Strategic AI Integration: Ghazenfer Mansoor on Automating What Makes Your Startup Unique

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I think the biggest lesson that I learned along the way in my journey is trusting the experts, talking to the people who have done it again and again. If I'm the first one, and most people do that, they, they learn the hard way. I've done that in my past life, but now I would go to expert for everything. So learning from their experiences, how they have done it. So hiring a coach, working with a group of people or other entrepreneurs, having that circle helps you a lot.

Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders to success. There's a number What's the barrier that stops most entrepreneurs cold before they ever build anything? 95%. That's the percentage of apps that fail within their first year. But here's some more interesting question. What do the other 5% know that everyone else doesn't? My next guest has spent his career on the inside of that question. As a CEO of Technology Rivers, he's shipped over 130 software products, built 50 healthcare platforms. That meet the most demanding compliance standards in any industry and worked with founders and operators across the spectrum from first-time builders to scaling enterprises to turn software from a cost center into a growth engine. He's also the author of Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps That People Love, Use, and Share Every Day, which is a playbook for any founder who's ever wondered why great products don't automatically find great audiences. Today, we're going to talk about what it really takes to use AI and technology to grow your business by 10x, not in theory, but in practice with receipts. Please welcome to Your Brand Amplified, Ghazanfar Mansour. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm really excited to dive into our conversation.

Thanks for having me, Anika Jackson.

So let's talk a little bit about, you know, your background. Technology Rivers has been around for over a decade. Take me back to the beginning. What was the problem you saw that no one else was able to solve?

Okay, so before starting Technology Rivers, I had my own startup, which was a recruitment software startup, and I learned the product development the hard way. I was a technical person. I worked with two startups as an early engineer, computer science degree, and I also realized I also thought the same as most tech people think, oh, I know how to build the tech, but building product is different than just writing a code or building application. So you also need to know what needs to be built. So we learned the hard way. We build the strong application, really strong foundation, strong backend. We spent so much time building, and then when you put it out, nobody came. Realize, oh, if you go build a good product— we looked at all the competitors, our product was Very good, very st— and then we went back to the whiteboard because that's when we realized, oh, we need to solve a specific problem. We need to get the use cases. Who are we selling? If it's a recruiter or what leaders are looking for, what recruiters are looking for, what job seekers are looking for, and what is the typical flow they'll be looking at. So went back to the whiteboard, did the product strategy again. User experience design, everything, and then relaunched the product, and then we started getting customers. So that was a lesson learned hard way after spending more than $100,000 on the product. Wow. So after this one, when I started this business, and I realized, okay, we don't want others to make the same mistake. And I see around me people coming from different backgrounds, in the DC area, a lot of government contracting, people coming from corporate background as well. And when you have infinite money, especially with the government, you are used to that model of keep building it, or we will, we will see what we want to build once we build and show. Well, the startups do not have that kind of money where you're experimenting on somebody else's money. So we came up with this model, like we wanted to build the product the right way the first time, helping founders build the product the right way so that they are not experimenting. Yes, the products you trade. So obviously don't get me wrong with the typical agile, like you have to put in front of the customer, but once you get the initial discovery, you know exactly what you need or whatever the initial MVP, you want to build that right. Even on that one, you are not gonna be experimenting. So with that motto, we started. And now looking back, I think majority of the customers are still coming like that. In fact, even this morning I had a call with somebody who built a whole product using a team building healthcare product, but they don't know about the compliance part. So how can you have somebody build the whole product knowing that means your foundation is not right? Just like building a house, realizing, oh, we We'll add the basement later on. Man, good luck with that. So those are the challenges we see all the time. We have, and it's so sad to see many times founders coming in, spending a good amount of money, and most of them, they're running out of the money and they come and now they want to fix it. And many times it's a rewrite. It's not always just fixing a patching. Sometimes it is possible, sometimes it's not. Every product is different. And sometimes it's just going in a different direction. So those are the challenges that we see all the time, and that was the core focus on starting this business.

I think you raised some really interesting and intriguing points. We have to have a strong foundation. You have to think through, and that takes time, right, to think through all the obstacles, all the things that are about compliance. Thinking through your ideal customer persona and making sure that that's really tight as you're starting. And it may change, right? Your original thesis might not end up being what it is, but you have to have that jumping off point. I teach a capstone class at University of Southern California for a graduate program, and a lot of my students want to start apps. And so it's really interesting because they have a semester to figure out how to do it. Right? And to have a business case and to create something. And the number of times people change as they start iterating and really doing the research is a lot. It's astronomical. And when you think about these business cases, so the fact that you're actually helping founders who have a real product that is going out to market, that have maybe some funding to solve these things. It's so important. It's vital. And I mean, I have a background as marketing, marketing strategy, public relations, and it's the same thing on my side. The number of founders who come and say, okay, here's my brand, but they don't really know who they're selling to, how they're going to position it, is also astounding. So I, I really applaud you for doing this work and working for startups to enterprise systems, right? What was the early moment beyond your own company where you realized it's not just about technical ability, it really is the business strategy first?

I think that, that pattern was visible pretty early as we started working with different customers. Some customers obviously didn't— they know what they want, they had their right team, so they just need help on the on building the right foundation, building the right product. So we have customers that have a really good product team and they just wanted our team to be the implementation partner. And in some cases they even have their own architects and CTO and we became the implementation. And then sometimes we are becoming the CTO. We're providing the product strategy part as well. So we provide all of those services, but Every customer is different, but the moment we see a non-technical, and this is where, because majority of our customers are non-technical and many of them are physician entrepreneurs, they're coming from a healthcare background. They know they're subject matter expert, but they're not the technical expert. They have idea. And that's when you are visionary, you are so much into your vision. You want to just, you want to throw, you're throwing your ideas like, this is what I want to do. This is what I want to do. Now the developers just will start keep building because you aren't telling them what to build. And nobody's there in between stopping and readjusting and prioritizing the scope of it. Like, how do you want to build the product? The strategy is the key part, definitely. As someone said, I don't remember exactly, was it Albert Einstein or somebody who said, if I have 1 hour to solve a problem, I would take 55 minutes figuring out how to, and then the last 5 minutes I will solve the actual problem. And that's key in everything you want to build. Like, have you ever built a house like that where you just— okay, I'm gonna build the room and then we'll figure it out? No, you put everything on a paper. Your blueprint is the key. And that's the part we teach our customers, that your blueprint is the most important part. You want to draw each and everything, how this is going to work, before you write a single line of the code. Because that's the most expensive part of the build, the actual build. And then before that, everything is on the paper, everything is designing. So those changes are easier and quicker.

And you've built over 130 projects at this point?

Yes, it's, yeah, around that number.

Yeah. And is there something that you wish that you'd known when you started the process? That you know now?

It's the same, the blueprint process, the strategy. Again, as I said earlier, even on my own products, that's where everything— I think, and the struggle comes in many times, how do you convince the customers that this is the right way to do it? And as you could see, probably the marketing as well, people who are doing it the otherwise, they already are coming up with this mindset that, oh, this is the right way. They want to learn the hard way. And this has been— there are so many times we have seen like people are so overconfident. Many times they come to us, they said, oh, I need a developer, I need an app developer, I need a React Native developer or different technology. Why do you need it? Realize you don't need a developer, you just want to build a product. And then sometimes it may not be your app developer. Sometimes you could solve your problems by just creating a clickable prototype, even in Figma. Or using now AI to create a POC using live coding to get feedback from your customer before you're even ready to be building. So that's the scary part. Yeah.

And this segues perfectly into my next section of questions, which is, I, you know, I love using AI. I love talking about best use cases for AI and AI for business growth is obviously in productivity, right? AI is kind of one of the hot topics right now. You're one of the few people who actually uses it appropriately. So I'd love to hear a little bit about, you know, what are founders getting wrong with AI adoption right now? Where do you think they're overinvesting and what are they actually ignoring that would be huge opportunities?

I think AI is still a big learning for everybody, including for myself. There are a lot of new things coming every single day. So I think it's one of those where obviously just like technology goes faster and AI technology is even going, moving way faster than anything else. So the bigger part I recommend everyone is spending time on learning AI. That's the most important part because just treating AI as assuming that, oh, it's just a prompt and you just upload your document and search. Well, that's not AI. I mean, yes it is, but that's just a small piece of it. And many time it's giving you the wrong result. So you have to know how the technology really works. If you have a huge amount of data, how do you use that? And then a biggest mistake which I have seen most people are making is they're assuming that AI is going to give them everything. They just ask AI without giving their own data. So the most important is you have to have your right data. AI is going to give you the output of what you give. So if your data is not right, your workflows are not right, your processes are not right, AI is not going to solve it. In fact, AI is going to expose it. So now you're more exposed because you didn't have those right processes. You have to work on those. And then you have to provide your own data. You have to provide your own context. It takes a lot more time to do that. But many time, I, I've seen like people just would have some good prompt to try to solve problem with AI, but that's just a very small piece of it. And no matter how good your prompts are, if you're not giving the right context, if you don't have the right data to support, the AI doesn't know about you. AI doesn't know about your business. Yes, it understand gradually from your conversation, but still there's a whole lot of thing like how you think, how you provide, how do you like to analyze, how do you like to present that information. I like to do it certain way and that's my way. So AI has to provide you accordingly. Mm-hmm.

Well, and speaking of, you're one of the few people actually is building products with AI that equate to business growth. So what does 10x growth look like through AI when it actually works for real clients?

Yeah, so when it comes to 10x growth, most service businesses, if you look at it, there are no real differentiator. They are differentiated from their competitors by just having a better service, better people, faster process or certain things, but not really a differentiator. They're using the same CRM, same tools that may be available to your industry, whether it's pet care, whatever is that industry, or healthcare. Now, in order to create differentiator, you want to have something that is unique to your business. Your competitors cannot copy your workflow, whether it's getting to the leads quickly, whether it's about automating certain processes, whether it's doing the delivery faster, whether it's communicating with your customers, whether it's providing information to them or through the dashboard, whatever is that you want to automate some of your workflow. Look at your unique processes, unique the cases that are creating bottlenecks and then automate some of those. Some of those may be available. Some of those may be like you may be creating a quick, let's say AI agents. So some may have, I mean, you obviously you still want to have a human in the loop. Part, but you still want to automate some of those. But again, those has to be very specific workflows that is, that are specific to your business. Those are the ones that create a differentiator. Let's say if you're giving a quote to your customers, is there a way that you can give it faster than your customer, your competitor? Whether you're doing audit of this or whether, like, it's, it doesn't have to be the same thing available to everybody. It could be anything. Again, there, there could be hundreds of those use cases, but you want to look at it, how do I make it faster for my customers? Whether it's automatically delivering a prescription to the pharmacy the moment I call, rather than I need to always talk to my pharmacist before that triggers. Whatever are those, you want to work on those because once your customers see those differentiators, they're going to come to you because now you're solving their problem. And that's how you bring more efficiency. More efficiency means more customers you can service, more revenue, more profitability.

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So it's fascinating because really the use case of using AI to 10x our businesses, it's still fundamentals because you, whether you use AI or not, you have to have differentiators, as you mentioned early on, for your brand, your product, your service, the things that make you stand out positively against your competition. Yeah. True, true.

I used to talk about 10x growth through technology. Obviously with AI now, it's much easier and faster. To do it the same thing that you were doing it before, because building a tech is expensive. It used to be very expensive. It is still in many ways, but that's a survival thing. If it's like, if you don't learn AI, you're not going to be able to survive. So it is important. And I think the bigger part which I've seen where people are more scared, they feel like, oh, we're not ready for that investment, or it's a big undertaking. It's not for us, it's for somebody else. In reality, what you don't realize is it's not really— it's more of a— it's a small investment that you do, but you gradually do because you're building those smaller, smaller things. Think of this way. If you have one person, additional person that— or one consultant that you hire that does some of the job, you're still paying even if it's a part-time, 2 hours, 10 hours a week. You're still paying for that person. That's the cost you are paying somewhere to address that. In reality, manual work has always been more expensive. It just doesn't look as expensive as it is in reality.

Yeah, that's such a good point again. And I guess I think even for myself, my MBA specializes in AI and ML. I do work in different things, But the time that it takes, I have to weigh out the cost-benefit analysis because I'm like, I can do this myself to help my business get stronger. But then if I don't have the time to sit and actually work through any kinks or any issues with API, you know, switching and making sure everything in the workflow is flowing to the right database, then it takes up my valuable time and then I have to find somebody else to help me fix it. So it's absolutely the same thing. How much can you invest, whether it's your time, your money? Are you hiring other people? Are you going to have to train them on exactly what you want for your business?

True, true. I think we can delegate some of our work to obviously to buy back our time. That's okay. But then how do you repeat that process so that it's a long run, so that it's automated and you are also able to track it?

Mm-hmm. So I wanna talk about the app economy in general, right? I mean, obviously you have a book Beyond the Download: What Makes Apps Actually Win, and I do feel like a lot of people are moving towards apps. We hear whispers off and on that we're not gonna have using websites same, everybody's gonna, everything's gonna be on an app. So I wanted to ask. The book is called Beyond the Download. The premise is getting people to download should be the easy part. So talk to me about that. What are founders measuring that they shouldn't be when it comes to the downloads and the other metrics around apps?

I think the more— most important one is the founders are not tracking most of the time. They're focusing on the download, but we're saying download is the start. It's not— you have to look beyond the download. Because we all have hundreds of apps on our phone. How many of them we are going back again and again? So you want to create an app that people use. So if you, if the users are not using it every single day or frequently, depending on obviously the type of application, you're not going to be using everything every day, but you want to have an app for that one specific type so that people, you bring those users back again and again. Not only they're back, but they also engage with the other user if they're sharing with it. Because the more they share, the more they use, the more it's solving their problem, the more it is gonna be beneficial. Because app stores will recognize it, Apple will recognize it, Google will recognize it, your users will know it, and then you will have a lot more adoption. More adoption mean you have more ways of monetizing from all of these activity.

It's so funny that you should say that because I was looking at my phone today and I was trying to log into an app that I haven't been on in a while and it was making me sign in again. I don't remember my username on the app, right? And then I looked and I'm like, I have a lot of apps that are showing that they're not downloaded right now because I haven't been using them. So, and, and that's one of your premises and research, right? Is that 95% of apps fail. In year 1. So moving beyond the download, what does that look like? Where should be people be paying attention to the metrics and what can they do to continue to engage audiences?

So the book has about 32 different chapters that talk about different strategies. So it's not just one strategy. Different types of applications will have to have a different strategy. Let's say you use Uber, you use DoorDash, those are different one. Obviously they're, let's say, Sometimes they send you a push notification. There's a new deal, right? Oh, you're getting 20% off. You want to go back because you could have been going to Uber Eats instead, you went to DoorDash or vice versa. So that's obviously one. You get the emails, you have other ways of creating rewards for your users, right? So all those things are important. Like, so it's not just one strategy. There are many different things that you can do. Some are inside the app, some are outside the app. So yes, some strategies need to be built inside, but I think most important part in every app is the app has to be good. Doesn't matter what those features are, that it has to be a remarkable app. It has to have a super easy to use user experience, better design, so that people feel like they're using it, they're not lost in the app. So yeah, those are the important ones. I wouldn't say there's one strategies best versus other. Every type of business is different, so you have to follow certain rules because especially if it's compliance-related, there are some restrictions as well, what you can do and what you cannot do. But there are different strategies that you can apply.

Yeah, so this is the first call to action.

The most important part is the tracking part. You want to make sure you know all the numbers, the downloads, what people are using, how are they using the app, on what screen, how much time they spend, where did they drop. Once you know that in data, you can make a lot of decisions based off of that.

Yeah, no, that's— those are excellent points. And I mean, I think the first call to action here is buy the book, right? Because you're going to share a lot more strategies. And, you know, even if it's not an app per se. I mean, podcasting, same thing. I need to be paying attention to the analytics. How much time are people spending listening? It's not just the fact that they listened. What time are they listening of day? What day of the week? Where is the traffic coming from? Because then that helps me figure out, am I releasing episodes at the right time? Right? Am I— are there other hooks I need to add in? So every business needs to be paying attention to this, but apps particularly, I mean, if you invest a lot in an app but you have a 95% failure rate, you have to be really careful to make sure that you're making a very strong investment in your product.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So you write for startup founders, indie developers, and creators who want to compete with industry giants but have a tight budget. Is there an asymmetric advantage a scrappy founder has that a well-funded competitor doesn't?

Well, the biggest advantage is when, as they say, like, if you— I don't remember who said it— that they said, if I want to get the work done cheaper way or quicker way, I'll find a lazy developer because they'll find an easy way to do it. So I think if you're scrappy, then you have to figure out a way. Okay, I don't have money, I cannot do this one. What are the easier way I can get this done. So, or maybe just building one feature. Again, you need to have that discipline. The bigger challenge with once you have money, people start building too many features. So now, oh, 6 months or a year to build the whole product before launching. And then you realize, oh, things have changed. Now your customers are asking this one, then there's another few months of stabilizing that. So the bigger the project you make, the more complicated it is, the delay it will take. We push for every project to be no more than 2 to 3 months of MVP, no matter how big is the product, to like break down into a smaller feature so that it should not be delayed more than this timeframe. Because yes, it— that may also mean internal launch, that may also mean only to the alpha users, but you want to put it out, you can start having people using it because once people start using it, you get a good feedback. And once you have feedback, you gradually improve. I've seen cases where the product took more than 2 years, 3 years to build, and then they realize after that, oh, this is not what we wanted. Suddenly all of that investment is gone. So the sooner you identify the problem, the better it is. And as they said, you want— if you have a short time, so you want to fail fast. Sooner you fail fast, the sooner you'll identify the right path.

Yeah, that's such an interesting point. I mean, that's why it's called an MVP, right? Minimum Viable Product. Doesn't mean you have everything done to completion because things are changing so fast every single day. Something is, you know, even if you are in Claude, oh, they have a new version that's out. Oh, now they have co-work and they have code and they're constantly adding things. And the same thing is happening across the ecosystem of technology and AI. And that is now changing the way that all of us have to look at how we do business and how nimble we are.

Yeah, absolutely. And unfortunately, many people are not taking it as a minimum viable but maximum viable product because that's where it becomes a bigger MVP.

Yeah. So you've built way over 50 healthcare products, over 23 HIPAA-compliant systems. Most founders hear HIPAA compliance and they think cost, delay, complexity. But what are they not hearing? What's that version of the story they're not hearing?

Yes, most people think that it means complexity. Yes, it is complicated, no doubt. But once you know how to do it, then it's— for us, it's not. It's like people always scared technology is complicated. For us, it's easy. We have built so many that now we know we have reusable components, we have done it again and again. We have a checklist of things that we shared publicly on our website as well. What are the steps you need to validate? This checklist for our developer, there's a checklist for our QA team, there's a checklist for our project managers so that different people can validate like whether this app is HIPAA compliant or not. So it is complicated if you're building it first time, or if you haven't done it most of the time., but for people like us who have built it again and again, so for us, it's not that complicated. I think the bigger part that people miss is if you're not compliant, there are penalties. But another big part I've seen is let's say your app does not have a whole lot of PHI or does not have any PHI and you don't warn, but there's a natural confidence. It's like you tell people, oh, this is a secure app. Everybody would use it versus not secure, even if there's no real data in it. So you won't still go on unsecure. The same is the case if it's not HIPAA compliant. Many people in the healthcare industry won't even use it. They just have this minimum criteria set that it needs to be HIPAA compliant. So even if your application does not have a PHI, if you are selling it to healthcare, you do want to make sure it's HIPAA compliant.

Yeah, that's a really great point. And I do think part of what you're saying is find the right partner, find somebody who's skilled, who's done this, who has a proven strategy and the know-how to make sure that you are the most up to date on your compliance strategies.

True, true. And we recently met a customer who spent 2 years on a, on an app, somebody else built it, and after 2 years, She realized after putting the healthcare data that it's not HIPAA compliant. So it's scary, a lot of penalties. So people have to be very careful.

How did you decide healthcare as one of your core competencies?

We naturally moved towards— I have personal experience on the healthcare side. I worked at Veterans Health Administration in the past as a consultant. One of our first customer came from a healthcare space, and then gradually we did more and more healthcare work as we work with those, because you know how you, if you work on the healthcare, you get the similar references. And then we started working on one of the projects where we learned HIPAA compliance, and then we started doing more and more HIPAA. So from one to another one, now we started getting more and more leads for that kind of work. Work. So that was a natural transition towards that. And it's an interesting space because there's so much demand in this space, there's so much interesting work going on. And this is also one of the areas where you do need out— like, you want to build something that solves the real-world problem. This is solving the patient's problem, it's people's health. So there are multiple benefits of this one.

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Must be 21. I think about the term because I know when we're looking at advertising, for instance, Google and the AI overviews tend to stay away from the your money or and your life. Healthcare is obviously a big one. Perhaps it's also financial banking, other highly regulated industries. So, for those who are not in healthcare, you know, are there other lessons from regulated industries in general about building products that earn deep trust? Is the lesson what one of the things that you mentioned, which is build the most compliance in possible from the beginning?

So obviously these are terminologies for a specific vertical, but in reality many of those are similar. So when we'd say like HIPAA, so there are rules, like there are certain things like, okay, what can be done, let's say, from authentication, authorization, who can access what, audit logging, encryption. A lot of those could be applied in any of— so any application there where you have internal data That's your sensitive data. If I don't deal with healthcare, but any of my business data is sensitive data, I do want to have all of those protections in my business. So we definitely, I think it is highly recommended that you build an app that is secure, that has pretty much all of those checks that are needed for the HIPAA compliance. Yeah.

Nice. So let's talk about You know, building a custom app, buying off the shelf, using AI tools, and also when to hire. These questions that come up for every business. One of the most expensive mistakes founders make is building software that they should have bought or buying tools that can't scale. How do you help a client figure out what decision they're actually facing?

It, it, it's a difficult problem. It's, it's quite interesting as well. You have to figure it out. In every different case, it's different. Every company has a separate different DNA. So what the problem for your business is different from my business. In some cases, that one use case, one workflow is most important for your business and it makes sense to build internally versus in another case it's using. So if something is helping you build your business faster or grow faster, yes, you want to use the existing one, but there are certain things that are unique to your business you want to build. So there's no right or wrong. In some cases you are doing integrations. You don't want to be building everything that you have. Let's say if you look at it, how many subscriptions you have. So if you like, every company have probably, I mean, a normal company even have like 50 people company may have like a good more than 20 subscriptions. So, and many of those will have overlapping features. So many times you are paying too much for all of those. Well, that doesn't mean you start replacing everything. No, I don't want to be creating another email server, right? I don't want to be creating another CRM. All those are good to have, but you want to build something that solves your unique problem. And there are some commoditized agents, commoditized services, you want to use them now. But AI is also changing the dynamics. So now you say, well, what is that one thing that this tool is giving me? If it's a CRM, that's just your database. Do I really need that anymore? Because now I can build something really quickly with AI and I can use that as my database. It gives me all of that information, like give me all the dashboard, all the data, everything. Then I can even host it. My cost is less than what I'm paying the subscription fee to Salesforce or any of those big companies. But if that is providing you way more than just a storage, then you may want to think. Let's say if that service is giving you data and you don't have access to that data and your business is dependent on some of that data, you do want to use those services. You're not going to be building those. So it's really a question that nobody has answer right away. So every case is different. So in our case, we call like the— in a strategies meeting. So we go deeper, we do the assessment, we review different workflows, see where are the bottlenecks, where are the manual workflows, how some of those things could be automated. Some says it does make sense. Okay, you're using spreadsheet, maybe for this thing, move to Airtable, or maybe just use this database, this CRM. Another case, build this piece. It could be just building the integration. There is no one answer that fits everybody. That's fair. But you do want to build something that creates more value because at the end, that's the one that will do. Because in order to get a 10x growth, you want to have your— well, where you have to have unique things in your business that increase the value of your business.

Yeah, absolutely. And let's talk a little bit about Lessons from the Leap, because some of these things that you've talked about are lessons, right, that you've learned along the way or that you've seen other people learn along the way. What was the meaning behind Lessons from the Leap? Did you have a specific leap and learn something big in the fall that you decided you needed to share?

I wanted to talk to other founders, leaders, and learn from their leaps. So what are the leaps they have taken that helped them got to where they are today? And this is one of the interesting topic for me. I'll— I enjoy stories. I like to learn other people's stories and learn from their experiences. So whether I'm reading those different books or articles, whatever. So that's one of my interesting topic for me. So I was more interested. So that's why as we're looking for a name for my podcast, this name sounded really right for the type of conversations I wanted to have with the people.

Yeah. And you're working with founders who are in the thick of it, right? They could be scared, they could be under-resourced, they could be making really big bets. What do you find yourself saying to them that no one told you when you were starting out?

I think, The biggest lesson that I learned along the way in my journey is trusting the experts, talking to the people who have done it again and again. If I'm the first one, and most people do that, they learn the hard way. I've done that in my past life, but now I would go to expert for everything. So learning from their experiences how they have done it. So hiring a coach, working with a group of people or other entrepreneurs, having that circle helps you a lot. And it's the same thing as the founders, whether they are making— if you haven't built an app, you want to talk to the people who have not only built that, but they have also launched it successfully. They have grown it. Like, just somebody who knows the programming doesn't mean they can build something that could be scalable. If like anybody can be a carpenter, anybody can be a house builder, but have they built the high-rise? Have they built the bigger bridges that can handle the load, right? The same thing is here in the software world. Have they built the application that can handle millions of users? Have they built the application that have grown from zero to millions of users? So those are the different ones because it's not about building the app, it's about building and growing the business. So whether it's app is just one medium, it could be a web application, it could be a tool, it could be a combination of things. How do you build something that is scalable, that scales, that get to a stage where that makes a difference for you and for your business? Yeah.

Is there something in these conversations that you believe in deeply when it comes to being a founder that you think most people in general would push back on, something that you believe in, something that you hear time and time again from speaking to all of these founders?

Oh, that's a difficult question. There, there, there are, there are so many, obviously people have different beliefs. So yeah, it, it, I think the bigger one is it's similar to where people just believe that they know the stuff. So, And which is fine, but if you haven't built it, people like to make mistakes and then learn the hard way.

Yeah, this is true. Raising my hand for that one. Is there an AI tool or capability that you think is underutilized by business owners right now? Underutilized?

Yes, I think even just the, let's say, even just look at the basic stuff, whether you're using Claude or ChatGPT. Again, most people are just using prompt. Now there are skills, there are connectors that are like, so the MCP is a model control protocol by Anthropic. So where you can connect with any of your software, whether it's your database, whether it's your QuickBooks, you can query from your console, search console, AI console, and make queries without going to that software. So, and then creating a skills when you have a skills. That means it's something more of a reusable thing that could be applied to your different data that later on you could, you can use that skill for. Similarly, the projects in Claude and ChatGPT where you give all that detail upfront and then have the Claude act on it based on the information that you are sharing. So for example, in my case, I have a project, for example, for proposals. So I said, well, read the last 5 emails. I give just the name of the company, says, well, read last 5 emails from this company, look at my Google Drive for all the information about this company, go on internet and search for this. Like, it gives me all of their data and then I have different templates and it would generate the stuff based off of what I'm giving them. Again, it's generating something specific that we previously had, but now all we are giving is just the, the input. That we are, that we are giving. So just with one information, it generates everything. So rather than just giving everything manually, uploading every time. So I think this is where, again, learning how to use AI effectively would make a difference.

Absolutely. Going back to the founder who's building their first app, what's one thing that you would tell them to do before they spend a single dollar on development?

Articulate your problem the right way. Start creating a blueprint or sketches. Doesn't have to be like— you are the person who knows the use case, so you have to tell who are your users, what are the steps they're gonna go through in order to use the app. So creating those high-level flows, and again, that doesn't mean you need to hire a UX person. It could be just a high-level flow where you are just explaining, hey, my vision is that this app does X, Y, and Z. User A comes in, they will do this. User B comes in— even just the high level, that would help defining the clarity. Once you have that clarity, then somebody can help you. Somebody like us can help you and create that blueprint before you actually do the development. In our case, people do come in many times, they're from their side, they're ready, but we still have them like Let's make sure we go through, we tighten all those loose ends before we start any of the development, because that's the least cost option.

Yeah. Nice. And you put a lot of lessons learned in Beyond the Download. What should people be able to do after they read the book?

The most important thing is start following some of those strategies, start implementing those strategies. And the number one is really tracking part. Doesn't matter how good or bad your app is, if you have the tracking enabled, then you can start measuring how the people are using it. If you see people are opening up the app and they're not coming back, then you know where to solve the problem. So then wherever the progress is being made, then you want to track that. And obviously, you know, as a marketing person, we do the same for the web, like You want to track everything what people do. If you can track, then you can make better decisions based off of that.

Yeah. And where do you see Technology Rivers going in 2, 3 years?

Technology Rivers growing to be one of the top names in the healthcare space, healthcare software development space. That's our focus. We have 3 main things: healthcare, AI and mobile. On a tech side, mobile is like— my book obviously is the main topic on that, and the AI and healthcare. So that's the area we're heavily focusing, and we are deepening our footprint in that. We're already— I think we rated pretty high on AI. When you look for top HIPAA app development companies in the US, we get number 1 or 2 That's where most people find us. So I think as we're doing more and more projects, we're getting that visibility more and more.

Fantastic. Gisela, this has been the kind of conversation I love having. You've taken something that is very complicated to most and you've made it feel like a decision that anybody who's starting a business can make. 10x growth through AI conversation is happening everywhere, as we said. But very few people are bringing the receipts the way that you did. We know that your book Beyond the Download is available and we'll have the link in the show notes. So whether you're building your first app or your 15th, I honestly urge everyone to put it on your desk. And to everyone listening, if this episode added value to how you're thinking about AI software scaling your business, please share it with somebody who needs it. And thank you again, Ghazanfar, for being a guest on Your Brand Amplified. I've really appreciated you bringing your knowledge and expertise to our conversation today. Well, thanks for having me on the show.

Really enjoyed it.

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