Today we’d like to introduce you to Will Perrone.
Hi Will, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
Ethan Becker and I had actually started a business together before Alyra. It was a small business that ran for about a year, and around December and January it came to an end. That one stung a little, but neither of us was ready to stop. We took some time off, talked through a lot of ideas, and kept landing on the same thing. We wanted to build something bigger, and we wanted it to have a lot more tech behind it. In March of this year, that became Alyra Labs.
We brought in Tristan Parker, who’s been a close friend of ours for years. The three of us come from pretty different backgrounds. I studied data analytics, Tristan studied cybersecurity, and Ethan has an engineering background in biomedical engineering. But we’ve always been the tech guys in our friend group, so it felt natural to put that together and see what we could do with it.
From the start, we set Alyra up with two sides. The first side is working with small and medium sized businesses and helping them with anything tech related. For us, that started with web design and development, and that’s really how we got our foot in the door. A lot of business owners are great at what they do but don’t have the time or the know-how to deal with websites and software, and we like being the people who can just take care of it for them at a price that makes sense. We’ve worked with 25 companies so far, and the projects keep getting bigger. We’ve built CRM systems, lead generation tools, web scraping setups, AI automations, and backend integrations that get a business’s tools working together.
The second side is building our own apps for the App Store. Our first one was Aurum, a widget based app that gives you a daily Stoic quote. Our second is Fuelist, which is a much bigger project and the thing I’m proudest of so far. Fuelist honestly came from my own problem. I wanted to eat healthier and get more protein in, but I never knew what to actually eat, and I didn’t want to spend hours researching recipes and building grocery lists. So we built an app that does it for you. You put in your budget, what you like, what you don’t like, and pretty much everything else about how you eat, and it builds you a meal plan and a shopping list around exactly that. It took a long time to build, and getting it approved by Apple and seeing it live on the App Store was a big moment for us. Now we’re focused on getting it in front of more people.
Day-to-day, we all overlap a lot. I lead app development and handle a good amount of our client communication. Tristan has been our biggest sales guy; he’s worked with a lot of our website clients, and he’s really strong on the security and backend side. Ethan also works with clients one-on-one and knows his way around just about everything we do, especially the backend work on our websites.
If I had to sum up what we’ve learned so far, it’s that relationships are everything. Most of our growth has come from connections and referrals, and that only happens when the customer is actually happy with what you gave them. You have to work hard and really listen to what people need. And you also have to learn when to say no. Not every project is the right fit, and being honest about that up front is better for everyone.
We’re still small, and we’re not even a year old yet, but we’re profitable, and we’ve met a lot of great people along the way. A year from now, I’d love to see our referral network keep growing, bigger projects under our belt, a few more apps out in different areas, and Fuelist at 100,000 users. We’re just getting started, and that’s the fun part.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely hasn’t been a smooth road. The first hit was the way our original business ended. When you put everything you have into something and then watch it fall apart, it really stinks. But you live, you learn, and you grow, and much of what we learned from that is why Alyra works the way it does today.
When we started Alyra, we put zero dollars into it. Every dollar we’ve made, we earned from scratch using the tools and skills we already had. That meant a lot of cold calling early on just to find clients. Cold calling is rough. You hear the word no over and over, and every once in a while someone curses you out and hangs up. It’s not fun, but you keep your head down and keep going, and eventually those calls turned into real clients and referrals.
Fuelist was its own challenge. It took a long time to build, and getting it on the App Store meant meeting a lot of Apple developer requirements we’d never dealt with before. There was a lot of learning as we went. We took our time with it because we wanted to get it right, and I’m really glad we did.
The other big one is time. We all have our own jobs, and on top of that, I’m in school, so balancing everything has been a challenge from day one. That was true even back when it was just Ethan and me on our first business. It really comes down to time management. We’ve had to stay disciplined about ho
As you know, we’re big fans of Alyra Labs LLC. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Alyra Labs is a small tech studio with two sides. On the business side, we help small- and medium-sized businesses with anything tech-related. That usually starts with a website, but a lot of our work goes further than that, like CRM systems, lead generation tools, automations, and backend work that makes a business’s tools work together. On the app side, we build our own apps for the App Store, like Aurum and Fuelist.
I think what sets us apart is that we’re small and you always work directly with us. You’re not getting handed off to someone you’ve never met. We also try to keep our pricing fair because many of the people we work with are great at what they do but don’t have a big budget or a tech background.
One moment I’m really proud of is our very first client. They were a small spiritual healing shop here in New Jersey, close to where we live. Closing that first deal, building their website, and seeing how happy they were with it was a big deal for us. It made all the cold calls feel worth it.
Our tagline is “Built with purpose. Designed to last,” and that’s what we try to bring to every project, big or small.
What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that failing at something isn’t the end. When our first business ended, it would have been easy to walk away and say it just wasn’t for us. Instead, we took what went wrong, learned from it, and used it to build Alyra the right way.
Along the way, I’ve also learned that people are everything in business. Your clients, your referrals, and the people you work alongside every day matter more than any tool or skill. If you treat people well, do honest work, and actually care about what they need, the rest tends to follow.
And the last one is just to keep going. Some days are slow, some calls don’t go your way, and some projects take way longer than you planned. But every bit of progress adds up, and looking back at where we started at the beginning of this year compared to now, I’m really proud of how far we’ve come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.alyralabs.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alyralabs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alyralabs
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alyra-labs
- Twitter: https://x.com/AlyraLabs
