[00:00:15] Ghazenfer:

Hello and welcome to Lessons from the Leap. I’m your host Ghazenfer Mansoor. On this show, I get to sit down with entrepreneurs, founders, and business leaders who talk about the bold decisions, pivotal moments, and innovative ideas that shape their journeys.

This episode is brought to you by Technology Rivers. At Technology Rivers, we bring innovation through technology and AI to solve real world industry problems. We do this in two ways. First, by helping businesses streamline and automate their operation. Second, by partnering with startup founders, entrepreneurs, and product owners to create innovative software products from SaaS platforms to web mobile apps. A big part of our focus is healthcare, where we work with health tech companies to build HIPAA compliance software products. If you’d like to learn more and work with us, head over to technology rivers.com and tell us about your project. 

Today on Lessons of leap, we have joined with Patrick, the founder of First Work, the most popular lessons delivery tool in applied behavioral analysis. Since launching in 2023, first work has grown to over 25,000 professionals including BCBAs educators and therapists. We use it to support autism children in their learning. 

For our listeners, a quick note, applied behavior analysis or ABA often uses a method called discrete training or DTT. It’s a structured way of breaking down skills into a smaller step and reinforcing them through practice. A BCBA or Board Certified Behavior Analyst is a licensed professional who designed and oversees those programs. 

Patrick created the first work to solve a huge pain point. The hours drop is spent prepping paper-based lessons. His platform Cuts Prep time by 75%, makes sessions four times faster and helps kids stay more engaged while easing burnout for therapy teams.

Patrick, welcome to the show. We’re excited to hear your story and leap you took to build a transformative tool.

[00:02:24] Patrick :

Thanks Ghazenfer. It’s great to be here. I’m very excited to share a little bit about what we’ve done at First Work. A little bit of background.

[00:02:32] Ghazenfer: 

Tell us about your background, and then also what originally inspired you to create First Work.

[00:02:40] Patrick : 

Absolutely. So, my background is in the behavior sciences. I worked as a technician in an applied behavior analysis clinic. I also have a bachelor’s and master’s degree focused on behavior. So my focus really has always been on behavior. While I was at the University of Pennsylvania, I was thinking a lot about my experience as a behavior technician and I realized that a lot of the things that were being done in sessions could be improved in a couple different ways.

The two notable ones were that there was a lot of manual preparation that went into preparing the things that you needed to do and given there’s so much demand for BCBA’s time, it just didn’t feel like a great way to use that time preparing things, especially because a lot of people had the same kind of preparation needs and at the same time the way that programs were delivered in sessions were often not as engaging as they could be.

We were using a lot of traditional paper-based materials, which is the common way to deliver a lot of these programs and while that is certainly effective. There are definitely benefits to moving to a digital format because so many learners find that that’s just a more fun and engaging way to do the learning that they do.

So those were really my big motivations and the pin points that I saw kind of circling back the preparation time that it takes to get these materials made and the way that these programs were delivered in session being not as engaging as they could possibly be or at least, you know, forwarding an alternative to the traditional paper-based lesson delivery that is really common in ABA.

[00:04:11] Ghazenfer: 

That’s a smart insight and obviously we see that kind of, I would say, frustrations across many different industries, including in healthcare where we work, so a technology rivers, whether it’s healthcare, FinTech, that paper-based manual work is still going on and sometimes if it’s being used, that’s more like.

Half manual, like just the spreadsheet based, not really automated. So that really creates frustration. So solving this kind of software definitely can be a game changer, just like the way you did at the First Work.

[00:04:45] Patrick : 

That’s absolutely true. I think that the goal for a lot of healthcare providers, whatever discipline that they’re in, is often to really focus on that service delivery and being able to, you know, support their clients.

And I think that one of the places where technology can really make an outsize impact is helping professionals spend almost all of their time doing that as opposed to. Some of the more backend or preparation related workflows that end up taking up a lot of time and sometimes that leads to, you know, just overly busy schedules or other times it leads to not being able to provide as many services as you could otherwise do.

So generally speaking, regardless of the healthcare sector that you’re thinking about, I think that those are the types of problems that companies are looking to solve in almost every case.

[00:05:31] Ghazenfer: 

So I mean the ABA therapy is so manual and paper heavy. I’m curious why nobody has thought about this before. It’s 2025.

[00:05:44] Patrick : 

It is 2025. It’s interesting actually, I’m a bit of a student of history and there have actually been a number of attempts to build systems like this over time and they’ve had different failure points for different reasons. So starting off in the early two thousands, there were some folks who started to build computer-based systems to deliver DTT programs.

DTT being a structured type of lesson delivery that you can use to build essentially language skills. So you’ll work on, you know, matching and then being able to label things and you can kind of build these skills up to have a foundation which can help learners speak, which is often something that kids with autism are working on early on in their therapy journey.

So it’s been a known thing that this is a process that could be potentially better if it was done digitally. But in the initial forays into trying to solve these problems and to digitize things. One of the big issues was actually the delivery mechanism. So when you’re working with really young learners, often learners are between three or five when they’re working on these kinds of skills.

Being, doing something on a computer with a mouse is really not very practical. So some of the first systems that were developed had a lot of the right materials and  you know, could be used to work on these types of programs. But one of the big challenges there was that it was still a computer mouse era in the early two thousands.

And that mechanism of interacting with the lessons really was not perfect for this population. It’s fairly abstract. It’s something you have to learn and for learners to be able to do these programs by themselves. It just didn’t make the most sense. So, those programs were introduced and had some level of success, but really never stuck around because of that impracticality of using a computer with a mouse in the middle of a therapy session.

It’s just not really what you traditionally envision. So the first programs were developed using that kind of technique and the real opportunity to start building these kinds of systems didn’t emerge until around 2010 when the iPad became more prevalent. The iPad is a really interesting piece of technology because the touchscreen interface just changes the way that you interact with technology in a really fundamental way.

Because it’s so much more intuitive. So if you think about it like using a computer and mouse, there’s a pretty large layer between you and the computer interface that you’re interacting with. It’s fairly abstract and it is, you know, typically gonna require being in a pretty confined space.

You need to be basically at a desk in order to do something with a computer mouse or even a touch pad. But when you think about something like an iPad, you can take that anywhere and the way that we interact with iPads is much more similar to the way that we interact with things in the natural world by, you know, physically touching it.

So it’s a type of interface that really is much more suitable for younger learners because they can more or less naturally pick up how they’re going to interact with this technology. And the feedback loop between the action that they take and the response that they see is much tighter than it is when you’re working with a computer or mouse.

So starting in that era, the type of technology that we developed became possible to develop but the processing speeds and the memory required to kind of run complex systems like this,you know were a little bit less than perfect and it took a while, I think, for people to recognize how foundational, you know, the iPad was going to be for, you know, the types of things that you could be doing with learners in this population.

So, post iPad era, there have been a few projects that have worked on something similar to what we’ve developed. The challenges that they faced were really surrounding images. So, what first work does in a lot of cases is, you know, uses a really vast library of digital images in order to start to build these foundational language concepts.

And in order to do this properly, you need images of just about everything which is,you know, a pretty big ask for somebody to develop for a fairly niche space. So, There’s about 80,000 BCBAs. It’s a large space and you know, BCBA works with technicians so they can serve a large number of clients.

But this isn’t, you know, this isn’t like some general healthcare is the thing that applies to lots and lots of people. It’s fairly niche so not that many people know about the problem effectively and economically. Developing a solution that required, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of images was really difficult in that 2010s era.

The primary way to get images was through stock photos. If anybody’s ever purchased stock photos, you’ll know that they’re actually pretty expensive. If you need a couple, not a big deal, a couple dollars. But if you need, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of images and for them to be very specific, sourcing them effectively becomes challenging.

Editing them to fit criteria becomes challenging. So that whole project becomes like really difficult. That’s one of the things that has changed recently where the ability to get photorealistic images and the cost of stock photos have really gone down significantly since the introduction of generative AI has really changed the game when it comes to images.

So that’s been another hurdle that was sort of reduced right around the time we started to work on this project. Actually a funny story is somebody once cited me like a really high number for a fairly large set of images that would’ve been potentially good for first work and right around then things started to change and the cost of images decreased significantly and became.

More approachable to work on this problem. so I know that was sort of a very long-winded, explanation, but in effect what’s been happening over time is that the cost of producing this kind of technology and the systems that are needed to deliver these kinds of programs have really shifted in such a way that it only became possible to really effectively deliver this kind of solution.

In the last couple of years so, you know, our timing has just turned out to be very good, relative to some of the other attempts to work on this problem, despite the fact that it’s been pretty consistent over the last 20 years or so.

[00:11:48] Ghazenfer: 

Yeah, with my background. So, before starting this business, a few years before even Apple and Android came, they changed everything.

So, devices need to be powerful, the OS on a device needed to be controlled by the same company. In the past it was very different. So those were the challenges, and now those things are easier. And now as you also mentioned about the tablet that’s the right age, like for all those youngsters.

Mostly, we haven’t talked about the age, but I’m assuming for all those younger kids. The default tablet is the go-to device because they’re not getting the phone at this age. So my kids, we’re not giving them until eighth grade, so that means the only device they have is the tablet and anybody can use it, including my mom , who doesn’t know how to read.

[00:12:43] Patrick : 

It’s, I think people really underestimate how significant that development is, you know, kind of the modern world of technology that we have. You know, even things about, if you’ve been to a hospital recently, almost everybody in the hospital seems to have a tablet.

Like that’s,You know, something that makes all of this technology so much more mobile and, you know, when it’s the mobility, when is the ease of use just combining all these things together really, you know, has changed I think the application landscape in a way that was probably hard to imagine when this kind of technology was initially developed.

It kind of seemed nifty and cool, but especially in the healthcare space, there’s just so much that is really enabled by tablet-based technology, especially as costs have gone down, it becomes very accessible to get, you know, hundreds or thousands of Android tablets. So,you know, it’s sort of the, I think it’s the foundational step to a lot of things that are happening today that often goes underappreciated in terms of its significance.

[00:13:44] Ghazenfer: 

Okay. And is this, can you talk a little bit more about, specifically about the app? Obviously there’s a business part, but in terms of like maybe a quick intro of, or maybe a, I would say a virtual walkthrough of like how the app is and is it for iPhone and Android?

[00:14:06] Patrick : 

Yeah, no, of course. So it’s

[00:14:08] Ghazenfer: 

So it’s for therapists, parents, for kids.

[00:14:10] Patrick : 

We can give a bit of a high-level description. So, First Work is available on iOS and Android devices. It’s primarily used in the professional setting by therapists. So it’ll often be on a therapy technician’s device. They’ll use it to deliver these programs directly. So first work programs are in the discreet trial training format, which is gonna be unfamiliar to a lot of people.

But really what discrete trial training is a way to present a sort of breakdown. Single instance of some kind of learning activity in such a way that you can really easily analyze how well a person is doing with that. So if you think about, you know, a reference I like to make often is if you think about a traditional worksheet, like a math worksheet, there might be 10 questions on the worksheet.

You’re gonna do all 10 questions, and then afterwards somebody is going to score it and they’re gonna tell you how you did. Discrete trial training is more about breaking that down into much smaller units of analysis. So we can say, here’s the first question. It’s, you know, two plus two equals four.

And if you start to write a three we might stop you right there and say, okay, like, let’s take a step back. Let’s try to really laser focus on this single question, and we’re not gonna move on to the next question until we’ve correctly solved this question. So it’s a way of breaking down a bigger learning activity into smaller learning activities and being able to quickly analyze and error correct, so that you’re not going far down the path of making some mistakes.

And you know, kind of doing all this useless learning. Instead when mistakes are going to happen you’re able to really contradict that very quickly and help learners make the correct association because it’s a behaviorally informed type of learning. A big concept in discrete trial training is reinforcement.

So when you get the correct answer, we wanna make sure that it’s really clear and it’s really rewarding to get that correct answer. So you try to kind of promote more of that where if you get the incorrect answer, we’re gonna be trying to do error correction as quickly as possible so you’re not going down that path and sort of going too far off into left field. Once we notice that there’s a kind of mistake happening.

Bringing it into the first word context. A lot of the time we’re working on things like matching or being able to pair a word with an image, things like this, which are really foundational components of the types of things we need to know in order to understand language and be able to use it. So, you know, if you’re thinking about the concept of language, a lot of the time, you know, there’s images, there’s spoken word, there’s written words, and so you can work on all of these things in discrete trial training format.

And be able to essentially provide those proper associations between two different things. So First Work is able to deliver these programs, it scores them automatically, it provides error correction automatically. It sort of does all of the things that would traditionally be done by that technician.

But it does it in a really consistent and effective manner, the exact way that you set it up and the really kind of unique component of First Work is that it also has a reinforcement system built into it. Make the learning activities a little bit more engaging for learners, so there’s lots and lots of really fun and distracting things on any tablet.

So that’s one of the things that you know, we’ve kind of baked into our application during learning lessons. When you’re supposed to be doing your questions, you can’t access fun applications. So if you try to go, open up YouTube, for instance, YouTube will not be available and the neat thing with that is that we can lift that restriction on a conditional basis.

After you complete your programs, you can earn time on these fun apps , to really kind of incentivize you to engage in the experience and to provide a sufficient reward for the effort that you’re putting in. So that’s kind of a behavioral component of the application that,you know, just makes it more fun and engaging and also creates a bit more of a focused environment.

So it’s a fairly complicated system from an outsider’s perspective, I imagine but really breaking it down. What our application does is delivers these programs the way that you would traditionally deliver them with flashcards and then provides reinforcement or  rewards in the form of access to fun applications after you’ve completed your programs which is an optional component of the application, but often is something that really motivates learners to enjoy the experience and want to engage in it more.

[00:18:29] Ghazenfer: 

Absolutely. Kids love those competitions, getting the rewards for doing stuff. So, it makes them more competitive and challenging.

[00:18:41] Patrick : 

Exactly. Rewards are very important.

[00:18:44] Ghazenfer:

So talk about the growth. So you got to 25,000 professionals and families in such a short time. How did you get it, if there are any lessons learned along the way, any challenges that you encountered?

[00:18:58] Patrick : 

It’s a great question. It’s definitely been a big continual learning process for me.

This is the first business that I’ve started in the technology space. So I’ve really learned a lot about marketing and product development, along the way. So the general philosophy that we have with First Work is we have a very consultative process where we are very feedback forward.

We kind of put something out there. We share it with folks who might be interested and then they tell us what they think and then we try to incorporate that back into the application as quickly as possible. So really listening to your users and being able to take the things that they take, that they say very seriously and be able to build those into features and ways to make your system better is something that’s really proven very important for us.

 That’s how we’ve developed everything in the application and is a really great way to make sure that you’re always solving real problems for people or not, you know, sort of making them up based on what you think is important as opposed to, you know, really responding to a user’s need. So that’s probably been the most important thing for the growth of the application is that we started off with something that we knew that people would find helpful but at a fairly limited level.

You know, we weren’t trying to make the most comprehensive solution. We were trying to solve a fairly small problem, as well as we could. At the MVP level, and then we’re able to really make that system much more robust over time by working very closely with users and then the other side of that growth has really been just being very present in the community as much as we can.

So we, you know, are always sharing about the application, looking at different channels where we can talk about it, different people that we can meet who might be interested in it. It’s a fairly small space. That is true in a lot of cases in the healthcare sector where, you know, it’s when you’re in a niche there’s only so many people in that niche.

So,you know, as long as you kind of keep building those relationships and finding new ways to share about what you’re doing that’s often a really great way to just create more opportunities for people to see value in it and wanna try it out as long as you provide it an easy way for people to do that

And you know, that’s something we also are really focused on. I think in most cases, if you have something that people are interested in, you’ll see a lot of growth.

[00:21:15] Ghazenfer: 

Cool. Who provides the content is that you or therapists are able to also provide their own contents.

[00:21:23] Patrick : 

We developed a lot of content based on things that we know that just about everybody is doing.

But we do now have components in the application which allow people to add their own materials and then everything is very deeply customizable. So ABA in general and then DTT in specific are highly customizable. That’s kind of the whole premise of this therapy approach is to be able to really personalize things to a specific learner.

You wanna meet kids where they are, you know, address the specific situations of their life and not kind of take a very broad view. So that’s an important part of the application is that everything you can do inside of it is very deeply customizable. You don’t, You know, you’re not conscripted into doing things one way.There’s lots and lots of ways to do basically everything inside of the app.

[00:22:11] Ghazenfer:

I noticed that you also were part of the Wharton’s Venture Lab Accelerator program. So , how did your time there shape your approach in building and scaling First Work?

[00:22:24] Patrick : 

Yeah, I learned a lot while I was there. It’s a, you know, really wonderful program with great mentorship and I’m still in close touch with a lot of folks from that universe and I think the thing that helped me the most with was really understanding and prioritizing the things which are most important and to me those things are, you know, essentially product-led growth, like being very laser focused on solving real problems and solving them better every day.

And then also. Effectively spreading the word about what you’re doing. I think that those are, you know, very general concepts. I think one of the things that’s tricky about entrepreneurship is that there’s no silver bullet. There’s no easy way to do anything. You just have to apply a reasonable framework, focus on the right things, and just show up every day and can keep getting better.

So the big thing I took away from that is really just like what those North stars should be and seeing from different people who have, you know, been through those programs or have gone much further down the road than we have how that typically looks and kind of where you can easily fall off the rails.

So, you know, folks are often very focused on things that aren’t important and I think that’s kind of the biggest thing to stray away from is trying to align yourself with things that really are important. In my mind, there’s really very few things that are important.

It’s, you know, making sure you have a product that solves a real problem, solving that problem better than you did yesterday and being able to share that with people in a credible and compelling way which is really what sales and marketing is about. So, it’s probably a bit, a non-answer.

But,  I did learn a whole lot there and it really helped kind of frame my mindset surrounding entrepreneurship.

[00:24:13] Ghazenfer: 

Yeah, no, no. And these accelerators play a big role in a lot of these startup growth. So that mentorship in some cases, funding and guidance, those are all so invaluable.Yeah, For sure. So talk about building an app. How was your experience? Did you have a prior experience in building any software application or was this the first time? How did you go?

[00:24:41] Patrick : 

Yeah, building an application has been a learning experience of a lifetime for me, for sure.

So I personally did not have any significant experience in building applications. I’ve always been interested in technology but I have very limited coding experience myself so needed support on that side of developing this. So we work with Technology Rivers and we also work with our internal.

Tech lead, Thaddeus, who has been the person who’s really been driving a lot of that forward for us. It’s definitely an interesting process. I think that one thing which I learned is that it’s more approachable in certain senses than it seems like there are resources and ways for you to get things developed, even if you aren’t a developer yourself.

And a lot of the time. I think non-developers can serve an important role in the product development side of things. So like most of the conceptual work, but writing good code is something that requires people who know how to write good code. So if you can’t do that you certainly need to find somebody who can help you with that otherwise you’re gonna be in trouble.

So it’s been a really interesting process. I think that for me, the things that I found are really important is starting off with a strong foundation, you know, if you build a castle on  sand like it’s gonna collapse at some point and things are really gonna go wrong. So that was something that we found was really helpful with working with Technology Rivers just being able to know that, you know, we took really close attention to detail with the foundational things that were important which really set us up for continued development over time that we’ve done much more internally being able to build on something that we know is not gonna break and is not, you know, causing problems.

And we’ve asked all the right questions and made the right infrastructural decisions. So I think that when you’re building something like paying close attention to detail when it comes to the infrastructure is critically important. Otherwise, you’re gonna, even if you are having great success in other parts of the business, you’re gonna find yourself in some situation that will.

Be a, you’ll have a big problem at some point. So you really need to make sure that you have a strong infrastructure and then from there, I think that the development process becomes a lot more consultative and more product focused. What I mean by that is more conceptual as opposed to technical where once you have something that people can really provide real feedback on.

Then it’s more about listening to users, prioritizing the things that are most important and finding ways to effectively solve the problems that people see in your system. There will inevitably be problems with anything that you develop. So I think having an open mind to,you know, other people’s perspectives and really kind of taking it seriously essentially that, you know, the feedback that people provide you is a great gift.

I mean, it’s like the best thing you can ever hear is really solid, constructive feedback on what you’ve developed. If you always are listening for that and looking for that actively you’ll find yourself developing a product that people really want over time.It’s, you know, kind of just a process of listening and developing  back and forth. Eventually, you know, sometimes years later, you’ll wake up and you’ll look at what you developed and you’ll see that, you know, there’s just so much that’s happened and as long as you’re listening to people who are really using it, everything you develop will be something that’s meaningful to at least somebody.

And so some of the art is understanding what kind of feedback is, you know, more general and what feedback is very niche and maybe only applies to a couple people. But as long as you’re listening to people and developing things based on what they say you’ll find yourself with something that’s meaningful to a lot of people.

[00:28:29] Ghazenfer: 

Yeah, you are spot on. So I think the two issues you talked about building the right foundation that’s definitely the key. Many times I have noticed as part of work when we are talking or when we take over some of the  existing projects. Many times,the approaches are you just build something for, but even now you can just build still a cheaper MVP.

But having the right foundation, the technology is so much available that you don’t have to really spend months and years building the strong foundation. The foundation has to be good from day one and then you can gradually expand. Yeah. So that’s definitely key and the second part, you touched this really.

The product management part, the prioritization, because you’ll have so much feedback coming. Everybody wants different things. How do you manage that? How do you control that? Because, if you start building everything for everybody, it’s a never ending feature war. So you have to figure it out, prioritize it, and maybe sometimes combine those and adjust those.

And those are the common challenges and discussions that we see all the time doing our work with the startup founders and bringing people right on the path is very critical. So absolutely. That’s a good lesson learned.

[00:29:51] Patrick :

Yeah. It’s , I think the art of product development, as you kind of alluded to there is really about at least once you have your infrastructure in place is it.

Yeah,prioritization. It’s kind of what it’s all about because you’re right, like there’s often too much feedback which is a good problem to have if you have too much feedback probably you’re doing a good job at building something that people care about and communicating about it effectively with people.

But ultimately some things are, you know, if you have a list of 10 things people want one of them is in reality more important to more people than you know, something else and so being able to figure out what those things are what needs to come first and what can come later is really where I think the kind of delicate art of doing much better or much worse really comes in.

[00:30:37] Ghazenfer: 

So what does the future of first work look like? More automation, more personalizations, more integrations, based on your current understanding of whether you’re gonna be pivoting or staying there because startups learn all the time, so.

[00:30:55] Patrick : 

No, we’re, so the last year or so was really spent on enhancing customization and enhancing the scope of what you can do on the platform.

We’ve now reached a point where the scope is maybe not maximal like there are always more things that you could do with any given system but we’re covering the vast majority of things that people want to do with this kind of system. And the customization options are quite wide as well. So right now we’re focusing a little bit more on.

Implementation and fitting into ecosystems is a bigger focus of ours. So, you know, really making sure that the way that the system is deployed and the way that it exists inside of other structures as all technology does is as good as possible. So thinking a lot more about, you know, that deployment level, that active use level and how we can make things easier so that we’re saving more time and fitting in better with other systems.

You know, having those integrative components is the next stage for us. Now that the core content and functional components are pretty much in place though of course there’s always ongoing developments that will be happening there to  increase customization and increase the scope.

But I think that typically a path that a lot of products take is that you focus on solving the problem well.Then once you have solved the problem, well then it’s about. How do we solve this problem in context? How do we solve this problem at large organizations versus small organizations, you know, versus more individual use and making sure that you can really fit into the use cases where you know your product is important as well as possible because that’s often something that, you know, it’s not worth thinking about until you’re solving the problem or maybe not that it’s not worth thinking about, but that’s a less important issue I think at the earlier stages. Then once you do have something that’s really doing what you want it to then it becomes.

Much more important to make sure that all the context is in a good place.

[00:32:50] Ghazenfer: 

One last question. What do you know now that you wish you had known at the start of this journey?

[00:32:58] Patrick : 

That’s a good question. Interesting. I’ll have to think about that one for a second. I think the thing that I wish that I knew is that a lot of.

So there’s this saying that I had a professor would share a lot and it was to sell, measure, build as opposed to build, measure, sell. And the idea there was that you can come to an understanding of what people need, talk with them about how it needs to look and then build it afterwards.

And that’s gonna be the best way for you to cut out a huge portion of the journey. And we took that approach or at least I thought we were taking that approach but You know as we’ve gotten further and further into this and learn more and more, I realize just how much you can do before you’ve built anything

And you can save so much time, so much money, and not to say that we had, we did a poor job at that, but just how deep you can go into that concept and get to a place where your MVP cycle is very short your pre-revenue cycle is very short and being able to build something that people want as quickly as possible.

And so I think the thing that I’ve learned is that is a very true axiom that you can really go by is that you should try to sell, measure, build instead of build, measure, sell that the way you can do that is by, you know, asking the right types of questions and being able to get that concrete feedback that often doesn’t actually require having something in people’s hands.

It’s often even easier to get that kind of feedback before you’re selling something and before you’re, you know, trying to have somebody use your MVP, which might not be perfect, and all these things like you can get really close to the truth without building anything. I think that’s something that I understood in a conceptual sense, but didn’t quite understand in a practical and applied sense in the same way that I do today, where if I were to start another technology business today, I would do things pretty differently and wouldn’t spend a dollar or move an inch until I was really close to something that people were like begging for.

You know, like  you can get to a point with any kind of development process. On a conceptual level where people are willing to give you money before you have anything at all and I think that’s a much better way to approach, you know, venture development than when you want to get started quickly.

can often be a, you know, cart you for the horse kind of situation.

[00:35:27] Ghazenfer: 

Yeah, a lot of temptation on building first. So, and that’s common or amazing advice. Now we all receive, build your customer first, find your first customer, then start. But it’s still the best advice if I do my next. That’s what I also believe that finding a customer’s trust first, and then building for that. 

Thanks Patrick. So we have been talking with Patrick Vega, CEO of first work, who’s solving this amazing problem for the kids. The autism where it’s essentially every minute spent on paperwork is a minute not spending and connecting with a child. That’s the problem Patrick is solving. Patrick, where can people. Find you where they can learn more about you. If you have anything you wanna share with our audience

[00:36:28] Patrick : 

no, please connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me. My name is Patrick Faga. It should be easy to find there. Otherwise, our website is first work app.com.

We have lots of great testimonials and just information about the application. If you wanted to check it out for whatever reason you could do that there as well. So I would love to connect with anybody who’s listening here. It’s always great to expand the network and just get to know more people in the space.

[00:36:53] Ghazenfer: 

Thank Patrick. So if you’re listening and building something in education, healthcare therapy space, this is exactly the kind of challenge we love to solve at Technology Rivers. We specialize in building software that reduces burnout, streamline workflows, and help teams scale impact. You can learn more about technology rivers.com.  Thanks again, Patrick. Thanks for having you on the show.

[00:37:17] Patrick : 

Yes. Thank you so much. It was wonderful