Tanya Kohen: Invention doesn't always start with a breakthrough idea or a bold technology back. Very often it begins with a simple question, can this work? And then it unfolds through conversations, trade-offs, misunderstandings, corrections, and moments where the original idea quietly transforms into something better.

Today's episode is about that exact moment. What happens when a business with no technical background builds its first product, works with developers for the first time, and discovers that invention doesn't follow a straight roadmap. We'll talk about how ideas evolve during development, why clarity often comes after the first version is live, and how new possibilities, including AI, can emerge not as a planned feature, but as a natural next step once the system exists.

To explore this, I'm joined by Dilara Dominova and Samuel Ary, founders of Local Pros, a product that grew from a simple business need into a scalable digital platform and along the way reshaped how the business itself thought about technology, processes and future growth.

As I mentioned, Dilara and Sam are founders of Local Pros, a mobile-first platform designed to help people find trusted local professionals based on where they live.

What makes your story especially interesting is that you didn't come from a tech background and had never worked with software developers before starting this journey. So instead, you brought domain insight and a clear business problem, and then the willingness to learn as the product took shape.

So to start at the very beginning, when you only had an idea — not a product — but a problem that you were trying to solve, what made you feel it was worth turning it into something real rather than keeping it as informal service and a side concept? What actually kicked off this project?

Dilyara Daminova: Sam and I have been in real estate for a long time. And obviously there are loopholes that we have in the real estate industry that could be improved. And over time, we had a lot of conversations that it would be great if this happens. I'm a real estate agent and Sam is a loan officer. So we take a lot of responsibilities and liabilities for clients and little things can put you in trouble just because you’re an intermediary between two contractors or a connection point between two people. We've been in a lot of situations when we were just a connecting point, but we ended up going to courts to resolve problems and stuff like that. So we've been always having conversations, and we were always thinking that it would be great if we would have it. Then at some point we were obviously very successful in our field for our region and we bought a house, both of us — as a couple not addicted to expensive jewelry or expensive cars, and we thought, “Why don't we invent it? Why don't we invent what we're thinking about that is missing in the real estate industry?”

Tanya Kohen: I love this entrepreneurial mindset and invention mindset.

Samuel Ary: This is something that we thought about for many years and it developed over time. It was something that we became very passionate about and we've just been blessed with our business that we have. So it was something that let us move forward with doing this, developing this app. So it's something that we developed over time. It was something that was definitely needed based on years of work.

Tanya Kohen: So the idea was pretty well-developed and like being the connector. And from my personal experience, working with Dilyara and working with you, I know that you guys are connectors. Helping people get into the network of professionals and helping just provide any advice and any help, that's needed. So I actually think it's a great idea for you to structure this, to wrap it into a product like a mobile app. So really excited for the fact that you were able to finally give it the shape and form and real technological existence.

For founders, the first collaboration with the development team is eye-opening. And sometimes it's quite uncomfortable. I'm curious to learn what surprised you most once development started. After the idea was discussed and after you shook hands, what was it, in your opinion? The complexity, or how quickly the original idea started to evolve and you start seeing it being built? What was the most surprising thing about this interaction at the early stage of building?

Dilyara Daminova: The most surprising and difficult stage — once we developed what we want — was to find the right people, right professionals. It was the challenging part. It actually took us two years to go through and actually understand — can we actually do it? And what we have in our hand to implement in a real product actually is very complicated because you have to find the right people that actually understand what to do. And surprisingly, in a very developed country, the United States of America, where we’re located, surprisingly it was challenging to find someone. Because we found out that a lot of developers wanted a lot of money, but they didn't really understand our thought. And it was just a simple sit-down evening with the right person, you Tanya, where I just shared my idea and you said you could do it. It was the game changer, the life changer when we actually started transforming our idea into a real product that we can bring to the US market.

Tanya Kohen: Sometimes the key is to just to talk about something that's on your mind and then see where the conversation takes you.

Dilyara Daminova: We always had the right team, right person next to us that we knew, but we just never connected the dots.

Samuel Ary: I would just add that — once we had the idea — figuring out the direction of where to go from there and how to get to what we needed to be was the most challenging because we were new. We didn't have guidance, we didn't have the knowledge. But we had someone that was close to us, Tanya, and she was actually able to give us the guidance and the direction. And so we're very grateful for that.

We're lucky that we knew you because we shopped around, we were really trying to find the right developer that could bring this application to life, see our vision, what we had, and we just weren't having any luck with it. So finding the right developer, finding someone that can bring our dream to reality.

Tanya Kohen: Thank you, I appreciate the kind words. Also, when the actual team of developers joined and started building, was there any point in time where you thought, “we haven't even thought about this, but now we are realizing that there is more to this idea.”? I'm curious, did the idea shape as we started building?

Dilyara Daminova: Definitely. The original idea that ended up in the final product probably was only 20%. The 80% shaped, and we were lucky to work with your team because they had experience already. This was our very first product, so we didn't even know how to do it or how to implement it. We had a huge guidance from them, like “what you were thinking in a real market is not going to work.” So it has reshaped significantly, to the point of logo, to the point of little visual things of the app.

Not what we imagined and it was so much better. So much better ideas were brought to us and corrected from our original thinking just because the developers team had already experienced and already made products for the market and already knew what works and what doesn't work in the mass market.

Tanya Kohen: You have a great attitude as founders. We do product builds all the time, for companies of different sizes and different types of platforms, but it's not always when founders are willing to reconsider and brainstorm together what would be best for the product. Sometimes the founder is very much set on something they think will work, but not really open to other ideas, or other times they have very vague ideas of what they want.

In this project we were in the middle. You have a very good vision of what business you want to have and then you're open to suggestions as to how to get there with the app.

That is moving us to discussing the progress of your project and your app. Right now it's in production, still being enhanced, and you're adding features and you're adding your vision. Was there a moment in your experience where your definition of the success for this product shifted and you realized that you probably should enhance it more, build more features into it? Was it one moment when you thought “maybe we should make changes" or was it gradually throughout the process as you started to add users to the app and started to get feedback from the market? How was that part?

Dilyara Daminova: I would say now, having this experience, none of the products will work unless you bring it to the market and test it on a real market, on real people. You can bring 20, 30 people in the same room, but those are people that usually have the same mindset as you. But once you introduce a product to the consumer, the consumer has a different opinion about it. So, we changed probably 50% of our product again once we hit the market and once we started getting real feedback from the people. And we were like “Yeah, what? We didn't think about it, this is right.” Even to the point of visually moving buttons from top to bottom or in the middle. Little things like that make sense to us because we have people in the room with the same mind, but the mass market has different opinions about it. And since we develop a product that we wanted to develop for all ages, even for a 90 year old woman or an elder person, we wanted to be able to use that as simple as possible. Actually simplicity adds more work to the developing team. It looks clean, it looks neat, but as simple as you get in the frontend — it gets more complicated in the backend. So we changed a lot because of the feedback of the market once we went on the market with our product.

Tanya Kohen: Sam, what was something you didn't expect throughout the process or what was the moment when you saw, “okay, this is what we're going to build”, but then at a certain point in time, you've figured out “maybe it is slightly different than we first thought it's going to be.” Was there a moment like this for you?

Samuel Ary: I think it was once we went through the process and actually got something in our hands to see what we thought we were thinking needed to be done. And once we got it and tested it, and then our thoughts evolved over that. We said that we need to make these certain changes. But really, once we actually put it on the market, we didn't know for sure how it was gonna look to customers or clients until they actually got their hands on it and they gave us feedback. Then with the feedback, we took that and we made the changes based on their feedback. So that was the most important thing I think that really helped develop, get us to the finish line with the app was getting it out on the market, getting it reviewed by actual customers that actually had it in their hand, people that we didn't know. I think that really helped us a lot in putting the finishing touches on it and making it more user friendly, because that is the whole point of the app — to make it user friendly. We wanted to make it as simple as possible. As Dilyara hit on, it seems like the simpler it is, the more complicated it is on the backend. But that was the point, and I think the only way we got there was testing it with people out on the market.

Tanya Kohen: That makes total sense. Now looking back at your journey so far, what advice would you have for a founder that's thinking about building not necessarily a similar product, but any product for their business? Is there anything that you think right now you would do differently or any encouragement or any advice for founders that are thinking about building something right now?

Dilyara Daminova: I would say — have a clear vision. We had an idea and we shared it with the development team. A lot of mistakes could be avoided. But because we just dumped into the development team our original ideas without thinking that it's going to work or not going to work, even to the point of color. Have it as fixed as possible in your mind as a final vision to avoid extra work for the development team of redoing it. We redid our product several times before we even hit the market. So few things could be avoided that we didn't think about and we should have thought about it. But honestly, it's easy to give feedback looking back, but going back to our original state, probably we had it as developed as we imagined. And it comes with experience, changes come with experience. We're so lucky that we had a team that actually went with it and really helped develop it.

Remember, there's a financial side on that part. If you want to save, have your product as visually finalized as possible, even though now I know it's impossible.

Tanya Kohen: It is possible to some degree I guess, but that's a great point. What is possible for cost efficiency is to start with a few sessions designing the product, looking forward, sitting together through the design workshop, so to speak. And we often start our projects with a product design workshop to see what are the features, what are the looks of it, a designer can join from a very early stage to visualize the product for the future. That's very valid.

Samuel Ary: Coming into it without the knowledge that we have now, I think we did pretty well. Because we had the support team, because we had the developers, the experienced developers that really led us along and took us in the right direction to make sure that we had something that was going to be good. The initial idea, it definitely changed from initially how we imagined things. But going into it, it's really hard to say if I would change anything because it was a learning experience, we had to go through that to learn, to see how it's done.

But it all goes back to that we had a good support team and a good bunch of developers and people that were all on the same team and wanted to see us successful. And so we're very grateful for that.

Tanya Kohen: I'm really happy to hear that. Let's talk about the future and looking into the future state of the product and also what is in development right now. First of all, are you excited about what is in development right now and what is your future vision for Local Pros, for your business, and for any technical side of it?

Dilyara Daminova: We think it's gonna be very successful. We thought it's gonna be successful much faster. Now, testing the market, we know we have a lot of competition and we're getting a clear vision on how to push our product to the mass market with the competition we have. So we're continuing to build a marketing team, and we think we will be very successful, but not as fast as we originally thought. We thought everybody was waiting for our product and it's missing.

Tanya Kohen: Having a solid go-to-market strategy, which you are now developing, that's the key.

Dilyara Daminova: Yes, we have a clear plan.

Samuel Ary: It developed over time, as we tested it in the market to see how people reacted to it. We were able to develop more of a plan because of that in order to get it out there and so just the testing part really helped us out and let us develop a full, solid plan on actually getting it out there and getting it around. The app itself, I think is done, but there's still some backend stuff that we're working on, and I think we're almost done with most of it. But even as we put it out there and get it out there, I know we're still gonna adjust things and come up with additional ideas in order to improve it. I mean, it's always gonna be something that we're gonna be doing and working on. We have to see how the market reacts and we're going to react to how the market reacts and make sure we're always making sure we have the best product out there.

Dilyara Daminova: You can't finish a product to its perfection. It needs to change. Market changes, people change, requirements change, with AI developing there are extra restrictions being added. So if you're thinking of something that you’re developing and working on, just have your financial mindset for that, because it's not a product that you come from point A to point B and you're done with it. It's a product that you're pushing to the mass market and you need to continue developing, reducing, adjusting to the market and to the local laws.

Tanya Kohen: We wish you a lot of success with this and I'm pretty sure that with your vision and with your passion, it's going to work really well, and we’re really happy to work on this with you. We learned a lot as a team as well, a lot of how the approach can change and how flexible it should be.

To close this, there's a lot of conversation about AI, Artificial Intelligence, and how new technology is embracing all those new things in the market. I know that we are also doing some parts of this for your product, at least on the backend of it. So what are your feelings about this? And are you excited about having the possibility of using AI tools in your product to make it better? What are your thoughts in general on all these new developments?

Samuel Ary: I think AI is only going to make things better for us. We definitely need to implement it and it needs to be part of our application and review process and things like that. So I think it's only going to benefit us.

Tanya Kohen: Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you for this. That's it for today's questions. Thank you for the conversation and happy to hear about your experience. And I'm pretty sure our listeners benefited a lot from the advice that you gave and from hearing about your journey.