AI App Development for Founders with Ghazenfer Mansoor

[00:00:00] Ghazenfer Mansoor: 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 experts for everything.

[00:00:24] 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.

[00:00:36] Anika Jackson: 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.

[00:00:58] There’s a number 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 the 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.

[00:01:18] As 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.

[00:01:38] He’s also the author of Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps that People Love, Use, and Share Every Day, 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.

[00:02:01] Please welcome to Your Brand Amplified, Ghazenfer Mansoor. Thank you so much for being here today. I’m really excited to dive into our conversation.

[00:02:09] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for having me, Anika.

[00:02:12] Anika Jackson: Let’s talk a little bit about 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?

[00:02:24] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Before starting Technology Rivers, I had my own startup, a recruitment software startup, and I learned product development the hard way. I was a technical person  I worked with two startups as an early engineer, with a computer science degree  and I thought the same as most tech people think: “I know how to build the tech.”

[00:02:48] But building a product is different than just writing code or building an application; you also need to know what needs to be built. We learned the hard way. We built a strong application, a really strong foundation, and a strong back end. We spent so much time building, and then when we put it out, nobody came.

[00:03:10] We looked at all the competitors. Our product was very good, but that’s when we realized we needed to solve a specific problem. We looked at the use cases: who are we selling to? What recruiters are looking for, what job seekers are looking for, what the typical flow would be.

[00:03:34] So we went back to the whiteboard, did the product strategy again, redesigned the user experience, everything, then relaunched the product  and started getting customers. That was a lesson learned the hard way, after spending more than $100,000 on the product.

[00:03:52] Anika Jackson: Wow.

[00:03:52] Ghazenfer Mansoor: After that, when I started this business, I realized we don’t want others to make the same mistake. I see around me people coming from different backgrounds in the DC area a lot of government contracting people, corporate backgrounds too.

[00:04:01] When you have infinite money, especially with government work, you get used to that model of “keep building it, we’ll figure out what we want once we build and show.” Startups don’t have that kind of money to experiment with someone else’s funding.

[00:04:21] So we built this model: help founders build the product the right way the first time, so they’re not experimenting. Yes, products iterate. I don’t mean to contradict typical agile, where you put things in front of the customer. But once you get the initial discovery, you know exactly what you need for the initial MVP, and you want to build that right, not experiment on it.

[00:04:48] With that model, we started, and looking back, the majority of our customers are still coming in that way. In fact, even this morning I had a call with someone who built a whole healthcare product with a team that didn’t know about the compliance part.

[00:05:22] How can you have someone build the whole product not knowing that means your foundation is not right? It’s like building a house and realizing, “We’ll add the basement later.” Good luck with that. Those are the challenges we see all the time.

[00:05:47] It’s sad to see founders spending a good amount of money, running out of it, and then coming to us wanting to fix it. Many times it’s a full rewrite  not just a patch. Sometimes it’s possible, sometimes it’s not. Every product is different, and sometimes it just needs to go in a different direction. Those are the challenges we see all the time, and that was the core focus of starting this business.

[00:06:07] Anika Jackson: I think you raised some really interesting and intriguing points. You have to have a strong foundation. You have to think through all the obstacles, the compliance issues, your ideal customer persona, and make sure that’s tight as you’re starting.

[00:06:28] And it may change, 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 USC for a graduate program, and a lot of my students want to start apps. It’s interesting because they have a semester to figure out how to do it, build a business case, and create something.

[00:06:53] The number of times people pivot as they iterate and do real research is astronomical. So the fact that you’re helping founders who have a real product going to market, with some funding, to solve these things  it’s so important, it’s vital.

[00:07:16] I have a background in marketing strategy and public relations, and it’s the same thing on my side. The number of founders who say, “Here’s my brand,” but don’t really know who they’re selling to or how they’re going to position it, is also astounding. I really applaud you for doing this work across startups to enterprise systems.

[00:07:44] What was the early moment, beyond your own company, where you realized it’s not just about technical ability, it’s business strategy first?

[00:07:54] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That pattern was visible pretty early as we started working with different customers. Some customers know exactly what they want, they have the right team, so they just need help building the right foundation, the right product. We have customers with a really good product team who just want our team as the implementation partner.

[00:08:25] In some cases, they have their own architects and CTO, and we become the implementation partner. In other cases, we become the CTO and provide the product strategy too. We offer all of those services, but every customer is different.

[00:08:46] The moment we see a non-technical founder and this is where it matters, because the majority of our customers are non-technical, and many of them are physician entrepreneurs. They come from a healthcare background. They’re subject matter experts, but not technical experts. They have an idea, and because they’re visionaries, they’re so deep in that vision they just want to throw it out: “This is what I want to do.”

[00:09:03] Then developers start building because you’re telling them what to build, and nobody is there in between stopping, readjusting, and prioritizing the scope. The strategy is the key part. As someone said, I don’t remember if it was Einstein. “If I have an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes figuring out how, and the last five minutes solving the actual problem.”

[00:09:34] That’s key in everything. Have you ever built a house by saying, “I’m gonna build the room and we’ll figure it out”? No, you put everything on paper. Your blueprint is the key, and that’s what we teach our customers: your blueprint is the most important part.

[00:09:54] You want to draw out exactly how everything is going to work before you write a single line of code, because that’s the most expensive part of the build. Before that, everything is on paper, everything is design changes are easier and quicker there.

[00:10:12] Anika Jackson: And you’ve built over 130 projects at this point?

[00:10:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yes, around that number.

[00:10:21] Anika Jackson: Is there something you wish you’d known when you started that you know now?

[00:10:29] Ghazenfer Mansoor: It’s the same, the blueprint process, the strategy. Even in my own products, that’s where we struggled: how do you convince customers this is the right way to do it? As you’d see in marketing too, people doing it another way already believe “this is the right way.” They want to learn the hard way.

[00:10:44] We’ve seen it so many times  people are overconfident. They come to us and say, “I need a developer, an app developer, a React Native developer.” Why do you need it? Realize you don’t need a developer to build a product.

[00:11:02] Sometimes it may not even require an app developer. Sometimes you can solve the problem with a clickable prototype in Figma, or use AI to create a proof of concept with web coding to get feedback from your customer before you’re ready to build. That’s the scary part.

[00:11:36] Anika Jackson: This segues perfectly into my next section. I love using AI, I love talking about best use cases for it, and AI for business growth is one of the hot topics right now. You’re one of the few people who actually uses it appropriately. What are founders getting wrong with AI adoption right now?

[00:12:05] Where are they over-investing, and what are they ignoring that would actually be huge opportunities?

[00:12:10] Ghazenfer Mansoor: AI is still a big learning curve for everybody, including myself. New things come every single day, and AI technology moves even faster than other tech. The biggest thing I recommend is spending time learning AI.

[00:12:28] That’s the most important part, because just treating AI like “it’s a prompt, you upload your document and search”  that’s not really AI. I mean, yes it is, but it’s just a small piece, and often it gives you the wrong result. You have to know how the technology really works.

[00:12:53] If you have a huge amount of data, how do you use it? The biggest mistake I’ve seen people make is assuming AI is going to give them everything without giving their own data in return. You have to have the right data.

[00:13:13] AI gives you the output of what you give it. If your data isn’t right, your workflows aren’t right, your processes aren’t right, AI isn’t going to solve it, it’s going to expose it. Now you’re more exposed because you didn’t have the right processes. You have to work on those, and provide your own data and context.

[00:13:34] It takes a lot more time to do that. I’ve seen people rely on a good prompt to try to solve a problem with AI, but that’s a very small piece of it. No matter how good your prompts are, if you’re not giving the right context, if you don’t have the right data, it won’t work.

[00:13:58] AI doesn’t know about you. It doesn’t know about your business. Yes, it gradually comes to understand your conversation, but there’s a lot more to it: how you think, how you like to present information. I like to do it a certain way, and that’s my way.

[00:14:20] AI has to be given that context accordingly.

[00:14:24] Anika Jackson: You’re one of the few people who’s actually building products with AI that equate to business growth. What does 10X growth look like through AI when it actually works for real clients?

[00:14:41] Ghazenfer Mansoor: When it comes to 10X growth, most service businesses don’t have a real differentiator. They’re differentiated from competitors by having slightly better service, better people, a faster process  but not a real differentiator. They’re using the same CRM, the same tools available to the whole industry, whether it’s pet care or healthcare.

[00:15:08] To create a differentiator, you want something unique to your business, something your competitors cannot copy. Whether it’s getting to leads quickly, automating certain processes, delivering faster, communicating with customers, or providing information through a dashboard.

[00:15:29] You want to automate your unique workflows, the specific cases creating a bottleneck. Some of that automation may already be available; some you might build as a quick AI agent. You still want a human in the loop, but you want to automate parts of it.

[00:15:53] Those workflows have to be very specific to your business, that’s what creates a differentiator. If you’re giving a quote to your customers, is there a way to give it faster than your competitor?

[00:16:09] It doesn’t have to be the same thing available to everybody, it could be anything. There could be hundreds of use cases, but you want to ask: 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 needing to talk to my pharmacist first.

[00:16:35] Whatever those are, you want to work on them, because once customers see that differentiator, they come to you and you’re solving their problem. That’s how you bring more efficiency. More efficiency means more customers you can service, more revenue, more profitability.

[00:16:53] Anika Jackson: It’s fascinating, because really the use case of using AI to 10X our businesses is still fundamentals. Whether you use AI or not, you have to have differentiators for your brand, your product, your service, things that make you stand out against competition.

[00:17:15] Ghazenfer Mansoor: True. I used to talk about 10X growth through technology. With AI, it’s much easier and faster to do the same things you were doing before. Building tech used to be very expensive. It still is in many ways, but now it’s a survival thing.

[00:17:26] If you don’t learn AI, you’re not going to be able to survive, so it’s important. The bigger issue I’ve seen is people are scared  they feel “we’re not ready for that investment,” or “it’s a big undertaking, it’s for somebody else.”

[00:17:51] In reality, it’s more of a small investment you do gradually, building smaller pieces. Think of it this way: if you hire one additional consultant to do part of the job, even part-time, ten hours a week, you’re still paying for that person. That’s the cost.

[00:18:19] You’re paying somewhere to address it. Manual work has always been more expensive; it just doesn’t look as expensive as it is in reality.

[00:18:32] Anika Jackson: That’s such a good point. Even for myself, my MBA specializes in AI and ML  I have to weigh the cost-benefit analysis. I could do something myself to strengthen my business, but if I don’t have the time to work through the kinks with an API or make sure the workflow flows to the right database, it eats up my valuable time.

[00:19:10] So it’s the same thing: how much can you invest, whether it’s time or money? Are you hiring other people? Will you have to train them on exactly what you want for your business?

[00:19:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: True. We can delegate some of our work to buy back our time, that’s fine. But then how do you repeat that process long-term so it’s automated and you’re able to track it?

[00:19:38] Anika Jackson: I want to talk about the app economy in general. You have a book, Beyond the Download, and I feel like a lot of people are moving toward apps. We hear whispers that we won’t be using websites the same way everything’s going to be on an app.

[00:20:01] The book is called Beyond the Download because the premise is: getting people to download should be the easy part. What are founders measuring that they shouldn’t be, when it comes to downloads and other app metrics?

[00:20:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The most important issue is that founders aren’t tracking, most of the time. They’re focusing on the download, but downloading is just a start. You have to look beyond the download. We all have hundreds of apps on our phones.

[00:20:52] How many do you go back to again and again? You want to create an app people use that brings users back again and again. Not only do they come back, but they engage with other users and share it, because the more they share, the more they use it.

[00:21:24] The more it’s solving their problem, the more app stores, Apple, Google, and your users will recognize it, leading to more adoption. More adoption means more ways of monetizing from all of these activities.

[00:21:29] Anika Jackson: It’s funny you should say that  I was looking at my phone today trying to log into an app I hadn’t used in a while, and it made me sign in again. I didn’t remember my username.

[00:21:40] I have a lot of apps that show as “not downloaded” simply because I haven’t used them. That’s one of your premises  95% of apps fail in year one. So moving beyond the download, what should people be paying attention to, and what can they do to keep engaging audiences?

[00:22:07] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The book has about 32 chapters covering different strategies, it’s not just one. Different types of applications need different strategies. Take Uber versus DoorDash  if one sends you a push notification about a new deal, 20% off, you go back to that one instead of the other.

[00:22:26] You get emails, you have other ways of creating rewards for users. All of that matters, some strategies are built inside the app, some outside. But the most important thing is the app itself has to be good, it has to be remarkable, super easy to use, with better design, so people don’t feel lost in it.

[00:23:12] I wouldn’t say one strategy is best versus another, every business is different, and you have to follow certain rules, especially around compliance, for what you can and can’t do. But there are different strategies you can apply.

[00:23:38] And the most important part is tracking. You want to know all the numbers of downloads, what people are using, how they’re using the app, on what screen, how much time they spend, where they drop off. Once you have that data, you can make a lot of decisions based on it.

[00:23:59] Anika Jackson: Those are excellent points. I think the first call to action here is: buy the book, because you share a lot more strategies. Even for podcasting, it’s the same thing I need to pay attention to analytics.

[00:24:17] How much time are people spending listening? Not just that they listened, but what time of day, what day of the week, where the traffic is coming from  that helps me figure out if I’m releasing episodes at the right time, or if I need other hooks.

[00:24:32] Every business needs to pay attention to this, but apps particularly  if you invest a lot in an app with a 95% failure rate, you have to be really careful to make sure you’re making a strong investment in your product.

[00:24:54] Anika Jackson: 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?

[00:25:09] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The biggest advantage  as someone once said, “If I want to get work done cheaper or quicker, I’ll find a lazy developer, because they’ll find an easy way to do it.” If you’re scrappy, you have to figure out: “I don’t have the money. What’s the easiest way to get this done?”

[00:25:24] Maybe just building one feature. You need that discipline. The bigger challenge, once you have money, is that people start building too many features.

[00:25:46] Then it takes six months to a year to build the whole product before launching, and by the time you launch, things have changed and customers are asking for something else  so there are more months of stabilization. The bigger the project, the more complicated it is, and the more delay it takes.

[00:26:16] We push for every project to be no more than two to three months for an MVP, no matter how big it is, break it into smaller features so it’s never delayed beyond that timeframe. That may mean an internal launch, or launching only to alpha users.

[00:26:41] But you want to get it out so people can start using it, because once they do, you get good feedback and once you have feedback, you gradually improve. I’ve seen products take two or three years to build, only for the team to realize, “This isn’t what we wanted,” and all that investment is gone.

[00:26:59] The sooner you identify the problem, the better. If you have a short timeframe, you want to fail fast. The sooner you fail fast, the sooner you identify the right path.

[00:26:59] Anika Jackson: That’s such an interesting point that’s why it’s called an MVP, minimum viable product. It doesn’t mean everything is done to completion, because things change so fast every day.

[00:27:22] Even with Claude they released a new version, now they have Cowork, Code, constantly adding things. The same thing is happening across the entire ecosystem of technology and AI, and that’s changing how all of us have to look at doing business and staying nimble.

[00:27:32] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. Unfortunately, many people treat it not as a minimum viable product but a maximum viable product that’s where it becomes a bigger problem.

[00:27:43] Anika Jackson: You’ve built over 50 healthcare products, over 23 HIPAA-compliant systems. Most founders hear “HIPAA compliance” and think about cost, delay, complexity. What version of the story are they not hearing?

[00:28:02] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Most people think it means complexity. Yes, it’s complicated, no doubt, but once you know how to do it, it isn’t, for us. People are scared because technology sounds complicated. For us, it’s easy  we’ve built so many that we know how.

[00:28:38] We have a checklist we’ve shared publicly on our website  steps to validate, one for developers, one for QA, one for project managers, so different people can verify whether an app is HIPAA compliant. It’s complicated if you’re building it for the first time, but for people like us who’ve done it repeatedly, it’s not.

[00:29:09] The bigger part people miss: if you’re not compliant, there are penalties. But there’s also a natural confidence factor  even if your app doesn’t have much PHI, telling people “this is a secure app” makes them more likely to use it than an unsecured one.

[00:29:30] The same is true with HIPAA. Many people in healthcare won’t use an app that isn’t compliant. They set that as a minimum criterion. So even if your application doesn’t handle PHI, if you’re selling to healthcare, you want to make sure it’s HIPAA compliant.

[00:29:39] Anika Jackson: That’s a great point, and I think part of what you’re saying is: find the right partner, someone skilled, who’s done this before, with a proven strategy and up-to-date knowledge of compliance.

[00:29:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: True. We recently met a customer who spent two years on an app built by someone else, and after putting healthcare data into it, realized it wasn’t HIPAA compliant. It’s scary  a lot of penalties, so people have to be very careful.

[00:30:16] Anika Jackson: How did you decide to make healthcare one of your core competencies?

[00:30:22] Ghazenfer Mansoor: We naturally moved toward it. I have personal experience on the healthcare side. I worked at the Veterans Health Administration as a consultant in the past. One of our first customers came from healthcare, and gradually we did more and more healthcare work.

[00:30:47] We started working on a project where we learned HIPAA compliance, then did more and more of it, and started getting more leads for that kind of work.

[00:31:00] It was a natural transition, and it’s an interesting space there’s so much demand and interesting work going on. You’re solving real-world problems, patients’ problems, people’s health. There are multiple benefits to it.

[00:31:23] Anika Jackson: I think about this because Google and AI overviews tend to stay away from “your money or your life” topics. Healthcare is obviously one, but also financial, banking, and other highly regulated industries.

[00:31:43] For those not in healthcare, are there other lessons from regulated industries about building products that earn deep trust? Is the lesson to build in as much compliance as possible from the beginning?

[00:32:02] Ghazenfer Mansoor: These are terminologies specific to a vertical, but in reality many of them are similar. With HIPAA, there are rules about what can be done around authentication, authorization, who can access what, audit logging, encryption.

[00:32:30] A lot of that applies to any application handling internal, sensitive data. Even if you don’t deal with healthcare, your business data is still sensitive data, and you want those same protections. I’d highly recommend building an app that’s secure, with pretty much all the checks needed for HIPAA compliance.

[00:32:53] Anika Jackson: Let’s talk about building a custom app versus buying off the shelf, using AI tools, and when to hire. One of the most expensive mistakes founders make is building software they should have bought, or buying tools that can’t scale.

[00:33:12] How do you help a client figure out which decision they’re actually facing?

[00:33:16] Ghazenfer Mansoor: It’s a difficult problem, and quite interesting. Every company has a different DNA. The problem for your business is different from mine. In some cases, one workflow is critical enough that it makes sense to build internally.

[00:33:31] In other cases, using an existing tool helps you grow faster, so you use that. There’s no universal right or wrong. In some cases you’re doing integrations  you don’t want to rebuild everything you already have.

[00:34:15] Think about how many subscriptions you have. A fifty-person company might have more than twenty subscriptions, many with overlapping features, so you’re paying too much. That doesn’t mean you replace everything. I don’t want to build another email server or another CRM. Those are good to have, but you want to build what solves your unique problem.

[00:34:35] There are commoditized services you’ll want to keep using  but AI is changing the dynamics. Now you might ask: if a CRM is just a database, do I still need it? I could build something quickly with AI, use that as my database, get all the dashboards and data, host it myself, and pay less than a subscription to Salesforce or similar.

[00:35:20] But if a service gives you more than just storage  data you’d lose access to, that your business depends on you wanting to keep using it, not build it. It’s really a case-by-case question, nobody has a one-size answer.

[00:35:44] In our case, we run a strategy meeting, go deeper, do an assessment, review workflows, find bottlenecks and manual processes, and see what could be automated. Sometimes it makes sense to move from a spreadsheet to Airtable or a CRM; in another case, build a specific piece or just an integration.

[00:36:12] There’s no one answer that fits everybody.

[00:36:13] Ghazenfer Mansoor: But you want to build something that creates more value, because that’s what will last. To get 10X growth, you need unique things in your business that increase its value.

[00:36:28] Anika Jackson: Let’s talk about Lessons from the Leap  since some of what you’ve discussed are lessons you’ve learned, or seen others learn. What’s the meaning behind that name? Was there a specific leap that inspired it?

[00:36:51] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I wanted to talk to other founders and leaders and learn from their leaps  what leaps helped them get to where they are today. I enjoy stories, learning from other people’s experiences, whether through books or articles.

[00:37:31] Anika Jackson: You’re working with founders in the thick of it, scared, under-resourced, making big bets. What do you find yourself telling them that no one told you when you were starting out?

[00:37:48] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The biggest lesson I learned along the way is trusting the experts, talking to people who’ve done it again and again. If you’re the first one to try something, most people learn the hard way  I did, in my past life  but now I go to experts for everything.

[00:38:23] It’s the same for founders: if you haven’t built an app, talk to people who’ve not only built one but also launched and grown it successfully. Just knowing how to program doesn’t mean you can build something scalable.

[00:38:41] Anybody can be a carpenter, but have they built a high-rise? A bridge that can handle the load? The same applies in software. Have they built an application that can handle millions of users, that’s grown from zero to millions?

[00:39:04] It’s not just about building the app, it’s about building and growing the business. The app is just one medium: a web app, a tool, or a combination. How do you build something scalable that makes a real difference for your business?

[00:39:26] Anika Jackson: Is there something you believe deeply about being a founder that most people would push back on?

[00:39:44] Ghazenfer Mansoor: That’s a difficult question, people have different beliefs. I think the bigger one is that people believe they already know the stuff. Which is fine, but if you haven’t built it, you’re likely to make mistakes and learn the hard way.

[00:40:08] Anika Jackson: I’m raising my hand for that one. Is there an AI tool or capability you think is underutilized by business owners right now?

[00:40:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yes, even just the basics, whether you’re using Claude or ChatGPT, most people are just using prompts. There are skills, connectors  MCP, the Model Context Protocol by Anthropic, which lets you connect with your software, your database, your QuickBooks, and query directly from the AI console.

[00:40:51] Then there are reusable skills you can apply to different data later. Similarly, projects in Claude and ChatGPT let you give upfront context and have the AI act on it.

[00:41:13] For example, I have a project for proposals: I say, “Read the last five emails from this company, check my Google Drive for information about them, search the internet.” It pulls all of their data, and using my templates, generates the output based on what I gave it.

[00:41:50] With just one piece of input, it generates everything  instead of uploading everything manually every time. Learning how to use AI effectively makes a real difference.

[00:42:07] Anika Jackson: Going back to the founder building their first app, what’s one thing you’d tell them to do before spending a single dollar on development?

[00:42:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Articulate your problem the right way. Start creating a blueprint or sketches you know the use case, so explain who your users are and what steps they’ll go through to use the app.

[00:42:39] Create those high-level flows. You don’t need to hire a UX person for this. It could just be a high-level flow explaining, “My vision is that this app does X, Y, and Z. User A comes in and does this.”

[00:43:04] Even that high-level clarity helps. Once you have that, someone  like us can help you build a proper blueprint before development starts. People often come in ready to build, but we still make sure we tighten all the loose ends before starting any development, because that’s the least costly stage to fix things.

[00:43:19] Anika Jackson: You put a lot of lessons learned into Beyond the Download. What should people be able to do after reading it?

[00:43:29] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The most important thing is to start implementing those strategies, and number one is tracking. It doesn’t matter how good or bad your app is if you have the tracking in place, you can see how people are using it.

[00:43:48] If people open the app and don’t come back, you know where to look for the problem, and you can track progress from there. Just like on the web side, you want to track everything people do. If you can track it, you can make better decisions.

[00:44:11] Anika Jackson: Where do you see Technology Rivers going in two or three years?

[00:44:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Growing to be one of the top names in healthcare software development that’s our focus. We have three main pillars: healthcare, AI, and mobile.

[00:44:32] On the mobile side, my book is the main focus; AI and healthcare are the other two areas we’re heavily investing in, deepening our footprint.

[00:44:49] We already rank pretty high when you search for top HIPAA app development companies in the US, we come up number one or two. That’s where most people find us, and as we do more projects, our visibility keeps growing.

[00:45:04] Anika Jackson: Fantastic. Ghazenfer, this has been the kind of conversation I love having. You’ve taken something complicated to most people and made it feel like a decision anybody starting a business can make.

[00:45:31] The 10X-growth-through-AI conversation is happening everywhere, but very few people bring the receipts the way you did. Your book, Beyond the Download, is available, and we’ll have the link in the show notes. Whether you’re building your first app or your fifteenth, I honestly urge everyone to put it on their desk.

[00:45:52] And to everyone listening, if this episode added value to how you’re thinking about AI and scaling your business, please share it with someone who needs it. Thank you again, Ghazenfer, for being a guest on Your Brand Amplified. I’ve really appreciated you bringing your knowledge and expertise to our conversation today.

[00:45:58] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thanks for having me on the show. I really enjoyed it.

[00:46:03] Anika Jackson: Thanks for listening or watching this episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don’t forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.