The Moment You Realize Your Product Isn’t the Business Model

TRANSCRIPT SUMMARY

00:00 - Intro & guest background
02:00 - Career path (fashion, tech, product roles)
05:00 - Transition from corporate to startup
08:30 - Fashion tech industry overview
10:00 - Role as product “translator”
12:30 - Startup vs corporate speed & learning
14:30 - Initial product (AI wardrobe app)
17:00 - B2C traction vs monetization challenges
20:00 - Pivot decision: B2C to B2B
24:00 - Building an AI “operating system” for fashion
30:00 - Product-market fit & enterprise traction
36:00 - Scaling team & next growth phase

‍

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jeff Holman (00:09)

Welcome back everybody to the breakout CEO podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Holman, and I'm so glad to be here with you today. I love having these conversations with really smart people. And today we've got another great guest with us. Myza Banachi. Myza, thank you for coming onto the show.

Maisa Benatti (00:25)

Thank so much for having me, Jeff. Happy to be here.

Jeff Holman (00:28)

I'm really glad to have you here. You're joining us from a podcast studio there in London, right?

Maisa Benatti (00:34)

Exactly, North of London.

Jeff Holman (00:37)

North of London. Okay. I was in London for the first time this, this last, I guess, summer, last summer, 2025, took my family and not that it matters a whole lot, we were there during, let's see, we went to France during the French Open, the tennis tournament and missed, I hadn't planned ahead. hadn't thought, let's, let's get tickets. When we went to, when we went to London, they were having a smaller tournament leading up to Wimbledon, I believe.

And so we were able to catch a tournament there on the Queens court ⁓ one day, just almost randomly. was fantastic experience for me and my family.

Maisa Benatti (01:13)

Amazing. So you enjoyed the time in London. Was it ⁓ nice and sunny? Were you lucky?

Jeff Holman (01:19)

It was, it was. was, I think it was June when we were there, if I remember right. And it was great weather.

Maisa Benatti (01:26)

It's a good time to come.

Jeff Holman (01:28)

How long have you lived in London?

Maisa Benatti (01:30)

Five years now.

Jeff Holman (01:33)

yeah. you're doing a whole startup thing now. you're, well, startup thing and a newborn baby. We don't want to leave that out. You've got a two and a half month old new baby girl.

Maisa Benatti (01:46)

Two Yes, the company and the baby.

Jeff Holman (01:50)

Yes. Which one's easier?

Maisa Benatti (01:54)

I would say the company, even though it's very challenging. think it's easier than a baby for sure.

Jeff Holman (02:00)

Yeah, a lot of work, both of them. Both of them are a ton of work.

Maisa Benatti (02:03)

Both of them very rewarding. Both of them very rewarding. that's what we're

Jeff Holman (02:08)

Definitely. Well, we want to get into your business a little bit and understand where that is and what you're building. know that you mentioned when we were talking before the show, you mentioned a little bit that you feel like you've completed the zero to one phase and you're in the one to 10 phase in terms of growth, getting out there and having maybe proven the model enough that you can now start to think about how to grow the model. So I'm excited to talk about that and maybe one or two of your breakout moments along the way.

But before we jump into breakout moments and those deep insights that you've learned as a leader, give us some background on what was your path to get to this point in your career?

Maisa Benatti (02:50)

Great, thank you. ⁓ So ⁓ I studied economics, international business and fashion design ⁓ and ended up finishing a master's in fashion and technology. So I specialize in fashion and technology, entered fashion and tech through the product career, which for me was completely new at the time. So my first product role was at Parfetch. ⁓

An amazing role because I could combine lots of the skills that I was studying and ⁓ there at Farfetch, I ended up focusing on AI and customer experiences with personalization, returns reduction, and also visual experiences with AI. So computer vision models to generate synthetic content. This was before AI was even a buzzword or was even a thing like a few years ago.

⁓ Then I led two &As as well in this space. So I was working with startups similar to ⁓ Ayuta in this area. Went to Amazon as well, where I was also leading personalization there. And after some time, just decided I was a bit tired of corporate career, wanted to move a little bit faster and I met this amazing team. So I didn't found Ayuta, I was hired as a subject matter expert CEO. So it's an area that I've been...

testing and experimenting for a long time, is ⁓ visualization and fashion. ⁓ joined as a product leader, was then promoted as CEO some months later. And this has been my journey so far. Now, the main reason why I decided to join this team and at the time sounded like a huge risk going from the corporate career to a small startup was because of the team. It's just an...

absolutely brilliant team that I saw and the IP that they created. So what they were able to build was what I was trying to build with much bigger teams. So my last team at FireFight, I we were about 70 people, ⁓ trying to crack ⁓ visualization in fashion at scale, which is something extremely hard to do. And this small team with much smaller budgets ⁓ were able to build an incredible platform, incredible technology.

And I was just, I fell in love. after I spoke with the CTO, said, okay, I need to join this team. They're going to bring my visions to life and here I am.

Jeff Holman (05:23)

I love that. And that's so counterintuitive, right? For a lot of people, you're like, man, I forgot I've got this job and I'm on this big team. We should be able to do so much. And yet sometimes you can accomplish 10 times as much with a smaller, faster team. want to dig into that here in a little bit, but can I jump back just a minute, just because maybe some of our audience members would say themselves, wait a second, fashion and technology. is that, how much of the fashion world is technology?

Because a lot of people would say to themselves, I thought people went into fashion to design the clothes. We've had other people on the show before who've, know, ⁓ Megan Higney does shoes. You know, she created shoes and it's more of a consumer product ⁓ type of emphasis than say a tech emphasis. ⁓ Is it more common now to have people going through fashion with a business mindset and emphasis and looking to start a technology company?

How common is that?

Maisa Benatti (06:23)

Not very. ⁓ When I was studying fashion design, I was a big outlier because I went with a business mind into fashion school at the time. And it was so funny because I was surrounded by a lot of creatives thinking about how to bring collections to life. And all I could think of was how do I monetize this? What is the supply chain is going to look like? Thinking about all the more business aspects of fashion and tech is

Quite recent, I believe it's a very recent career for you to actually study. And I don't think I met many people actually that studied fashion and then went into tech. This was a whole journey as well for me. Because I'm surrounded by a lot of people that studied engineering. But when you're building products, you can't have an engineering mindset. You really need to understand the consumer, what they're looking for, what is really that they want. And what we do at IUTE is we create visual experiences and immersive experiences.

⁓ So you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you don't understand how to put the pieces together to really build something that fashion creatives are going to enjoy or buy, you don't have a product. So it's rare, but it's growing and I think the fashion tech space, especially with now startups coming up and also big companies or marketplaces like Farfetch, like Zalando.

There are also lots of companies, some of our clients, Gap for example, they're investing a lot in technology as well. And when I say technology, I'm talking about online shopping, but also supply chain, how to optimize supply chain now, ⁓ passports. for example, ⁓ tag passports, digital passports of tags. So now it's going to become a law in Europe.

If I'm not mistaken, I don't remember.

Jeff Holman (08:21)

like inventory control type tagging or?

Maisa Benatti (08:24)

Exactly, exactly. It's a ⁓ digital passport that your clothing needs to have so you have the whole traceability of the materials, where it was produced.

Jeff Holman (08:37)

Tree

of origin is what we refer to it here in the U S yeah.

Maisa Benatti (08:40)

Exactly, exactly. Lots of exciting things happening in fashion tech for sure.

Jeff Holman (08:45)

Yeah, that's amazing. And you're kind of a special place then. As you describe where you're at, a cross section between fashion, business, and tech, it reminds me of my path has been long and winding myself, Engineering background, and ⁓ then went to get my law degree and did patent law for a while, working with innovators, and then went back up my MBA. And I often tell people because of that, I spend a lot of my time ⁓ translating for different people.

between the business side, the tech side, ⁓ and the legal side of things. Do you ever refer to yourself as a translator or do you find yourself helping one group, your engineers understand the business side or fashion people understand the engineering side? Is that something that you find yourself doing?

Maisa Benatti (09:33)

And because my technical background is product, I think that's really the product career is to be a translator, to be a translator between business teams, between the client ⁓ and the tech team as well, to translate what the client requirements or the client needs into real products. So for sure, think being a translator is a great analogy.

Jeff Holman (09:56)

Yeah. And I just realized you've also got the Portuguese and English. You're ahead of me also on the translation side of things. Maybe you speak other languages too. you do? What language is just for reference?

Maisa Benatti (10:05)

Yeah, I do.

Spanish and German, Portuguese, ⁓ English, and a little bit of Italian.

Jeff Holman (10:16)

my gosh. You're so talented. That's amazing. I love it. I like to eat food from all those places. Does that count?

so, well, good. so, okay. So you, you in corporate, what was it about your corporate experience that, that made you or that led you to say, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to go give this smaller business a try. I'm going to go join a team that, you know, is a 10th of the size of the one I've got. Was there anything, anything in particular that led you to do that? Was there a frustration or an experience? Because a lot of people, when they're in the corporate world, they, they never

I don't want to say get out, right? Because there's not a, that maybe puts a spin on it that people should be getting out of corporate and there's not necessarily a reason to, but a lot of people get in corporate and they stay there because, you know, it's fulfilling for them. What was the draw for you to make a jump from corporate to iUTA?

Maisa Benatti (11:14)

I have a lot of energy, I just wanted to move faster. And here in this case specifically, when I met the team and when I met our CTO at the time, I fell in love with the IP. And you're an ⁓ IP lawyer as well, you ⁓ know the value that IP has. like I said, this was something we were trying to build, ⁓ lots of investments with &A's, trying to scale. And then I saw the small team able to build this, I just fell in love.

I thought of all the possibilities of what we could do. We went through pivots and so I adjusted on how we were using this IP as well in the company. So I think all this flexibility of kind of breaking things down into puzzle pieces and building my own puzzle and experimenting and testing with clients and just moving fast just gives me so much drive and energy. While in the corporate world, you can also do that, but just you need to involve a lot more people. It takes a little bit longer.

So you will see the results of your experiment in a year. While in a startup, if I test something today, tomorrow, I already have results or at least like in a month, I will have some initial results and I love that. And so you can get data much faster and move faster and adjust your route as well. So I think it would be really the learning as well, like you mentioned, you know, being able to learn quickly and move.

The movement is really what drives me.

Jeff Holman (12:43)

Yeah, I love that you pointed out the learning side of it because I know a lot of people talk about moving faster, know, they give the analogy of big business moves like a large freighter on the ocean, they can't turn fast, it can't move fast, and a small ship can pivot and move everywhere it needs to. So we get that like the movement side of business, the learning side, that's something that I've actually been thinking about more in my own law firm even because we're a small law firm and I'm like,

I'm like, we don't need to just move faster. We need to learn faster. that's a side that not as many people talk about. ⁓ You must have a real inclination towards learning.

Maisa Benatti (13:21)

And to learn, you have to be willing to fail. That's also something that I think if you're not willing to fail, ⁓ you're going to learn slow.

Jeff Holman (13:33)

You mean I can't just sit here and read books and be like, I'm a way better business person now because I read 12 books last month or whatever.

Maisa Benatti (13:40)

You know, I'm super, especially in the Utah now in our business, I'm very against us just sitting and start, you know, strategizing and thinking this is what we're going to do. And just talking about work. ⁓ I hate that. I keep telling the teams, okay guys, let's just do it. Let's do it and see what happens. If it doesn't work, next week we try something else. But we just, we would learn better and faster if we're just willing to fail. And a lot of people are quite risk averse.

Especially in the corporate world. That is something that I saw quite a lot. And so that will compound in a bunch of meetings to discuss risks. And obviously in the company like Amazon, for instance, you do need to do that because ⁓ depending on the tests or experiments you want to do, there are lots of ⁓ consequences, ⁓ which in the startup, you also have consequences, of course, but they're just ⁓ smaller scale.

Jeff Holman (14:37)

Yeah, you're not betting the company on every decision or spending $10 million to test something. Well, let's get into Iuta a little bit more. ⁓ So you joined as, what did you say your role was when you joined that?

Maisa Benatti (14:44)

Exactly.

I

was CPO, I was Chief Product Officer. The company at the time that I joined, they were operating in the B2C space. They were starting to think about experimenting with B2B. ⁓ When I joined, the company was an AI stylist that would read your wardrobe, understand everything you had in your wardrobe.

And then recommend outfit combinations with matching with our new purchases, new things that you should add to your wardrobe matching with what you already had and you could visualize that on yourself. So it was a try on where you can, you could combine ⁓ things you want with new things. ⁓

Jeff Holman (15:31)

So I could take that into my closet, for example, that version of it. And I could have said, hey, I could take photos of what I've got and then say, tell me how to wear these things plus what else should I buy to go with it?

Maisa Benatti (15:42)

Exactly. And you wouldn't have to take photos of things in your wardrobe. You could just put your, like your dress today and the AI would understand all the pieces and it will just categorize that for you automatically. And if you put your outfit of the day, it will tell you how many times ⁓ a month you wear a specific item. So will give you some ⁓ cost per wear. And so it was quite an interesting proposition and it was very successful. had 2 million downloads, half a million monthly active users.

with zero marketing spend, ⁓ definitely an amazing venture there. But at the time I joined, we were starting to experiment on ⁓ B2B, so licensing the platform, the AI that could do all of those things. So the visualization, the try on two corporations. And that was something that I knew the industry was craving for because that's what I was trying to buy.

When I was a product leader in those other companies and partnering with other startups or trying to build it from scratch. But there were lots of scalability issues ⁓ with this type of technology.

Jeff Holman (16:50)

Can I ask though, just to interrupt here for a second. You had 2 million users. Why not stick with that? Like that was, it sounds like you traction that so many young companies would love to have. ⁓ Was it not being monetized or was it, is that what it was?

Maisa Benatti (17:10)

This is a great question. It's a question that we debated for about a year with our board ⁓ in a Utah, especially when we tried B2B and we saw that that also worked. So we were in an identity crisis of do we go B2B, do we stick with B2C? ⁓ And the reality is in the current situation we're in with AI advancing so fast and also entry barrier being much lower now with any AI product.

For B2C and B2B, both things. We looked into all the possibilities and also as a startup, I need to think not only about the potential of both businesses, but I also need to think about fundraising and when I can break even, when I can make the company become profitable. And with a B2C product, you can build great things and it's not a door that is closed, so we pivoted, but it's not a door that is fully closed for the future.

But for now we paused that because the infrastructure cost was quite high. So for us to be able to break even on that product, it will still be a journey. And we also needed quite a lot of investment to really be able to get to a point of monetization where the business would make sense. so, especially me working on the platform, so working on the platform side of things of the other business, the big corporations that I worked with and knowing the huge

challenge they were facing ⁓ in this area, ⁓ I decided to really stick to B2B. And from a business case perspective, our breakeven point is going to be much ⁓ earlier than if we had pursued the B2C journey. But it wasn't an easy choice. It was very hard. There was no consensus in our board ⁓ and our board is composed by super senior CEOs, ex CEOs that had ⁓ exits through IPO that... ⁓

Jeff Holman (19:07)

Smart

people.

Maisa Benatti (19:08)

Exactly, of companies of hundreds of thousands of employees. And yeah, we had endless discussions on this, which I hate having endless discussions, but this topic ⁓ was a hot one because we were having traction on both sides and we had to choose one of them. right now I'm pretty sure we made the right choice. We're winning enterprise clients and...

Again, with no marketing spend, we're just now starting with a small marketing budget that we're allocating to see how things are going with that. But for now, ⁓ all the contracts that we secured, everything has been indications from one client to the other. ⁓ And I'm talking about companies like ASOS, like GEP, like ⁓ Namshi, about you is from the Zalando Group, which is also a massive company ⁓ here in Europe.

Yeah, so yeah, we've seen Traction. And now we found Product MarketFeed, we saw Traction, now we are starting a completely new chapter. ⁓

Jeff Holman (20:02)

Seen traction

I love it. I love it. And the way you described it too, I mean, you're demonstrating that, you know, the ability to bring different perspectives and going back to your, you know, the tech versus the fashion versus the business, you know, the tech was working, right? And the business in a sense was showing signs of working with 2 million, you know, consumer users. But you, and I think a lot of people with maybe with an engineering only mindset or a tech.

If we want to call it a tech only developer only mindset would say, no, no, no, the product is working. It's working great. Let's just make it better and people will use it more. And you said, wait a second, we got to go back and like, like, how do we, there a better way to monetize this? Not that there's not that what we're doing is bad, but is there a better way that we could take this forward? And, ⁓ and, and you stopped and kind of rethought about the B2B market because you'd been there. That makes sense.

Just a quick note about our guests. I host the breakout CEO podcast to share behind the scenes insights from scaling businesses. As an attorney, I see the real challenges leaders face long before success becomes public. But client stories have to stay confidential. So we invite guest CEOs to share their own moments of struggle and success. I'm so grateful to our guests and my team at Intellectual Strategies for making this show possible. Now,

Let's get back to the show.

Maisa Benatti (21:40)

Because I've been there because I was on the client, on the B2B client side. And also I had to map the opportunity size, right? And with the now AI ⁓ barrier being lower, this means that someone in their room can now code very quickly, like vibe code a very similar app to what we had.

Not with the same performance, but from a user experience, not very far from that. So the entry barrier was much lower. While in B2B, most of our team had, ⁓ have, I think, a hundred percent of people worked in corporations before, so they know what it takes to scale a product in a corporation. ⁓ And that entry barrier is much higher. So our competition there, it's also smaller. And here, when I look at competition in the B2B space, we had...

small startups, and we have also companies like Google and Microsoft. We already won tenders against Google and Microsoft, for example, with our tech, because our P ⁓ is vertically focused, so it's trained for very specific use cases. And we were able to create an infrastructure that is very unique, that even the big tech providers aren't able to catch up so quickly. Of course, we have a timeframe of how...

⁓ how novel TRIP is and we need to keep running to stay still. And then while smaller ⁓ startups, don't have all this enterprise readiness that we have. So we are very well positioned to win this market, which is happening and now we're getting super exciting traction. The biggest brands in the world are interested in our solution now and we want to build ⁓

be vertically focused, but built a horizontal layer to serve the industry. And that was unique. I mean, that was unique. Sorry to interrupt you, but that was unique. And that's why we ended up going into B2B while B2C. There are lots of other wardrobe apps. So if you put wardrobe on App Store, you will find at least 20 apps. Of course, our was the best and we could still make the best, but...

But I believe ⁓ it will be more challenging to monetize, more challenging to be differentiated in that space.

Jeff Holman (24:07)

That makes sense. Well, you know, I've got so many things going through my mind because it's a fascinating field that you're in. You know, I assume that the challenge with going after the consumer market is that there are other people are doing it, but also I could probably walk into my closet. I don't have an extensive wardrobe myself. I'm pretty simple, but I could probably, you know, even just take a photo of my closet and say, Hey, AI, you know, try to categorize this stuff for me and help me think about my wardrobe and

whatever way I wanted. It reminds me of a few months ago, my mom, ⁓ she's telling me about the dealing my dad's library of books in his office. She's like, we need to go through them. We need to clean them out. And he wants to categorize them, right? He wants to like index every book or whatever, just how he is. And I said, mom, just take a photo, like of the bookshelves, and AI will build the list of books that you have and then alphabetize it and put everything in order. I assume that, you know, somebody could.

potentially do something like that ⁓ on their own with AI in their closet instead of with books. And so there's, that's in a sense, I think what you're describing is that's sort of the competition ⁓ that you're dealing with in a B2B market, right?

Maisa Benatti (25:25)

Yeah, well, you mean in B2C, right?

Jeff Holman (25:28)

B2C, excuse

me, yes, B2C.

Maisa Benatti (25:30)

Yeah, exactly. And that was a hypothesis, right? That we were trying to test and we had 2 million downloads and we had almost half a million monthly active users, but the retention was not there yet. So there were lots of things we had to fix. And ⁓ at that time, of course, we needed to also improve the whole flows, but less than 1 % of people were uploading the full wardrobe. They would test with one mouthpiece, but there is effort involved. While if you break the technology that was making that possible,

into different puzzles that fashion businesses can use for completely different workflows, which is what we're doing now. ⁓ You're just selling the pieces and giving ideas on how those fashion businesses could implement. While on B2C, we had a very specific hypothesis that we were testing, but we had a lot of hype, but we weren't sure yet it was a product. So I believe that journey would have been much longer for us to be able to get to a monetization.

a stable monetization journey that while in B2B, ⁓ we know the value of our RP, we know where the best, we know where the fastest right now, so which we're in a very unique position, so it's easier to come and say, okay, these are all the pieces, let's plug and play to solve the problems you have. What are the problems you that's why what we say is that we're building the operating system of AI in fashion because...

There are so many problems that can be solved with the technology that we built. So I can give you a few examples.

Jeff Holman (27:02)

Before we get into examples, I, I want to make sure I'm staying up on the conversation because there really is so much here. So you didn't just take your, and this answers a question that I had, but had not asked yet. You're not just taking the same end user product and taking it to B2B and saying, hey, white label this and take it out to your audience. You've actually done, this is a sophisticated thing and it goes back to, think maybe even, I'm going to take a guess, maybe goes back to your &A experience.

You know, know some people when they have a business and then they go to, they, they're like, Hey, it's time to exit or whatever. I'm going to sell my business. And this is a classic private equity play, right? They, they come in, they buy the business and the business is it's a business, but it's got component parts. And so to maximize their value out of that business, they don't just turn around and sell, resell the same business, you know, entire in its entirety to people. say, how do we break this into pieces that

are valuable in and of themselves. in a sense, the sum of the parts is much greater than the whole when you take them apart and you sell divisions off to strategic partners, you can get a much greater value from a business sometimes than if you just try to resell the entire business as a whole. Am I describing this correctly?

Maisa Benatti (28:25)

Exactly. And also this just ⁓ gives a lot more value to our IP. Yeah. Because there are so many ways, so many exit possibilities because our IP can be just sliced and diced and build different products.

Jeff Holman (28:37)

And now you don't just have one product, you have multiple component products, if I can call them that. And not only that, now you can also go in and you can, if you want, you can help ⁓ be the service partner to plug these component products into the right places in the corporate businesses. it's not just a product business anymore. I know that's where everybody wants to be. I just sell products and I make money while I sleep, whatever.

But there's a lot of money to be made in the service side of these businesses. If you can come in and say, hey, you know what? You've got a great business, but we're going to plug these three things in for you or this one thing in. And in your case, we can come and actually help you execute or integrate or build. I'll bet the value of the business when you looked at just the total enterprise value projections, I bet it was...

I would think it should have been really convincing to your advisors to say, while this is different than what we've been doing, the market is so much bigger. There's so much more opportunity and so many more ways to go. Was that part of your conversation with them?

Maisa Benatti (29:49)

⁓ Hey, 100%, that's exactly it. ⁓ Because my objective and because especially on the &A, so when we were thinking about when we were working on the &A, so I worked in two &As at FireFetch. And in those two &As, we had different people from the business evaluating the businesses that we were going to buy. I was doing the product due diligence, technical product due diligence, but we had people ⁓ from the operations side of things and we were really looking into...

⁓ Like you said, everything that we could use. And that gave me a perspective of how many personas are attached to a technology or to a business. And they have different needs. for example, in a fashion business, we usually have the tech team, which is where I was. And then we have the operations side. So studio production and let's imagine like a...

and e-commerce, they will receive the samples and then they have to take the photos to put on the website. But then there's also a separate team that will think about the marketing campaigns and also how to create completely different visual assets for marketing campaigns. While the product team is thinking, how am I going to help ⁓ customers understand fit? How can I reduce returns? Because returns are too high and we need to rethink the user experience.

There are different personas that will be looking into different metrics in the business. Some will be thinking, how do we save costs? Others will be thinking, how do we increase revenue? With the platform we had, could serve, we can, and right now we have two strong product lines and I have now a vision of other product lines that are going to serve these different personas in fashion business, leveraging the same exact technology, just slicing and dicing in different way. ⁓

allow us to make much more out of it. And also I heard quotes from clients, twice actually, ⁓ in the past. It wasn't now that I came back from my maternity leave, but in last year where clients were saying, wow, I feel that everything that is in the company's roadmap, you have a product for. Which means that it's much easier for brands to have one contract, one procurement, one API connection that will help you solve multiple problems.

That's the journey we're in. that's really the operating system that we're building for fashion.

Jeff Holman (32:20)

thank you for describing that. Now I understand much better why you call it an operating system and, you know, helps the sales process because you can sell. They don't need everything or all at once, but if they need one thing, they bring you in for that. And then they see the catalog of functionality you have. Like this is, this seems like, ⁓ I don't know, maybe ⁓ from a very superficial perspective seems like, well, it sounds a little more complicated and you know,

a new market we have to go after. once you dig into it, how was this not an easy sell for everybody? What was the pushback you received to doing this?

Maisa Benatti (33:01)

I think that also my thinking evolved along the way to be able to defend the idea. So what I'm telling you now in hindsight, it's really easy to explain. Got it. When we were starting the B2B proposition, this wasn't really the initial vision right away, like straight away. So this narrative that I'm telling you now in a cleaner way was not how we entered. I see. We entered this world. So we started with one product line and then I started realizing, wait a minute, this is how we can expand.

And it was actually in a client's call, so I was selling one product, the wardrobe product, where you upload a photo of yourself and then it would create a visual, let's say of this top or a visual of the pants that I was wearing. And then a client said, ⁓ actually we need flat lays because they're very expensive to shoot in studio. Can you AI generate them for me? And then I also connected to the experience that I had with, wait, we have this different stakeholders that they will be interested in different things.

And I said, yeah, of course we can use my product for that. And so this was something that we learned along the way. So it's hard when you already have half a million monthly active users in one of your products and the other one, you're just scratching the surface. Of course, so that's why we had lots of back and forth, but now the vision is very clear to everyone. And also the value is very clear, but it's messy. And I think when you're building a vision for a startup, especially one that you haven't found, which is my case where I joined and I was looking into what we had and I was...

thinking what is the best business that I can build here and what's the best monetization strategy. ⁓ It's messy and it will take time until you can have a clean picture of what that's going to look like.

Jeff Holman (34:41)

Yeah, no, that makes sense. guess we are getting, we're getting the benefit of hindsight and growth and some of the wrinkles have been ironed out in the meantime. That makes a lot of sense. Well, as you've built this, you know, what's an area, you know, when you think back and we're talking about your breakout moment, like what is, is this the breakout moment or, you know, what is the area in the business where you say to yourself, man, we really went through a, we really went through a

a time trying to figure out this part of the business. But once we figured it out, when we shifted our thinking, we've really hit our stride. Is this that moment or is there another moment in the business where you feel like that's happening?

Maisa Benatti (35:25)

No,

from a product market feed perspective, that's it. It was when we started realizing that we could do much more with EIP and we could just license Dice in so many ways and solve so many different problems. And right now, our clients, we usually start with one product, that's what we enter. then I believe all the clients that we have live right now, we are already talking about the second.

⁓ the second product or what would be the second launch and we're already iterating and in touch with different personas within the company. So different business personas, different ⁓ stakeholders to be able to cross-sell our products. And here, when I talk to VCs, right, and where I'm raising money, if you summarize the business to this is a virtual try-on company, the contract size potential is this.

This is a virtual try-on company, but it's also AI studio, but it's also marketing, but it's also... So then your contract size goes up to over a million, right? the end, right? So that's where the story becomes much more interesting. So the cross-selling opportunity is really the breakout moment and that was a learning. ⁓ It was not, ⁓ I would say, even though I brought a lot with my experience, with my &A experience, like you mentioned,

into this vision, it was something that we developed along the way that become clearer and clearer and stronger as we learn and as we interacted with clients as well.

Jeff Holman (37:02)

Yeah, that makes sense. What has this done for your business? ⁓ I mean, is that when you kind of check the box and you said, I think we finished our zero to one, like we've now got a model that's working, we can finally enter into a different growth stage of the business.

Maisa Benatti (37:17)

So this was when we started getting enterprise contracts, right? And when we won tenders against Big Tech. I think it was huge moment when we heard from a client saying, we were comparing you with Google, but Google loads in 20 seconds and you load in four. So that's why we're moving forward with you because you are the fastest and the best. ⁓

Jeff Holman (37:38)

That's validating, isn't it? You love to hear that.

Maisa Benatti (37:41)

Of course, we were so excited about it. And then we heard it from a second client. then right, you know, a month after we heard the same thing, but it was against Microsoft. And then we realized, okay, the fact that we are vertically focused and we really understand various specific product needs is what is driving the business. And also then the fact that we were able to close the deals, close long-term contracts, we saw that we found product market fit. And then now...

We are in this moment of, okay, it was Maiza and a tech team. Now ⁓ we need actual department. So we need to have a sales department. We need to have a marketing department. We need to have a product, dedicated product person because Maiza was product, sales, marketing, everything. ⁓ And obviously I had amazing people, the amazing, amazing tech team and an operations person as well. ⁓ now we are...

having to shift a lot of things to really go from this one to 10 journey now. So the growth phase of the business of really bringing in the revenue that we know that we can get now in the short term.

Jeff Holman (38:51)

So is that one of your milestones then is to build out the team in the near future into what you need? What are the other milestones that you're working towards over the next few years?

Maisa Benatti (39:00)

So that's always really building the team and scaling. It's also continuing to expand the buckets of the operating system. Right now we're very good in two areas that we know are core for fashion businesses, but there are two more that we want to tackle ⁓ and we need to now repurpose and we can use the base technology, but we still have to add ⁓ some human layer as well to it. So it's a combination of technology and...

service and so that's now the next phase is how do we build this extra mile of the service? Because one thing that we're learning as well is that because AI is something so new and fashion is a legacy industry, ⁓ our technology per se might not be the full, full, full service depending on the size of the business. So if I'm talking about a big platform ⁓ like Amazon or like FireFetch,

like Gap, example, which is our client as well. They have tech teams, they know how this works, it's easy to plug, they know what is needed. But then if we're talking about luxury brands, which are also now looking into using our technology, they don't have massive tech teams. So they will need this extra final layer, which is a human to do QA to make sure that the images are perfect for the website. And this service layer is what we're investing on right now to make sure that

that we have a very complete product for everyone in the industry, for every type of client, for the more tech savvy clients versus the non-tech savvy clients or the ones that don't have engineering teams, for example. So that's what we're building. That's the milestone ahead.

Jeff Holman (40:47)

I love that. I love that. And I want to hear in a minute how your investors have reacted to this change now that they're seeing it take place. But before I do that, I have to ask on the intellectual property side of things, did this shift your mindset and how you think about your IP once you said to yourself, we don't have a product, we have a suite of products. We're not selling a product, we're selling an operating system. Like, what is your perspective?

⁓ How did it shift when you started to look at your business model differently?

Maisa Benatti (41:22)

We have ⁓ an amazing legal counsel who's a former IP litigator. He's been advising us on also how to protect our IP and how to really think about it and structure it. His advice is really the smaller the slices, the more valuable your IP is going to be because there's so many different types of exit strategies that you can have.

And so that's really what we're doing ⁓ right now. And also we had so many interesting discussions with the tech team, with our science team and with David around how to protect that. And I remember as soon as I joined the company, said, we need to have a patent, we need to have a patent. This is like unbelievable. I've been trying to build this and big corporations. We have an amazing ⁓ pipeline, amazing infrastructure. Let's patent this.

And David said, but he said, no, if you focus on a patent here for this type of technology, you're to be teaching your competitors on how to catch up. And AI is moving so fast that the best strategy for us to protect this is trade secret. So we established the whole trade secret policy in the company ⁓ and the whole team is trained on it. And so we have very little people that are...

fully aware of how our technology works. And so that's extremely protected and David helped us really then slice and dice into small bits. So it becomes more and more valuable ⁓ for several potential ⁓ different exit strategies we can have in future.

Jeff Holman (43:07)

I love that. I love that. great context ⁓ for people who aren't necessarily always thinking about how the IP helps in the business model or is part of the business model itself. So thank you for explaining that. getting back to your investors, your board, how are they feeling about this now?

Maisa Benatti (43:26)

They're super excited. think especially in the latest launches that we had, seeing the product work, they're feeling very energized. And most of my board, worked in very big corporations. So they still have a big corporation mindset. And now we're getting to a moment where I'm going to be able to use even more of their wisdom of how do we actually now take this to the next level. So they are for sure very excited. They continue to...

to ⁓ support us until we are ready really for a hyper growth investment round, which right now I still have some small things to adjust before I do that. ⁓ so the investors that are supporting us are the founders and some close investors from the founders as well. They continue to be very, very connected to the business. Yeah, it's super exciting.

Jeff Holman (44:19)

That's fantastic.

Yeah, this is very exciting. mean, this is quite the journey that you're on, Maysa. This is, ⁓ I mean, you've, you said upfront that you didn't start the business, you didn't found the business, but in a sense, you really came in and you founded the new business, the new business model, it sounds like. I'm sure your team contributed, you have great advisors, great team that helped with that, but, you know, sounds like you led the charge to...

to recreate this into something with more viability than perhaps what you came into.

Maisa Benatti (44:56)

Yes, it's an exciting journey, lots of learnings along the way as well. ⁓ I think especially moving, like I mentioned before, moving now from everything, Maiza, to building the teams, I'm already seeing so many interesting things happening because I'm a generalist. ⁓ I do have obviously specific focus in fashion, but I'm more of a generalist and I'm bringing specialized talent.

And it's incredible what happens when you bring specialized talent. ⁓

Jeff Holman (45:27)

Yeah. Well, and your ability now, even though it's after the fact to articulate what that business model is, I mean, it's so clear that helping those new team members come in and see the vision, see what you've done, see where you're headed, like that's going to be a ⁓ big benefit for the team as they come, as you grow and get bigger and get to the point where, you know, lot of the other CEOs I've talked to as they've grown bigger, they're like, you know, was a weird day when I walked down the hall and I'm like, who is that? I don't recognize them. I don't know their name.

So it'll be, you've got, you've got fun moments ahead of you too.

Maisa Benatti (46:00)

Yeah, this happened now when I came back from maternity leave, because we kept hiring. Yeah, we kept hiring and then I came back and I didn't know half of the team. So my first thing was, okay, I need to meet new people. I'm having one-on-ones with everyone. Lots of growing pains, lots of problems to fix. ⁓ But yeah, exciting momentum.

Jeff Holman (46:20)

So

Mayza, as you're explaining all this, I'm really, you know, we have an audience of people who are, they're on the same journey. They're, you know, different stages in their journey. They've done the zero to one or they haven't or the, but a lot of people are going to, they're going to be looking at this and saying, you know, that's a pretty innovative approach to come into a business, look at it, maybe see it, see it more granularly than just the product that it is and the seemingly successful product that it.

that it was at the time and to dissect it into pieces. Like they're gonna listen to this episode, I think, and they're gonna say, ⁓ I wonder if I should rethink parts of my business, like rethink what my product is or rethink who my customer is even. What would you say to people who listen to this episode and then start to reflect on their own business in that way?

Maisa Benatti (47:13)

I think the first bit would be zooming out. That was our journey from B2C to B2B is when we zoomed out and we saw that within the industry, we had more opportunity. And then the second thing is when we started the process of selling into B2B is really to listen to customers because we started selling one product and actually the product that made us think about the other bits and the whole operating system is a product that we're not even selling nowadays anymore. customers were interested in a part of it.

And then we realized, wait a minute, maybe we can enter this area. Let's explore. Let's talk to the tech team. So listening to the customer for sure. ⁓ Trying to understand where the gaps are, what are their needs and then solving real problems. That's really the key thing because I had to do a little bit of a reverse engineering of, this is the IP we have, how do we... But at the end of the day, what really made...

this work was when we listened to the customer and we discovered what were the real problems and not hypothetical problems we thought that they had. So I would say those two things.

Jeff Holman (48:20)

I love that. I love that. We didn't even talk in detail about those, but that's, you're right. That's, that is the key moment, right? Going in and saying, Hey, we've got this awesome thing. And they, and the customer says, well, I just need this piece of it. And instead of walking out saying, man, we didn't sell it. You walked away and said, huh, I think we can do that. I think we can build this. I can build that business. Fantastic. That's, that's fantastic. Well, Maisa, thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom and your insights.

on the show with us today. It's been fantastic having you and again, congratulations on the new baby and on the success that you're finding in Ayuta in your business.

Maisa Benatti (48:57)

Thank you so much, Jeff. Thank you for having me. It was great. ⁓

Jeff Holman (49:00)

⁓

It's been fantastic. to those of you who are in our audience that are listening to this show today, thanks again for joining us on the breakout CEO. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. And if you enjoy the show, a rating or a review goes a long way. Our mission is to promote the stories of breakout CEOs in scaling SaaS, e-commerce, and tech companies to equip peer CEOs with valuable perspectives.

confidence. Thanks again for joining us on this episode of The Breakout CEO. I'm Jeff Holman and I'll see you next time.

‍