is happening. And you are the only person that also understand the actual challenges that, that you have. And so I learned how to take advice, hear advice, but also follow my gut and my instincts of what I believe is the right direction. It's still a process. I'm still learning. It's something that I need to evolve. But yeah, trying to look into opinions and noise and what's really helpful for the stage we're in now. That's, that's definitely an area that I'm evolving. And I'm definitely growing a backbone, I can tell you in, in that area too because it's, it's just super needed. So yeah, that's really great to hear. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, I'll just share a quick story. We ended up getting acquired. This is a while back when I had our previous company, but before we did that, we were talking to a lot of consultants that were telling us how to position yourself and how to do this and how to do that. And at the time, my, one of my co-founders was, he'd gone through this before and he was more confident in not taking all the information in and going with it, where I was like, "Okay, if that's what they're saying, let's write it down and do it." And he's like... came to a meeting one time, and at the end of it he said, "Can we just want to have a little time for ourselves as the founders?" And so we're sitting around the table and he's like, "Everything that we've heard is great, but it's our company and we're the ones that are either going to live or die based on the decisions being, being made. We're paying them. We're paying them to help us, but it's our, it's our company. So, we need to have the, the courage to step up and decide what we want and, and, and take that action." And we did. We didn't follow the direction of any consultants. We just took our own path and it worked out great. But just because someone's a consultant or a mentor or board member, they're not in your shoes.

Maísa Benatti: Exactly. Exactly. And also they don't have the real experience, understand the industry. And so sometimes I get amazing advice that would work maybe in other types of industry, but in fashion it's not like that. And then you have to kind of put into perspective where the advice is also coming from. And yeah, so that's, that's definitely something that I feel I'm growing a lot and I'm learning as I go. And, and it's a process. I don't think it's something that I, I mean, I admire your, your co-founder. But I think it's a process for you to be able to clean the noise and understand what is noise, what is noise, and what is, what is advice. Because otherwise... and, and I actually saw myself in the situation in, in the beginning of the year. But there were multiple directions we could go and I felt I was being pulled by different directions and I was static in the middle, so I wasn't moving. And then I realized, "No, like, I need to move. And this means that I'm going to make some people unhappy, and I need to be okay with that." And so that has been an emotional growth journey for me as a leader for sure.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So that's the backbone. You can, it's okay unhappy because you're making the right choice. But as a leader, you got to make decisions, too. Like you got to make decisions and learn and evolve and keep going. So sounds like you're on a great path. I love what you guys are building. If anybody wants to find you or find AIUTA, where do they go?

Maísa Benatti: So you can go to our website www.aiuta.com. aiuta.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. So, Maísa Benatti, CEO of AIUTA. I think my name is pretty rare, so it's quite easy to find me on, on LinkedIn.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. That's great. And just for the listeners that don't know how to spell AIUTA or AIUTA... I don't have my glasses on at the moment, but a-i-u-t-a.com.

Maísa Benatti: Exactly. And fun fact, it means "assistant, help" in, "help" in Italian. And so that's how the company started. It was a fashion assistant. And it starts with AI, which is the soul of the company. So...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, I love that. Makes total sense. In Spanish it would be ayuda, but yeah.

Maísa Benatti: Exactly. Exactly.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That makes it easy to remember. Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate your time and for all the listeners for listening. I appreciate your time too. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now. We can't wait to catch up with you on the next episode. Until then, the world, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

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