Episode 8: Finding Frictionless Travel with SuperVisas

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast. A podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up. If you're wondering how technology can support your business goals, rest assured, our guests have been there and done that.

Take a moment and think about the most restful place you've ever been. The beach, the mountains, perhaps a notable vacation from the past. Now take a moment and think about preparing for international travel.

Jarring, right? Peace of mind is not something typically associated with traveling across borders. Between the paperwork and the approvals and the background checks, sometimes you wonder if the travel is even worth the headache. Well, if you can relate to any of that, our guest today has some good news for you.

Hey, Luke Sniezek here with SphereCast, and today Ksenia and I interview Spencer Dobrik, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at SuperVisas. SuperVisas makes visa applications simple, affordable, and fast. Dobrik himself describes his company's online platform as the TurboTax for visas. Through an extremely easy-to-use interface, a user can check eligibility, upload forms, consult with an immigration expert, and get approved to travel. The platform's flat-rate cost saves customers hundreds of dollars worth of fees, and customers leave the experience extremely pleased. SuperVisas boasts a 98% customer approval rating.

On the podcast, Spencer walks us through why he chose to co-found a company and gets into detail on the product strategy behind the platform. Spencer is also transparent about his company's biggest challenges and gives us some sage advice about staying grounded as a co-founder at a fast-moving startup. So without further ado, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Spencer Dobrik.

Hey Spencer, it's Luke from SphereCast. We're thrilled to host you on our CTO podcast. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Luke. I'm excited to be here.

Hi everyone. This is Ksenia from SphereCast, and I will lead us with the first question for Spencer. Could you tell us, our listeners, what or who inspired you to join and co-found a company?

Yeah. So, I've kind of been in the startup space for a little while now. I had another venture that I worked on for a bit, didn't end up working out. And really, being in that ecosystem showed me other people that kind of had inspiring stories. And when I first met Sean and Joe, they kind of had similar experiences of moving around many times in their life and kind of those big, life-changing moments. And we kind of meshed well in helping people, wanting to help people move around the world more easily. And that's kind of what gave us the motivation to work together.

I know you a little bit, we've had a couple of meetings, so I understood that you yourself are a bit of, your background is that you've been moving around as well, or you have moved some places. So, could you talk us through that? Like what was your, you're very young, so I'm just curious to understand like at what age you were like kind of moving from a country to another and yeah, just it would be great to know I think that that perspective coming to this particular, you know, solution or this this idea of startup that you have found.

Yeah. So, I have a different path than my other co-founders, which I'll go into a little bit later on. But pretty much from an early age, at the age of one, I moved from Canada to Indonesia, and I lived there for five years of my life. And then after that, I moved to Venezuela, and Houston, and then Ottawa, and then back to Houston, and then to Perth, Australia.

And then back to Waterloo. And then I moved around a bunch after that for internship and jobs and kind of spent my time going in and out of the States for work and for study. And I kind of have the experience of, okay, I have to get this visa, I have these requirements, I have to leave the country in September and come back in because I need to renew my visa. And I kind of went through all those experiences of, okay, this is an experience which is kind of stressful because you don't know what's going to happen at the border, and really having that peace of mind is important.

And just to go a little bit into my co-founders, they both immigrated to Canada roughly ten years ago for one and then roughly three years ago for the other. And they've also had the experience of, you know, for Sean's case, he had pretty much fraud happened to him where when he first moved to Canada, he was lied to about the school and he kind of learned through that. So, transparency has been a big thing for him, and as we go through this whole process of building the company, making sure it's transparent to our users. And for Joe, he kind of went through the process and he's had his troubles as well. So, really, our experiences has molded where we're going and why we built our company and the values that we have today.

Can you tell our listeners what is SuperVisas and what inspired you or why did you create the service?

Yeah. So, SuperVisas is a platform that helps people get visas or immigrate to Canada. So, you can kind of think of us as TurboTax, but in visas and immigration. Users come to our website and they just answer simple questions, find out what they're eligible for as far as visas and immigration, they input a couple documents, we take all those documents, we fill out their forms for them, we talk to them through the whole process. We really try to bring them the peace of mind and the transparency that they need so they know that their case is being handled appropriately. And so far, we've had an amazing approval rate over 98%.

And really, this came to be because of the shared experiences of us as co-founders. Myself moving around a lot and having lived in over five different countries, and my co-founders having immigrated to Canada and having issues with fraud in their whole process coming here, which really shaped who we are today.

So, tell us a bit more about your product strategy. I mean, we speak with a lot of technical or non-technical founders of startups and tech startups especially, and we hear things like, "Okay, we went with a cheap and dirty strategy." But then, you know, we're speaking with them and they're like, "Okay, I would advise listeners not to do it, because we found so many issues later on down the line that we hoped, in hindsight we think that we should have started with, you know, some technologies in mind and some scalable things." So, I mean, so far in most of our episodes, we've had different opinions. So, I'm just curious to understand from your point of view, how did you begin? Like what was in your mind? And yeah, what was the process behind what you have done so far in this process?

Yeah, it's a great thing to kind of really think about cheap and dirty versus really high-tech solutions. And SuperVisas kind of had a blended approach. Before I had even joined Sean and Joe, they tried stuff themselves of cheap and dirty, pull everything off the shelf, let's see what we can do, let's just try it with users just to get that validation that people will buy the product.

As soon as I kind of was able to put my hands on it, it was let's build this properly, but piece by piece. We kind of built the framework of our whole platform to really fit in with pieces, and then we could still take off-the-shelf components to help us in the intermediate term, but every day we're building towards everything is in-house that's reasonable to do in-house and really build out things with more capabilities, because we know there's limits to the capabilities of third-party software and things we pull off the shelf, but it did help us in growing quicker.

Could you give us some examples of the off-the-shelf, you know, let's say technologies or frameworks that you pulled in?

Yeah, so early on, we Sean and Joe very early on used SurveyMonkey Apply as kind of a a platform that they could use to have applications go through and kind of test the logic of how we check eligibility of users. And as we continued on, we realized that that doesn't have all the capabilities we want. We can't properly pull the data from documents people have uploaded and use those into actually automatically filling applications, and that's kind of where our platform came in. And then from there, we still use some third-party components. So, we used JotForm to do our forms very early on, and that's something now that we're we're actually replacing.

So, we've kind of gone through the steps of, okay, this is a full platform which is off the shelf, okay, and now we built our own platform, but these little pieces are off the shelf. So, JotForm. Obviously, we use Stripe. We're not going to replace Stripe. That's that's not ever on the roadmap. Yeah. But that's kind of how we've grown, and slowly pulling those pieces back as we find the limitations.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, that I mean, balance seems to be the key here. So, let me ask you a little bit further on this. So, let's say, you know, components, etc., forms, you started off with some stuff. So, at some point you started building it in-house, you were saying. So, I wonder, you know, there must be a point when you started questioning, "Okay, should I go with, you know, Python?" What was the, I mean, the choice of tech stack? How did you come to choose the the stack that you are working with now? Or is it still a temporary thing or were you thinking, "Okay, this stack would be, let's say, useful for the next two or three years, and then we will switch"? Was there any such plan in mind?

Yeah. From the very beginning, I leveraged both some mentors that I had within the Waterloo ecosystem, as well as friends who were very proficient in a whole different range of languages. So, I had friends asking for kind of like, "Oh, push the limits. Use Rust. Use Go. Try to make it as optimized as possible early on." Because they kind of looked at it from like, "What's What do you need at the best case?"

But really we looked at it and my mentors kind of looked at it, we talked about it, and we said, "Okay, Python is really what we need for most of our situations. We'll be able to program quickly." And Django has a lot of components that we can just pull right off, and it's perfect to use very quickly and get up and running, as well as it organizes stuff very very well. As far as the front end, we use React, the JavaScript library, just because it's something that I had a lot of experience in, as well as I had a lot of experience in building single-page applications and kind of building more extensive flows and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's that's something we hear on most of our episodes. I remember one thing you said when we spoke, you know, in the past that AI, machine learning, analytics, at some point, they will be relevant, but it's too early at this point. So, could you throw some light on that statement maybe for our audience to understand like, you know, when you start your when you're starting off, these are all good things to have in mind, but they only come into play at a certain point in time. So, at what point you're thinking they will become necessary for you to be playing with or offering it to your customers or having them embedded into your business?

Yeah, that's that's a great question about kind of when does AI fit into our into our space. So, as of today, the thing is the amount of throughput we have on our platform is too low to actually pull any proper insights from, as well as regulations change all the time. But what we've done today is we've we've realized that this data is very valuable in the future. As we continue to have more applications go through, as well as see the success rate of these applications, we know we can then train models, mostly likely on specific fields within the actual applications, as well as applications as a whole just for anomaly detection.

But as of today, we still have humans in the loop and checking every single application. And really AI comes in when we say, "Okay, I want to make this product more available to more people, or I just want to do anomaly detection for my reviewers to make sure that, hey, you looked at this application, but we think you missed something because this looks slightly different than previous applications." And really speeding up the time it takes for our reviewers to look at applications is where we see the fit. We always want to keep humans in the loop. We always want people to have that peace of mind that someone is looking at their application, but it's really about augmenting them to perform better and have fewer mistakes.

So, it's a hybrid approach that you yeah, yeah. I think in any kind of immigration process, I think human touch is is always reassuring for people. And I mean, we don't know if people would interact so much with people, you know, five years down the line. We're seeing the impact of, you know, the isolation or Exactly. the situation we are in, so there's less interaction between humans. Let's see how this develops. So, yeah. Okay, that's great. Thank you for that. I think Ksenia will take over some of the questioning from here.

All right. Spencer, can you tell us about the SuperVisas founding team?

Yeah. So, the founding team is made up of myself; Sean, our CEO; and Joe, our COO. So, Sean comes to the space with a lot of experience in the actual immigration industry. So, he has over eight years both working at immigration agencies, as well as running one of his own, as well as Joe, who has over three years of of experience in operations in immigration agencies. So, they both are very knowledgeable with the whole ecosystem, as well as Sean has gone through his own trials and tribulations with Canadian immigration. So, he's kind of seen the best and the worst of the whole experience, so he knows what really matters to people, as well as what matters to bring peace of mind to people.

And then myself, went to University of Waterloo for software engineering, have experience at a couple different large tech companies, and really come to this immigration experience from a different angle, which is kind of being an expat and moving around a lot of my life, but never actually going through the Canadian immigration system, but gone through five other country or four other countries' immigration systems. So, it's kind of a hybrid model to where we all meet in the middle and we all have different perspectives on the same direction that we're going as a company.

That sounds like the dream team.

It's been wonderful working with them.

You know, like you talked about a few different places you've been to. So, which visa process did you find easiest out of the four? I think I know the answer, but I'm just curious to know.

Yeah. I would say Australia was definitely the easiest. The US immigration system, it's so subjective and there's so many things that you can kind of get caught up on. And whereas Australia is really straightforward. And as a Canadian, it is easier. There's so many ways to just go through it a little bit quicker. But the US, there's stuff that makes it a little bit difficult. Indonesia and Venezuela, I didn't have as much experience with the actual paperwork, because I was with my parents at that time, so they took care of that. But I saw what they went through in filling out all the paperwork and kind of it is a headache.

Australia, yes, definitely. All online. You get your visa literally in like, I get my visa in 10 minutes when I applied it last year. I went to Melbourne, so yeah, that was easy. But my wife, she's from Ukraine, so it took a month. We got stuck in the visa process, so we had booked our flights and we were like, "Hey, we're flying in a week. Where's the visa?" So, I had to ring this call centre in Australia to check where the visa was. Exactly. I spoke with a very nice woman and next thing you know, within two hours, she got an email saying, "Here's your visa letter. You just need to take it, you know, with you, carry it with you when you enter Australia." So, easy peasy. So, it only needed a call, you know, and that was it. And everything is online. Literally, you just scan and upload things and you're done. So, I like that.

Yeah. Same with Canada. There's a lot of things that really simplify it now and a lot of online portals that really speed it up.

Yeah, and if somebody is there to help you make sure that things are correct, like SuperVisas, I think, you know, the life is so much easier. So, awesome. Exactly.

So Spencer, moving on, how has COVID impacted your business? What steps have you taken to adjust to the current situation?

Yeah, COVID has been really interesting for us. At the beginning of the lockdown, we thought it was going to be really terrible for business. No one's traveling anymore. You know, people are don't really look to say, "Oh, I want to go to Canada right now." But what we actually found was now that people aren't going in person to immigration agencies or to lawyers' offices, they're looking online, and that's where we flourish.

Because we're fully online, people will come to our website, they check their eligibility, they wouldn't even need to talk to someone and they could find out what they're eligible for and how they could do that. And because of that, it was actually it went from something that was scaring us to something that was helping us in business.

We also found it's kind of interesting because we've now partnered with immigration agencies overseas. So, immigrations on the ground in India, and China, and UAE, and a couple different countries have kind of come to us and say, "You know, previously, we went through lawyers to actually finish the applications that we had done, but now we realize we can just go to you," because they have more free time because not as many people are coming in, so they're looking at, "How can I save costs, and how can I make things better for when I come back?" And that's where we came in.

Yeah, there's opportunities, I think. That's, you know, every situation brings an opportunity. It may not be for everyone, but yeah, I see. Yeah, amazing. That's that's good. By the way, that's good to hear. So, okay. So, I think I have we've we've asked you so many questions about like, you know, SuperVisas, technologies, etc. So, I think this is where we go a bit tricky and we we talk about, you know, people now. So, you're a co-founder, Spencer, and that means, you know, you probably have sleepless nights thinking where to take the business next, lots of thinking, lots of things happening around you.

So, how do you keep yourself on an even keel while all this is happening: the busy times, the COVID, business, etc., etc.? You know, lots of changes, the world is changing rapidly. How do you take care of yourself, your health and well-being, and especially the let's say the the balance, you know, in your life where you Can I use this word? I don't know. Mental well-being nowadays is an important subject. So, yeah. Okay, so if I can use it, then yeah, would love to know how do you, you know, we we asked people very personal questions like what's your morning routine, so maybe you can start with that and then we can go into other things, other aspects of your life.

Yeah, so I'll start with my morning routine. So, every morning, I wake up, I make my bed. I find it's it's great to kind of start the day with a task that's accomplishable and kind of brings just slight slight amounts of accomplishness slight amounts of accomplishment. As well as because we're on video calls all day, people can see my bed, so better be clean.

The next thing I do, usually go into my my kitchen, grab breakfast, sit down for my morning meeting with my co-founders where we just briefly go over if anything happened overnight, what we're looking forward to in the day, and then where it goes from from that point really changes. Sometimes I'm in meetings all day. Other days, I I program all day or I'm working with stakeholders on on different new features and and putting out fires.

And then, yeah, as far as balance, it's something that we've really grown into as a team as well, I would say. My co-founders, Sean and Joe, joined the company earlier than I did, so they had a little bit more experience. They both had experiences with burning out just because of pushing so hard. And for me, it was trying to keep on top of that. So, I understand what they went through. We kind of set, "Yeah, we're going to work 9:00 to 5:00. You're probably going to work a little bit longer many days, but like Friday at 5:00 PM, if nothing's broken, everything's going well, give yourself that break. Step away. It can be solved in the future. If nothing's on fire, leave it," because you really need to let yourself step away, really get that mental break.

As well as the community that we're in in Waterloo and some other places, like Velocity. Velocity's been very helpful to us, a startup incubator out of Waterloo, Ontario. Because of that, we have other founders that we know and that we can talk to, and they all go through the similar experience. And it's it's a thing of you don't feel as bad about your situation when you talk to someone else that has gone through the same situation.

You're not you're not the only one. You're not alone.

Exactly. And it's really gotten better. Like as business has improved over the over months, like we're doing well with revenue, it really takes a lot of stress off the shoulders. Of course, you always want to push product, you always want to improve everything. But it's really taking a step back and saying, "I need to do this for many more years, not for the next two months. How do I make sure that I can survive on this marathon, not a sprint?"

Amazing. Amazing. I mean, it's it's really happy to know like, you know, there's these communities across the globe and there are these hubs where you can, you know, you're not alone, you have people who are in a similar, you know, situation. And and yeah, we we recorded a very similar, you know, story last last week, and we spoke with another founder, and she has a very, you know, very strict way of how how, you know, everything is being managed and, you know, sleeping at 8:00 in the evening, getting up at 3:00 in the morning and managing her day.

So, yeah, yours is a bit contrasting to that, your your routine. But I think very similar to, you know, her story is kind of similar to yours. So, when she she was at this stage, she knocked on every literally every door to learn, to have those advisors around her, you know, while you're on this journey, while you're, you know, laying the foundations of your organization. So, yeah, I think it's very important. And what I want to say is here at Sphere Partners, you know, we will we're also here. So, if if there's any technological stuff or challenges that you're you're facing, I'm always happy to connect you with an architect or a leader, so if you need any validation of your decisions or anything that you need help with, we'll be happy to speak with you and, you know, chip in where we can, okay?

Yeah, of course.

Okay. That that was not planned, by the way. I didn't put it down as, you know, some kind of advertisement for us, and we will take it off if you like, but I just thought I'll mention it, because, yeah, we are here to help as well. So, we've we've come to the let's say the last part of the podcast. So, this is where, you know, I think we've asked you the tricky questions. This might be simpler compared to the previous questions. So, I would like to understand, from the technology perspective, what seems to be, you know, what what are the biggest challenges that you are, you know, kind of foreseeing right now or preparing for?

Yeah. I would say the biggest thing that we've had on our roadmap that's kind of a looming beast is is localization and internationalization. Because we are a truly international product, of course the end location that we're trying to take people to is Canada, we're trying to bring people in from all over the world, whether it's India, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Nigeria. We have people all over the world, different types of payment they prefer to use, different languages that they'd prefer to read very legal wording in. Of course, we try to simplify that, but throughout the whole process, we just realize localization and internationalization is huge. It's It's a huge project. It's It's something we're slowly working towards, but it's it is that thing which is the scary beast of, wow, every country has a different payment platform, languages are it it's a solved problem of how to do localization with different languages, but it's it's still a very large piece to build in with our platform.

Right. Spencer, does Is there anything you would want to say to the audience, any any messages from you?

I would say one thing that's kind of important for people that are going down this path of building a new product is being ready to fail early and fail quickly. You know, you have an idea of what the ideal product is, but you really have to take steps on what's the best thing I can do today, and does that allow me to get to the next step? Yes, you want a website as good as Airbnb, but you don't get there in a month. You get there in four years. So, it's really about how do I get to the next step that allows me to keep going. And I I think that's been one really important thing that we've kind of learned in this experience.

A special thanks to our podcast guest this week, and once again to our sponsor, Sphere Partners, for bringing this episode to life. If you enjoyed this episode, drop SphereCast a five-star review on iTunes and share this content with your network. For any relevant links or notes from this episode, check out our podcast website at www.sphereinc.com/spherecast. And always remember, when you think you can't, technology can. See you next time.