 Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's extended hours. Things are starting to settle down. Dinner's starting, being served. We're here with Prince Alba as an invitation for the VIP Gala part of Monaco leaning into crypto. We're reporting on it. Not our normal set, more of an after hours vibe. We're here with Iman Hashir, founder of craftflea.ai. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So I love your story. You're a coder, built in, built some code, started a company, now you're the CEO. You hired some people to wrap around, support you. Now you're running the show. What a great story. How did you get here? It was the originator's story. Basically, for as long as I can remember, I've been an entrepreneur. My parents have stories of me being too young to babysit, but I would create a babysitting agency and have sent babysitters out, or I would sell my lunches. Throughout school, I would always find some kind of entrepreneurship endeavor. And when I came out of school, I kept finding myself lacking the necessary skills to really do a startup. And so that's when I discovered coding. And I took myself through coding boot camps and I started websites and I'm like, no, I want something more perpetual. I wanna make money when I sleep. And then from there, I found search engine optimization. So how to get to the top of Google. And I started working really quickly with really big companies and immediately I realized my full budget spent on copywriting. And so that's when I discovered you could have that written by AI. Not gonna replace you, but it's there to enhance you. And so built an AI copywriter. And so what does it do? Basically you type in a couple words. It could be anything, any use case. So product descriptions for e-commerce, blog articles for any company, really web copy, even does songs, or your next breakup text, which I'll get to that. But it does basically anything. You type in a couple words and it generates text for you, all original and plagiarism free. Okay, can you write our blog post for us? Yeah. We're covering the crypto conference in Monaco. Could even do a summary of this interview. Yeah. We'll get that transcribed in the cloud. We'll get that in a second. First, I love the story. Okay, so now you're the CEO. Great application, imagine you're scraping pages. You're looking at summaries, doing any extraction, looking at word combinations. What were some of the tech behind it? We leverage a bunch of different models. We use GPT-3, which was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, all major players that basically allows you to pull 175 billion parameters of data. Anything before it was two billion. So now you're talking, I'm able to pull like basically the whole internet. And from there, we added different models to provide learning and to get the best quality AI out there. There's a lot of bad quality. And so from there, we're able to take it, mix and match and have it formulate the best thing. So where are you now? So you're in your journey, the CEO, people in your staff, what's the status? So right now we have eight full-time people and a bunch of contractors. Before I was the lead developer, but now as the company's growing, I have to take it back, see and be more in a sales role versus being the one to develop it every single day. And so right now we're hiring more developers as we go. So funding options must be off the charts, offers coming in left and right. So tons, but definitely we're in a different market environment than we were two months ago. So as you may have heard, crypto's down, possibly. So we were- We're a temporary basis, not truly down. But in the beginning, I wanted to hold as much equity as possible by bootstrapping, proving concept, doing it. I have a lot of the background and skill set to have it there, so I hired the best people. And once we proved concept, we were prepared to raise and then the market kind of slowed us down. So right now, luckily our company is self-funded and supporting itself. So we're making money and we're profitable. If you wanna do, as long as possible. Yeah, and so right now we do, we are looking for growth options, funding options. We're talking to a lot of people. That's why I'm here in Monaco. But it's a good place to not be desperate. It's a good place to not need the money, but. You know, I always said when I was running companies and to my team, a friend gave me great advice. You can't go out of business when you have money in the bank. Yeah. So don't run out of money. Luckily our product, it's a subscription basis and it's a monthly, so we're making money immediately. All right, so I gotta say, what's the biggest challenge you've had and put in some, because it's a great, great story. You're really impressive. Great vision, you coded your own product. Now you've got the team around you. What's been the challenge? How have you handled the grind? Because joy in the grind can be fun, but then it gets complicated. You start adding people to the mix and you gotta get milestones, self-funding. Which by the way, self-funding is the hardest part. It is difficult. Most people think raising a big round is the top of the mountain. No, no, no, no. Self-funding is the A1 player. That's an A player move right there. Definitely, I would say if I were to go back, I would get funded a lot earlier, especially with the marketing conditions eight months ago. But one of the biggest struggles I feel I have faced was just being a younger founder, sometimes there's imposter syndrome within yourself, but otherwise, a lot of times people don't take you seriously immediately. Everyone always assumes that I'm someone's girlfriend at event or they say that's cute when talking about your business. And so you have to deal with that, yeah. Or one time I was at a conference and someone asked how I funded the company and I said I created ancillary revenue streams to be able to support it. And they're response-wise, oh, I love it when my Oli fans funds my business. And that immediately. That is total. But now I use it as fire to ignite me and kind of prove everyone wrong. But I definitely would say that falling in love with the journey and realizing that, no matter how big you get, your problems only get bigger so it's choosing the right problems to solve. And realizing that every day there's gonna be a fire, just living in the moment. Well, you're such an inspiration to me and I'm gonna share your story. Because what you just talked about, a lot of people, being the star of eating glass, you're falling on your face, you're tripping all the time, hopefully you don't get hurt. But when people make comments like that to you, given how smart you are, how brilliant you are, how beautiful you are, that is just unacceptable. And I think that is just a really weird thing. Like that's actually a change. It's like, it's so unacceptable. I feel like the world's heading in the right direction and it's up to people to use those setbacks to ignite them and push them forward, which I'm trying to. You know, I read a book about trauma and how trauma defines you, right? And trauma is little trauma, family trauma, and trauma is defined as, trauma is defined as, not like, oh yeah, something died, or like little things could be like little traumas. Oh yeah, I was offended by my brother, this happened there. So experiences define you. And I think one of the things that you just mentioned is you've made it stronger. You made it stronger. The comments made you stronger. Oh, I definitely see even everything that I've been through and this is the same for a lot of first time founders. All my previous companies, I've had the blessing of working with like an older mentor that had done it before. This was the first where I kind of was on my own and when you do that now, if I look back on the last year and a half, I could probably do the same thing in a week. Once you do it the first time, you really do it. I'll just tell you, you're really in beautiful. You're very impressive. Theresa Carlson who used to run all Amazon's web services business and public sector. She's a renaissance woman. She's an amazing friend, great power. She always says to me and she's like, you know, my father was a basketball coach. I can handle with those men. But she said it with proud, like meaning in like, hey, that's life. I'll take what life gives me. And I think that's a lesson we're seeing more of because you're seeing a lot more women in tech. I did 30 interviews in Europe in the past March 7th, okay, in three weeks. So a lot of stuff. Well, thanks for coming on. We've got the events starting. I'll let you go. Thanks for sharing your story. Thanks for having me. Well, what's next for you? What's next? Next is I'm gonna build the word processor for the future and be the future of writing. Okay. And thank you for coming. I appreciate it. All right. This is the cube coverage here at the event. We'll be back with more after this break.