Aaron Perry, an Overland Park native, is no stranger to entrepreneurship.
The college senior studying economics at Cedarville University in Ohio has started businesses before, and he says that helped him as he set out to start a new venture in artificial intelligence.
Perry started Misogi AI Solutions, a business that helps sales teams follow up with already-generated lists of potential leads for their own businesses, a type of service he found to be lacking.
How is Perry using AI in his business?
Essentially, the AI can engage past clients or new prospective clients, so that salespeople waste less time on lost opportunities. Perry said that’s called “lead nurturing,” which can convert a potential client into a paying customer with less staff time dedicated to that task.
He also thinks it will help business owners with specialized skill sets — like roofing, plumbing, etc. — spend less of their time on the hassle parts of running a business, and more time doing what they’re good at.
“If you’re a roofing company, you shouldn’t have to worry about the clients coming in the door; you should outsource that, because that’s not your specialty,” Perry said. “Your specialty is putting roofs on houses.”
Perry said he knows AI can be pretty intimidating. Still, he encourages people to play around with it.
“Anything that is new, there’s always fear associated with it, right?” Perry said, acknowledging that it can be kind of weird if you’re unfamiliar with it.
That being said, he also feels like it can be a pretty important tool that can help businesses with “tedious” tasks that might be wasting their time.
Misogi AI specifically uses SMS text messaging, which is trained to offer customized prompts for businesses’ specific needs. From there, if the AI is successful in engaging these prospective clients, a salesperson can take over to set up an appointment or service.
The business officially launched during the late summer months, and as of early October, Perry said he already had a few clients using Misogi AI.
He started on a different path at first
Perry, who graduated from a private religious K-12 school on the Missouri side called Whitefield Academy but grew up in the Blue Valley area in Overland Park, was attracted to Cedarville originally through a friend of his older brother, who attended the university.
He loved the “stunning campus in the middle of cornfields.”
At first, Perry was studying mechanical engineering, hoping to apply his love of math to a career; however, he found that he wasn’t enjoying some of the required classes, like physics.
So, he switched to the business college after his freshman year, starting out with the finance program, before settling on economics. That seemed like a natural fit, Perry said, because he’d been interested in entrepreneurship since high school, when he’d played around with some smaller-scale business ventures.
“It’s philosophy for business majors; it’s understanding why people do what they do, and their incentives, their motives,” Perry said. “It really clicked with me.”
And, though he’s never regretted switching majors, as he gets closer to graduating, he doesn’t plan to use his degree per se.
“My ideal situation is not using my degree in regard to that being an ‘in’ to a job,” Perry said. “The goal is to pursue my business and pursue what I created here in college.”
This isn’t Perry’s first entrepreneurial endeavor
Previously, Perry was inspired by his endurance sport hobby — that is, triathlons, ultra-marathons, Iron Mans, and the like — to start a company that sold gear for such activities, like lightweight hats with pockets for nutrition gels.
He started that business, called Ultra Lyte Running, as a sophomore in college. Earlier this year, he started transitioning out of the daily operations of that business to focus on Misogi AI.
That experience — and lessons learned from some failed startups he tried to get off the ground before — helped lay the groundwork for Misogi AI. However, he noted that the two businesses themselves are quite different from each other and have different focuses; his first company, Ultra Lyte Running, is a consumer product company, while this new one is an internet-based firm focused on the backend of a business.
But, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to play around with the new opportunities raised by AI, even using AI to help learn how to handle the computer science side of the business.
“It’s the new internet,” he said. “For a kid my age not to jump on that train, I think, would have done me a disservice.”
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