Vander
During my senior year at Brigham Young University, I started a company providing AI tools to CPAs. We fundraised money, designed a validated product, and sold it to customers. It was a great experience.
During my summer internship at Connor Group, I saw many companies that were not maximizing the efficiency of their cash. I shared the idea with one of my friends in the accounting program and Brigham Young University, and we felt like this was a problem that we could solve my leveraging new and emerging technologies.
After building our initial prototype, we began our secondary rounds of validation, where our main feedback was that no business owner was going to take financial advise of the type we were providing without first consulting their CPA. This led us to a major pivot in our product and Vander, an AI-powered financial intelligence tool for CPAs was born!
We continued to meet with small business owners and CPAs(our customers) to refine features and get feedback on our product as we built it. We were able to pitch to investors and fundraise money, and learned not just how to build a good product but how to run an effective company.