Some of the small business owners Sergey Alkorn talks to would rather not pay him $500 for a website. For $30 a month, they can get all the AI tools they want, so why pay a developer?
“They quickly discover that that thirty dollars turns into hours and hours and hours of building something that they’re not trained for and they don’t like,” Sergey says, “and that is not what earns them money.”
Sergey is the Founding CEO of Dependable AI Solutions, a service-disabled veteran-owned company in Corona, California, that builds websites and AI tools designed to be found by search engines and recommended by AI assistants. He runs it with his co-founder, Lino Valdovinos. Website builds start at $500.
“Most every client we’ve charged has been five hundred dollars with a forty dollar subscription,” he says.
The company’s first client, a mechanic in the mountain community of Lake Arrowhead, is now the top auto mechanic AI assistants recommend there, without spending a dollar on ads. In the two weeks before this interview, Dependable AI onboarded three nonprofits.
Sergey and Lino built automations into their design platform “so that we can keep the prices low.” A chatbot that plugs into a client’s existing website costs $300 to set up and $40 a month.
Those tools live under findbusiness.ai, the company’s one-stop shop for small businesses that want to be found by AI. Alongside website builds and chatbots, it offers a full suite of assessments. A website assessment grades how search engines and AI assistants read a business’s online presence, and how its competitors are being surfaced instead. A market assessment maps the businesses in an area and shows which ones stand to gain the most from getting found. The AI visibility plan compares a business’s website against the top performers in its industry and region, then returns a list of recommendations. It costs $25 and takes five to ten minutes to run.
His wife thinks he should raise his prices. He doesn’t entirely disagree. “With time we’ll settle on a price tag that makes sense,” he says.
The industry is cutthroat, he says, and full of large players. Dependable AI competes on price and on proximity. Sergey and Lino are in the room at local chamber meetings and networking events, and that is where their clients come from.
Dependable AI also gives its education away. Sergey is working with a library in Corona on free classes that teach entrepreneurs how to become discoverable by AI “for like zero dollars.” He watches small business owners throw money at Google and Facebook ads when the answer is usually free tools and the know-how to use them.
Sergey and Lino also volunteer with SCORE, teaching workshops on building an online presence. They are working to bring webinars to the Southern California Veterans Business Outreach Center (VBOC) and the Orange County Inland Empire Small Business Development Center (SBDC), and are planning webinars for local chamber of commerce events.
Sergey served in the Navy from 2009 to 2014 as a hospital corpsman. As a senior line corpsman, he was responsible for the medical readiness of more than 150 Navy and Marine Corps personnel. The habit he carried out of the service is attention to detail, “probably the first lesson you learn in boot camp.”
After the Navy, he earned a chemical engineering degree, summa cum laude, from the University of California, Riverside, and went to work as an engineer at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Corona Division. As a federal civilian employee, he built AI pipelines for processing data. Lino was doing AI development in a different department. The two crossed paths at the base’s AI incubator, which Sergey later learned Lino ran.
Scaling and improving their tools inside the DOD’s constraints was slow, while the commercial side was moving at lightning speed. His wife asked why he didn’t just get out and start his own business.
He brought the idea to Lino. “I basically told him, ‘Hey, why don’t we go and start our own business?’” Sergey recalls. “And he was like, ‘All right, let’s do it.’ And that was really easy.”
Today Lino is the technical brains of the operation, working behind the scenes on what the company builds. “I have absolutely no idea how he has time to manage so many different projects,” Sergey says.
The first year was harder. Sergey describes it as “a very rickety track,” with difficult stretches and bad decisions along the way. “You just gotta take the good with the bad and keep trucking along,” he says. The company found its groove in the last four months.
The direction came from a friend who had no website and wasn’t finding clients. Sergey and Lino built him one as a side project. Then other people asked for websites too.
Joining chambers of commerce and going to local networking events was new territory for Sergey. “Breaking out of my shell as a developer and an engineer has been illuminating,” he says. At those events, he and Lino kept hearing business owners ask how to get found by ChatGPT. “One success leads to reinforcement,” Sergey says. He pitched Lino on narrowing the company to a single vertical, AI discoverability for small businesses, and on findbusiness.ai as the platform to deliver it. The two have been building toward it since.
In Sergey’s view, AI agents searching on a user’s behalf reward context and original, opinionated messaging more than keywords. Some of the strongest results show up off the website entirely.
“A massive amount of traffic gets generated through your chamber of commerce profile,” he says.
Those same events are how Dependable AI finds its clients. Sergey has worked with small businesses and done outreach for most of his career, and he is blunt about the elevator pitch.
“The people that I have elevator pitches for, they never become my clients. Ever,” he says. “It’s the people that I go have a beer with, talk to them about their work and their daily gripes, and then they start sharing their problems. And then I say, ‘Okay, cool, let’s have lunch next time.’ And then they become my client in a couple of weeks.”
Pressed for the short version anyway, he calls the company “the small business on-ramp for AI discoverability.”
One of the three nonprofits the company just onboarded is Operation Community Cares in Rancho Cucamonga, which sends care packages to deployed service members. Sergey liked their mission enough that he now volunteers with them.
The company’s first product, Adjutant, refines a resume for a specific job by translating a candidate’s language into the lingo of that job’s industry. Anyone can use it, and Dependable AI gives it away free to veterans who are transitioning or looking for work.
Most of what small business owners ask him would take hours to figure out alone, he says. His job is to hand it over in plain terms.
“We just deliver it in a simple, understandable way, and everything just crystallizes, and it’s like, okay, cool. Now I know,” he says. “So it’s a good feeling.”
Sergey Alkorn is the Founding CEO of Dependable AI Solutions, a service-disabled veteran-owned company in Corona, California, that builds websites and AI chatbots designed to help small businesses get found and recommended by AI. He co-founded the company with Lino Valdovinos. A Navy veteran, Sergey served as a hospital corpsman from 2009 to 2014. He previously worked as an engineer at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Corona Division, most recently as Senior Engineer and GenAI Integration Lead. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering, summa cum laude, from the University of California, Riverside.