Small Business Bestie
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Small Business Bestie
44: AI, Innovation, and Affordable Web Solutions: Azra Is Building the Future
A rising star in tech entrepreneurship joins the Small Business Besties podcast today - and he happens to be the host's son! Fifteen-year-old Azra shares his remarkable journey as the youngest participant ever accepted into the Von Allmen Center for Entrepreneurism at the University of Kentucky's Gatton Business School.
This ambitious high school student has already developed "Deductly," innovative software that solves a critical problem for businesses across industries. His solution automates paycheck deduction calculations to ensure companies don't inadvertently violate the complex web of federal, state, and county minimum wage laws when making deductions from employee paychecks. What began as an alternative to days of manual calculations for a nationwide corporation has evolved into a promising software venture.
Beyond this single solution, Azra reveals his vision for an AI-enhanced web development firm that could revolutionize accessibility to custom websites. By strategically incorporating artificial intelligence into the development process, he aims to slash typical project costs from $20,000 to $5,000, making professional web development attainable for small businesses with limited budgets. "I want to make web development something everybody can have," he explains with genuine passion.
The episode explores various entrepreneurial resources available to young innovators, including the Governor's School for Entrepreneurship, Awesome Inc's programs, and startup competitions. Azra also discusses his experience developing the Small Business Bestie Toolbox, which helps guide entrepreneurs from idea to launch with business tracking and registration tools.
Are you struggling with time-consuming manual processes in your business? Connect with Azra on LinkedIn to explore how custom software solutions might streamline your operations and solve your unique business challenges. Share this episode with the young entrepreneurs in your life who might be inspired by this tech prodigy's journey!
Check out Azra's Governor's School of Entrepreneurism application video here: https://youtu.be/RORkJW_-w2o?feature=shared
Follow Azra on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azra-smock/
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Follow along on the Small Business Bestie Pod Facebook
Join the growing community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/smallbusinessbesties
Connect with Michelle on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/bestiemichellesmock
Check out the Small Business Bestie Website
Hey, besties, welcome back to another episode of small business besties. I'm Michelle Smock, your host, and today I have my favorite human in the whole world joining me for an episode. I've been bugging him for several weeks now to see if he would record with me and today we have this special, special treat of hearing from my amazing son, azra. So, azra, take just a second and tell everybody who you are, what you do and a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course, thank you. So I'm Azra. I'm a high school student here at Dunbar in Lexington, kentucky. I'm into web development. It's my passion. I love creating projects. I'm also an entrepreneur. I want to get into building my own business and I'm into web development. It's my passion. I love creating projects. I'm also an entrepreneur. I want to get into building my own business and I'm looking at starting up a business right now. And yeah, I just love technology and all that. That's just me.
Speaker 1:That's just you. That's absolutely one of the most consistent things that I know about you for the past decade is that technology has been at the forefront of your passions and interest and all of that. So it's really exciting for me to see you kind of blossoming into this new adventure that you're on. So I want to start with talking about the Von Allman Center for Entrepreneurism. I know I've kind of mentioned it a time or two on the podcast and I've talked to some of my friends and fellow entrepreneurs here in Lexington about the program. But, Asher, tell us a little bit about what you know about the Von Allman Entrepreneurs Program and kind of give us the rundown of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So it's an extension or it's a program of the Gatton Business School here at UK and it's open to the community and also UK students, for people that come in and introduce a business idea or a business venture they want to get into and you learn from Von Allman if you get accepted. They have these weekly meetings that they hold to teach you all this different stuff about entrepreneurialism and you get to learn all these different skills and at the end of this this boot camp is what they call it At the end of like a couple months stretch, you get to do a pitch competition with all the other contestants and then the winner, with the judges, gets a $500 grant to help start up their idea or make their dream a reality. So yeah, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:And so you are currently about halfway through the boot camp, is that correct?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I got accepted a couple months ago and then we started doing the boot camp and so we're about halfway through learning about legal advice and all that right now. Yeah, it's been awesome Just weekly Zoom meetings with Von Ullman. I get to meet with Warren Nash, the director of Gatton, and it's amazing, director of Gatton, and it's amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an incredible opportunity, like Azra was saying, not only for UK students, but it's open to the community. So when we found out about it, azra applied and was accepted to the program and like a boastful mom moment here but you're the youngest participant that's ever been accepted, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was pretty awesome whenever I got the acceptance email and the director gave me call and he was saying I was the youngest person accepted, so it was awesome yeah.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm so proud of you for that. I would like you to maybe share a little bit about the business idea that you kind of pitched to the Von Ullman Center whenever you applied for that program.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So it's a little complicated, to put in layman's terms, or to kind of simplify it. I pitched to them a software idea that automates employee deductions for businesses, and so the problem that I'm trying to solve is that businesses that take money out of employee paychecks, go and like, are at risk of putting their employees under minimum wage. This is mostly in, like, high turnover industries such as restaurants and all of that, and so anytime they like dock stuff from a paycheck, they're risking putting their employees under minimum wage. And so what this software I pitched is it'll do these calculations to ensure that the amount of money they're taking out of the paycheck doesn't put that employee under minimum wage, based on their location, and so it's supposed to help businesses not break laws, essentially by putting their employees under minimum wage.
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's what I'm pitching. That's so awesome and you mentioned that, like you're doing it by location, because minimum wage laws vary state to state and sometimes even county to county.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a giant mess. You have federal minimum wage laws and then the states can set their own wage laws, and then the counties within the states can set their own laws. So it just becomes a giant tangle mess. And so the businesses oftentimes don't even know what their minimum wage laws are like like oh, maybe it's the federal one. But see, the businesses oftentimes don't even know what their minimum wage laws are. Like like oh, maybe it's the federal one. But like, oh no, your state actually has a different one, the federal minimum wage. So a lot of times they don't know that they're putting employees under minimum wage sometimes, which they very well could be.
Speaker 1:Wow. So what's the name of the software that you've developed for that?
Speaker 2:It's a little bit of a mouthful. It's hard to say it's deductible. I want to change the name of it, but domain like website domain costs are a lot for stuff that I've been looking for. But yeah, it's deductible right now.
Speaker 1:Deductible. I like it. I mean, I think you could run with it for a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right, so tell us about any of the other, like exciting projects or ideas that you've had for software development lately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:So the main one is that it's not software.
Speaker 2:I want to start a web development firm and the USP, like the unique selling proposition or whatever you want to call it, the thing that differentiates it is.
Speaker 2:I want to take this AI innovation that's been introduced out to the public lately and I want to incorporate that into everything we do. So I don't want to be like we're brain dead and that we just rely on AI solely, but I want to use it to help whenever we're taking on projects from customers, to really accelerate it and make it cheap. Because if you can lower the time it takes you to build a project, you can lower the cost of it and that means you don't have to charge your customers as much. So anytime a customer comes to us, instead of saying like $20,000 to build something, it's $5,000. So you're really helping the public make web development way more affordable and accessible. So I think that if you could get it out to the public, you could really boost off of it and help a lot of people that have no idea what they're doing. I just I want to make web development something everybody can have, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so, deductly. I kind of know the backstory of how that idea came to you, so if you don't mind, I'll just share a little bit about that and then maybe we can talk about other ways that small businesses or medium sized businesses might be able to use, some like custom software development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:So deductly. The idea came from a nationwide corporation who has their headquarters here in Lexington and they had reached out to our accounting company needing someone to do this manual labor, very intensive research to find out minimum wages and that's when ASRA said why are we doing this manually? I could probably write some software that'll do this for us. Is that kind of the gist?
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, you guys are going to go through and have to calculate the exact problem I was solving deducting expenses from paychecks but that would take days upon days to do it for thousands of employees, so it just it wasn't effective at all. There's no logical reason to do it that way, and software can automate all of that. So you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so using that type of an example, like the corporation that needed this really labor intensive manual process for calculations and research and all of that, and you were able to write a software that can do it in a giant fraction of the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Are there other examples or ideas of things that you could think of that you might be able to help? You know, some of the small business besties out there may have this problem and they could go. Oh man, azra and his firm could help with that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course it's really open for anything. You need calculations done, like the example I was giving with deductible, anything like that, to automate calculations that happen in your business. A big one is that if you want to have a management portal that has custom features embedded into it, I'm actually looking at taking on a job right now for a business here in Lexington to help them create a management portal which would track all their employees calculations they need done. That you can't get from any old like leading management software portal thing. You know like they need these custom calculations and you can only get it by having custom web development done and so things like if you needed a dashboard built for you or if you needed a landing page for a website, anything honestly, just just all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one of the things that I tapped to Azra for recently was to build out the small business bestie toolbox is what we're calling it. So, azra, tell us a little bit about kind of the process that you and I worked through in order to get the ideas out of my head and then like onto the screen so that it made sense.
Speaker 2:Of course. So you came to me and you said that you had these ideas to help businesses go from idea to launch, and you said that you needed things such as a business tracker to help coach your clients through starting up a business and all the stages of it, and so I needed some questions. I asked you about it. You drew some sketches of it, so I knew what you wanted it to look like, and so I needed some questions. I asked you about it.
Speaker 2:You drew some sketches of it, so I knew what you wanted it to look like, and then I brought that together and I made it a reality and I would show it to you and you'd say it needs this refining on it, and I'd refine it and that's done. So then move on to the next one. You said you needed a registration tool to help businesses register their business based on their location, to give step by step, and so I built that into the software. You showed me some pictures, I asked what it needed like overall, and then I got a working product, and so I combined all the stuff you needed into one, but it was a lot of just I had to ask you what your vision was for it and I just need some like a quick sketch to visualize what it was. Nothing pretty. And then I just built it off of what you gave me and we got our final product.
Speaker 1:And it's lucky that you didn't need anything pretty, because I'm a terrible artist, so you were never going to get anything pretty from me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But so as you move forward with this firm that you're starting and you start to work with other small businesses, do you see it being where you need to sit down with people in person? Do you like doing virtual appointments? How do you think that that's going to all work together?
Speaker 2:I think in the modern day and age a lot of people find it more convenient and easier to do online consultations. I would look at doing in person and online, but mostly have like online booking consultations. So it'd be like you hop on a Zoom meeting with me. We sit down for 30 minutes at Uday, you could be at a Starbucks anywhere and I would just need to understand what they're doing. I'm wanting to develop my own software from high business actually so that I could have like a form I fill out that during a consultation, I can take notes and I can use that as reference whenever I'm building the website later, building the software later.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it would really just be a short consultation understand what the customer, what the business, is needing, and then just really ask follow-up questions and hopefully get to work with them. You know, and build it out. Pretty simple stuff.
Speaker 1:You say it's pretty simple stuff, but the rest of us were like minds are blown.
Speaker 2:Awesome, I better be good at what I do, you know, I mean, that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:Well, I think you're doing a great job. Let's see. Is there anything that you feel like there would be a good connection out there, somebody that you would love to have as a mentor, or an industry that you need to learn more about? That? If anybody out there hears this and they go hey, I would love to be able to mentor Azra or, you know, help him learn more about a certain thing. Is there anything you feel like you need?
Speaker 2:Well, honestly, just getting in connection with other entrepreneurs I'm kind of already in that area. I've been networking a little bit and I'm surrounded by people in Von Allman obviously, so I have those connections. But if I could really find somebody who's like, ideally somebody who started their own firm it can be anything, it doesn't have to be web development. So we're looking at like opening their own law firm, like anything like that, and just really understanding the process, where they went, how they got ahead of their competition, what they did to differentiate themselves, how they marketed, where they were finding customers at. You know, obviously it varies industry to industry. But just kind of, from somebody who's done it before, if I could learn some of the stuff that they did and what helped them become successful, that would really help to minimize the mistakes I make, obviously if I know what to do right.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean, I think you're like way ahead of the curve, because I don't know how many business development, leadership development books you've read at this point, but I know it's way more than I had read at 15. So I think you're doing good touch on some of the other programs and things like that that we have found out about in the past year or so, as you've gotten more and more interested in these things. So tell us what you know and I don't know how much you know about it we didn't talk about this beforehand but tell us what you know about the Governor's Scholar Entrepreneur Program.
Speaker 2:Governor's School for Entrepreneurship? Yeah, so it's something that Kentucky hosts. The governor's school has a lot of different programs. I'm pretty sure they have. They have a ton, I don't remember, but I was reading somewhere and I know some of the students at my high school have gone to other governor schools of each year and all these students in high school, from freshman up to senior year, they go in and they learn whatever they get accepted into.
Speaker 2:So for the entrepreneurship school, we go in, we learn all this different stuff. We have a ton of mentors there, a lot of people who've done it and succeeded, and they teach us all these best practices and what to do. They teach how to start a business. You're connected to investors, you really have a wide thing, and they also give out grants, if I'm not mistaken, to businesses that genuinely want to start up. They have pitch competitions as well, so similar to Von Allman, and they give it out and I'm pretty sure it goes into the thousands. So they have a pretty generous prize pool to give out to these high schoolers that want to start up their own business. It's awesome.
Speaker 1:And so you turned in your application for that program last month. Is that right?
Speaker 2:I believe it was last month. Yes, during January was the deadline.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. And then they're going to announce I think in April or May they announce who got accepted.
Speaker 2:It's in April, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I thought it would be really fun if we could link your YouTube video that was the application video for that program, because I think he's hating me right now. I think it is so funny. It shows such an interesting side of your personality, your sense of humor, but also your skill level, because if people knew that you came up with that idea, worked on it and had it all ready to go, you know, honestly, within hours of actual working time and it just kind of shows some of the skill that you have with creativity and tech ability and all of that. If you don't want to, we could cut this part out and not link it.
Speaker 2:I'm perfectly fine with that. That's fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can do it All right, so I'll link that in the show notes. You guys make sure to take the time to click on that. It's just like a maybe a two minute video or something.
Speaker 2:It's a minute and 30 seconds. They had a 90 second video deadline you had to submit as an application. Yeah, Awesome.
Speaker 1:Well, I appreciate you being willing to let us do that. I think it's a lot of fun. So you're looking at doing the Governor's School of Entrepreneurism. Tell us about what you've done so far to get involved with Awesome Inc and that great organization here in Lexington.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I've been attending Awesome Inc puts on the five across events and I've attended a few of those. It's a really awesome thing. I love to get to see a bunch of startups, but I've been connected with some of the people that work there and I'm looking at meeting up with one of them, but he's been offering to have a meetup to help me talk about my business ventures and I think even applying to like their Fiverr Cross event. It would be really interesting to see, like going in with the web development pitching the firm, how we're different than everybody else and what we're offering. You know so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then just before spring break I think the weekend leading into spring break or maybe the weekend after, I can't remember A weekend coming up in April there's also the startup weekend, which is like a really intensive boot camp weekend for startups and entrepreneurs, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's rapid. From what I understand, it's just a weekend and you come in and a bunch of people they throw out these ideas. You have like a brainstorming session where everybody starts to throw out these business ideas they had and then you all get to vote on which ones seem the best out of all people that's in and then the highest voted ones go on and you start working on business model plans and all that to actually make these business ideas reality. So I'll be attending that with you in a couple of weeks and we'll see how that goes. It'll be awesome.
Speaker 1:It's going to be great. So I guess, to kind of recap, there's a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs, tech entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs. So if you guys listening, if you know anybody who's interested in getting started in entrepreneurism or in tech, be sure to reach out to either myself or to Azra. We're both on LinkedIn. You guys can find us there and we're happy to share any of the resources that we know of or get you connected with people that we've met. That might be a good fit for you. You know, if we're helping each other all out, then we're all going to go much further together than not. So, azra, is there anything else that you want people to know about you, your vision for your business or anything like that?
Speaker 2:No, not really. Just if anybody's listening and they want to reach out or get connected, I'd love to say hello to any of you guys. I don't have to go anywhere, Just a simple hello. I love to connect with everybody. If we're all connected, obviously it makes it easier to reach out and to know the right people. So I'm open to anybody reaching out. I'm on LinkedIn, like Michelle said, and also if you know anybody that's looking for web development in the future. I would love to be connected to potential clients, like anybody you know. If you just hear somebody complaining about how hard a task is to do it's so intensive, going and do these calculations or payroll or something, or I could use this or that I'd love any type of leads I can get. Obviously, looking for clients, obviously always.
Speaker 1:Always, always looking for clients Awesome. Well, Azra, I'm going to cherish this episode for the rest of Always, always, always looking for clients Awesome. Well, azra, I'm going to cherish this episode for the rest of my life. I appreciate you so much, I'm so proud of you and for all the besties listening. Like Azra said, he's very capable of helping you with all sorts of different problems in your business, whether it's an efficiency problem or a time management problem or anything like that. So if you've got anything that you're like, I wonder if this guy could help me come up with an idea of how to solve this problem. You know, easier, faster, cheaper the chances are the answer is yes, so don't hesitate to reach out to Azra and see if he might be able to help you.
Speaker 1:Awesome Good deal. All right, well, I think that's going to wrap it up for us today and appreciate you guys listening. Like always, don't forget to rate and review. Share this episode with your friend. If you have any young entrepreneurs in your life that would be inspired by Azra's story, this would be a great episode to share. So we will talk with you guys later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thank you, bye.
Speaker 1:All right, besties. That does it for today. If you're interested in becoming a part of the Small Business Bestie community, join us in the Facebook group or find out more information on the website at smallbusinessbestieorg. Please share the podcast with your friends, who could use a friend in business, and it would really mean so much to me if you follow the show and take just a few seconds to rate or review. A five-star rating really helps the show become visible to other besties who may just need the support and friendship that we offer.