Ainars Klavins

CEO and Co-founder, Overly

I learned to code, build websites, and do my first few businesses in school years. Since then, my goal and dream has always been to become an entrepreneur. Do business in what I am passionate about - tech. After a few years of working in Sales, Marketing, and even managing some NATO projects, I found my opportunity. 2013, I co-founded Overlyapp - An augmented reality and Virtual reality development agency business. I saw the future in AR/VR and decided to be part of it. In nine years of building an Agency business in the AR/VR field, I went through the highs and lows of our business (3x almost went bankrupt), tried to scale the agency business, and pivoted a few times - have a lot of learnings, successes, and failures. I went through complete burnout, learned many important things, and then brought the company to an all-time high turnover (3x more than it has ever done) with amazing rentability. At this point, I had reached all my goals with this business, and it became limiting for me. At the same time, an opportunity appeared. Understanding where we gave the most added value to our customers gave us the idea to create an augmented reality SaaS tool for e-commerce stores - the main business I am working on now. We kept the brand but gave away the agency business - a decision to let go of something you have built for nine years and was doing financially well is a hard decision, but important one to move on and have a clear focus on what I want to do next. Getting out of comfort.