A ceiling of one
Josh Gaudry is a marketer. For three and a half years he ran his own marketing agency in Queensland, and he ran it as "a solo founder". That set a hard limit on how much he could take on.
Running my own business as a solo founder, you have limitations on what you can actually do yourself, you're restricted by time and resources.
Automating his own process
As AI improved, he began handing parts of the agency's work to it. The more he automated, the less of the work needed him. In his words, "I can actually almost remove myself" from parts of the process.
That realisation became a product. He set out to build "all of my knowledge, expertise, and kind of experience into an AI platform called Maivas".
With all of the advancements in AI, I started to automate a lot more of my process, and that's what kinda gave birth to Maivas.
An AI marketing employee for gyms
Maivas is built for one industry. Its website calls it your gym's first AI employee. Josh describes it as an employee that does "everything an agency would do for you", for gyms and anything fitness related.
We are an AI marketing employee, specifically for gyms. So studios, Pilates, yoga, anything kind of fitness related, we do.
Agency first, then the handover
Maivas does not start as software. It starts the way his agency always worked, with people running the marketing. Over time that work moves to an AI that has learned the gym's business, and the owner steers it. The website puts the same rule plainly: nothing ships until the owner approves it.
We have a period where we work with you as an agency at the start, but then we slowly transfer all of the agency work to our AI that's trained on your business, and then it basically does the work for you and you drive it.
One gym owner's follow-up
Maivas is in its pilot with a few of his agency's clients. One of them is a gym owner who was "really overwhelmed and kinda stressed out basically with the follow-up and the lead management", trying to keep track of every lead. With Maivas running that side of the business, the owner now steps in only for the conversations that need him.
He just gets involved when a conversation needs to be had or when a conversion conversation needs to be had. And so that's really taken a huge weight off his shoulders and a lot of mental load that he can use for other things in the business now.
From an idea to an MVP
Josh built Maivas while he was in AI Pathfinder. He says the program took him "from really just an idea to, like, a working MVP in a pretty short amount of time". Its stages lined up with his build: the program will "really take you through each stage of your startup".
So as I was building my product, it kind of all fit really well with the program.
Version one, after the pilot
He is not rushing the release. Maivas will stay in testing with gym owners until it works well for them, and then go to the wider market. For now, he says, "we're looking for up to 30 gym owners that would be willing to trial Maivas".
I think next after we've finished that pilot stage is actually to move into version one and release it to the wider market.
