[0:04] Broadcasting from AM and FM stations around the country. Welcome to the Small Business Administration award-winning School for Startups Radio, where we talk all things small business and entrepreneurship. Now, here is your host, the guy that believes anyone can be a successful entrepreneur, because entrepreneurship is not about creativity, risk, or passion, Jim Beach.

[0:26] Jim Beach: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another exciting School for Startups Radio. I hope you’re having a great day out there riding the roller coaster life of entrepreneurship, making a million dollars and then helping others do the same. Boy, we have got a great show for you today, two great stories from great entrepreneurs. First up, we have Ghazenfer Mansoor. He is going to talk to us about building apps. He has an app-building company and amazing technology. They have been doing this for, I think, 10 years. Started in 2015, I think. Forty employees. It is a great story. You are going to love it. And then Michele Ehrhart is with us to talk about crisis communication and what you do if your company screws up, what to do beforehand, what to do during, what to do after. And she has got a little bit of knowledge. She used to be the head of screw-ups at edX, and I mean that in the good way. She was Vice President of Communications globally, and so she was there in front of the microphone whenever there was a disaster. And we talked about that famous FedEx commercial that we all love from the Super Bowl. I think it was one of the top five commercials of all time. Oh, and today we have a Quick 10, so we are going to play the Quick 10 as well. Today, we will see if we can finally get a winner. Great show. We are going to get started.

[1:58] Jim Beach: Welcome back to the show. Again, thank you so much for being with us. Very excited to welcome my first guest today. He is going to help us understand some of the things going on in this crazy tech world. Please welcome Ghazenfer Mansoor. He is the CEO of Technology Rivers. It is a software development firm specializing in AI-powered solutions. They also do SaaS product development and healthcare technology. He loves to help startups and service-based businesses streamline their operations, automate processes, and scale. He is the author of a new book called Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps That People Love, Use, and Share Every Day. He has also been just award-winning and a very demanded speaker. When you look at his LinkedIn, you really get a sense of someone who is at the cornerstone of this industry.

[2:59] Jim Beach: Ghazenfer, welcome. How are you doing today?

[3:03] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Thank you for having me, Jim.

[3:05] Jim Beach: It is my pleasure. Am I getting the name right? Still Ghazenfer? Absolutely. That is perfect. Great. What part of India is that from? Or is it India or somewhere else?

[3:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I am originally from Pakistan, but that name is common in that region, India, Pakistan, okay, I think some part of the Middle East as well.

[3:26] Jim Beach: Well, certainly Mansour is. I have heard that many times, but your first name is a new one for me. The book, why don’t we start there? Tell us about it. Yeah, thank you.

[5:31] Brian Carruthers: Yeah, I will not be a statistic, I promise.

[3:40] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So I am involved in mobile for a long time. In 2000, when I joined a company in Reston, Virginia, they got a project from a European telecom to build wireless communities at that time. Those were smaller Nokia phones, flip phones, probably you remember those. So building a community on that phone was unique. So that is how I got into mobile. And then I built a wireless home controller proof of concept for Palm. So that was 2000. That is how I got into mobile. Based on that experience, we spun off that startup which was building a mobile platform that was pre-iPhone and Android, and later on, iPhone came, obviously the whole game changed. But because of the prior experience, I have always been involved in mobile. So based on all those experiences of 25 years, I wrote this book called Beyond the Download: How to Build Mobile Apps That People Love, Use, and Share Every Day. Because if you look at your phone, you will probably have so many apps that you cannot even count, and that is a challenge if today you are downloading the apps, because every other application, every other business, has those apps. But the bigger challenge is not the download, but how do you retain the users on those apps? How do you keep them going back to your apps again and again? So there are some strategies that you need to implement that would help you get your users to be involved, to retain those users, to come back again and again. And the more you are using, obviously, your SEO, your visibility, or everything will increase. Apple will feature you. Google will feature you.

[5:34] Jim Beach: If, what, what, how, I felt like there was an “if what” coming. How do I get Apple to feature me? Just do the “people use” the whole strategy, you mean?

[5:44] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So, so you won’t be able to. So let’s say, if you have an app, the reason people are coming back to it, using it every day, that means it has something on it, right? So it is not beyond just solving one problem. It is solving some problem for multiple people. Apple, Google, they have all the data. They pick up all of those things. Obviously, it is just one of the criteria. They have a big list of things that you follow to get featured on their list, to be one of the top. The quality of the app does make a difference. You have to have a remarkable app. You have to have an amazing user experience and design, along with many other things. So you have to follow certain processes and steps in order to get featured by Apple and Google.

[6:36] Jim Beach: Okay, well, we want to talk about that, but we want to get there in a minute. Let’s go back a little bit more. So when we build apps that are sticky like this and get used, and you are so right, my phone has six or seven pages of apps, and I use seven of them, you know. Is that about average?

[7:01] Ghazenfer Mansoor: I would say yes, that sounds right.

[7:04] Jim Beach: Right, about right, yeah, because, I mean, I can’t use more than, I don’t know, very rarely do I use more than seven or eight of them. I think I will go and count as soon as we get off of this, because I will be interested. So what is different about those? Are those all things that are necessities in my life, or I think are necessities? What stands out in that group? Can we make a big comparison of the group to the group that I never use, but I thought it was important enough to download at one point?

[7:33] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, so you download it because you learned about the app for one reason or another. Could be your business, could be your personal. Somebody shared this, x reason, but your needs define what, why you should be using. Like, why are you going back to Facebook every day? Why are you going on TikTok every day? LinkedIn. So all these different apps, not everything is productivity. In fact, none of those are productivity. So why do we keep going back to those apps? They are solving some problems. It is not just about an amazing app that has a beautiful user experience. Yes, that does make a difference, but it is solving a specific problem. Why are we going on Facebook or a dating app or whatever the apps are using? Why are we going there again and again? I think, once you have an answer to that one, that is when you will create the stickiness in the app. You want to provide reasons for your users to come back again and again. And if they forget, you want, that is where the marketing part comes in. Like, if they forget, how do you keep reminding them? How do you create opportunities for them? Sometimes, it could be rewards. Sometimes it could be just notifying them. Sometimes it is about sharing something that your circle is doing, your friend circle, your family circle.

[9:07] Jim Beach: Right? Your policy desig Or get a new client. What are the first steps that you do before you even start programming?

[9:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: In our process, it is like a house. You are building a house. You don’t just start building the house. You create a blueprint of the house. And it is very similar in our business. Building a blueprint even before design is important. It is more important what you build and how you build, rather than the specifics on the technical part. So the very first thing is creating that blueprint of the application. And blueprint meaning you know exactly. There is a process of going deeper discovery, figuring out the specific requirement, why you want to build it, who is it for, what is your target audience. If you are building something, let’s say for senior citizens, it has a totally different approach than if you are building something for kids under 10. Again, it is a different approach. So the blueprint process goes through all of those things. You create those sketches and flows, and once that flow is done, then you create a design of it. And again, that is where you make sure you create based on the specific audience, what those audiences are, what type of stuff they like. And then once you build the design, then you get to the development of the app.

[10:35] Jim Beach: How long does the design take versus development?

[10:46] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Well, there is no easy answer. It really depends on how deep you go into that. Sometimes it could take months, and sometimes you could get it done in a week timeframe. So every application is different. So there are a lot of templates as well you could use as a starting point versus something you really build custom, and that custom experience has its own benefits, but it has its own challenges as well. So again, the house example, building a purely custom house versus picking one of the 50 models that a builder has and says, I want this one. So you can move quickly if you pick one of the existing ones. If you are being purely custom, then everything needs to be reviewed. There are iterations, and once you go through those iterations, those are the ones that take time.

[11:43] Jim Beach: Okay, that makes sense.

[11:45] Jim Beach: And then when we actually get to design and build an app that we want, what are the critical things that we use during the design process? Are you using Agile or one of these other pedagogies or paradigms? What are your thoughts on all of these tools? And then at the end of that, talk to me about, in specific, AI and how that affects your programming phase.

[12:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, so design is an interactive process. You need constant feedback. You have to have all the stakeholders involved, because different people have different input, different taste. So you build things, you get feedback, and then iterate. How is it, how it relates to your overall brand? So yeah, design is an ongoing, interactive process. It takes some time because there are a lot of people involved in that. Now AI does play a huge role now, because there are a lot of tools that could be designed quickly. Now, with AI, we can create comps, give specific instructions, and you can get the app ready in a really short time by creating the mockups. And a lot of those AI-specific tools, even existing tools like Figma, Adobe, they all have AI components where you just give instructions and it can give you the design. So coming back to the design part, there are times when, depending on the time and budget, many times you just quickly want to have a proof of concept. So do you really need all that fancy design, or can you just simulate it, create that proof of concept quickly using AI? So using AI, you can give instructions and create a design that still matches your brand. You can create amazing design still, but now you are creating using AI. It has its own, again, challenges, but you can get things done quickly.

[13:59] Jim Beach: All right. Are you excited about the quality yet, or do we still need human intervention?

[14:09] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Human intervention is definitely needed still. It is necessary because AI has still a lot of hallucination, and depending on the input, let’s say how many times you give instruction to AI, you don’t want that kind of thing. Or if you are uploading, let’s say, 10 different documents, that is your requirement, it may only read the last few documents or so. You are not always getting. So you have to refine it. It has this limited context. So you will likely have hallucination in the AI responses, so you have to tweak it. So human involvement is critical, and the whole process, somebody needs to review before making sure the output that we generated is the one that we want. So, but AI will expedite the process. So the things that were taking weeks and months before, now they are taking hours and days.

[15:12] Jim Beach: What is the best AI tool for your industry for building an app?

[15:24] Ghazenfer Mansoor: We, in our company, we use heavily React Native. That is for mobile app development. It is an open-source project by Facebook. It is not AI. It is non-AI, but that is the one that we use for creating mobile apps for iPhone and Android, for tablets. So you write one code and you can mix your native and hybrid code together. So that is a popular framework. AI does support. There are different AI tools that could be used with it to generate the React Native code quickly. And then there are tools that are considered low-code or no-code tools, which you can use to quickly create web and mobile apps, but they are more for non-technical that will help you get to some stage. So the way we look at it, in the past, you were creating, let’s say, mockups or sketches by hand before you start using any tools. Now, you can use these low-code tools to quickly build something, and that is the thing we are seeing more and more. A lot of entrepreneurs are creating different applications using these tools, and then we help them take those, convert it into HIPAA compliant, or make them production-ready, because once you build it, that still gives you a good starting point, but that is still not production-ready.

[17:05] Jim Beach: All right, let’s switch the conversation just a little bit. If I were to come to you and say, we need a simple app or something in your wheelhouse, you know, something like a SaaS app or something like that, is a realistic, and it is not a big app, you know, I just need my customers to be able to buy my widgets a little bit. It is not big. What is the low-end cost and what is the high-end cost that we should expect in the marketplace? And if you want to share your price, you can, but what is the realistic price for that? Because I can go on Fiverr, and a guy on Fiverr is willing to do it for 15 bucks.

[17:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: And you already mentioned Fiverr. So it really depends on who are the people building it. Is that the company, all US-based, all offshore in India, Pakistan, or any of those regions, or is it a hybrid model? In our business, we have people in seven countries. We have headquarters in US, Reston, Virginia, and then we have developers offshore. We have people in different regions. So our costs are hybrid. We are not like US, and we are not India. We are somewhere in between. Every app has its own specifics. So there is no, I would say it is hard to come up with the pricing without the specific features. But I would say most of the app world, I mean, you can start from $10,000 and you can go up to even a million dollars. And we have done apps in those ranges, because there are apps that could be way bigger. It could have a lot of different backend integrations. It could be a multi-year project, and we went into that higher range as well.

[18:59] Jim Beach: All right, that is what we needed. That is a good answer. Ten K is going to be your bottom, and below that, it is just probably people who are not good at it. Can we put it that way? I do not want to say they are a scam or anything. Let’s just say they are not good at it.

[19:19] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Well, they may just have a free cycle available.

[19:25] Jim Beach: Okay, there you go. All right. So when you started Technology Rivers, it sounded like it came sort of out of another organization or another business. But how did you get your first customer? How did that first year go? So talk to us about being a first-year entrepreneur.

[19:45] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, so 2015, that is when we started. So our first customer, there was a company in Virginia. That company went public, and this CEO had an idea, and CEO wanted to build different apps. So CEO hired a manager who became the CEO of this new startup, and she found us through some forum where I answered a question on some warm part, hybrid versus native mobile app, and that is how we got our first customer. And we talked about it, then we built one app, then we built a second version of it. So we did three different verticals for that customer. So that was the starting point for us.

[20:44] Jim Beach: And what about marketing today? How do you continue to grow the business? What do you do? Is it word of mouth? What are you doing today?

[20:53] Ghazenfer Mansoor: When we started the business, it was mostly word of mouth, and then secondly, referrals from different customers. But in the last two, three years, our focus has been more on marketing, and we are getting more and more inbound. So if I look at it, in the last two years, we got two projects with referrals. Everything else came through inbound. And out of those, I would say, I do not have exact numbers, but almost, I would say 90% of those come through AI search. So now we ask people, people find us when people search us on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, they search for top mobile, top HIPAA, healthcare app development firm. They find us number one or two, and that is how we are getting most of our leads.

[21:47] Jim Beach: All right, excellent. And how big is the company now? Whatever scale you want to share with us.

[21:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: So we are close to 40 people.

[21:59] Jim Beach: Wow. That is very impressive. Thank you. Have you built any apps you are allowed to tell us about by name that you can say, oh, that is our app?

[22:08] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, there are a lot of apps that we also listed on our website. I do not know if I am allowed to say any specific names.

[22:18] Jim Beach: Well, you are allowed to say whatever you want. Our work, yeah. I mean, I’m on your website looking to see if I can find some to say about you.

[22:27] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, so let me talk about one couple of latest ones. So, for example, HealingTrack, it is a healthcare coaching app.

[22:41] Jim Beach: Okay, you have golf ball scanning apps, breast cancer apps, on-demand healthcare staffing apps, patient care management apps, kidney donor application apps. This is an incredible body of work. Restaurant and bars, fitness, event planning, and this is impressive. Congratulations. Amazing company. It is great. Great job. I heard you wanted to play our little game, the Quick 10.

[23:17] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely.

[23:17] Jim Beach: All right. Are you sober currently? I’m required by the state of Virginia to ask if you are currently sober.

[23:34] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely, I don’t drink.

[23:34] Jim Beach: Okay. Do you want to accept the standard wager? The standard wager?

[23:34] Ghazenfer Mansoor: What is that? I don’t even know.

[23:37] Jim Beach: That is the bet that everyone else made. No, you have to. Okay, yes, play. Say yes. Trust me.

[23:37] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely, yes. Yes.

[23:37] Jim Beach: Number one, your favorite creativity hack.

[23:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Questions are the answers to the problem.

[23:55] Jim Beach: Number two, favorite bootstrapping trick.

[23:55] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Sell the solution before you build it.

[23:55] Jim Beach: Number three, name your top passions.

[24:18] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Healthcare, innovation, playing badminton, playing puzzles, continuous learning, building business.

[24:26] Jim Beach: Number five. How do you get your first real customer?

[24:35] Ghazenfer Mansoor: First real customer, find one simple pain point that someone is willing to pay, rather than building the whole thing. Just find one use case.

[24:49] Jim Beach: Number six, what is your dreamiest technology?

[24:49] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, that is a tricky one.

[24:59] Ghazenfer Mansoor: AI that removes friction so humans can focus on creativity and relationships.

[25:07] Jim Beach: Number seven, best entrepreneurial advice.

[25:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Focus, and secondly, execution beats ideas every single time.

[25:19] Jim Beach: Number eight, worst entrepreneurial mistake.

[25:23] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Building too many features before proving the demand.

[25:29] Jim Beach: Number nine, favorite entrepreneur and why.

[25:33] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Steve Jobs for his focus on one product at a time, creativity, and belief that customers often need to be shown what is possible. And that is my favorite one.

[25:45] Jim Beach: And number 10, favorite superhero.

[25:45] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali.

[25:54] Jim Beach: Great choices. Great choices, especially this week. So very well said. We are calculating your score and to find out the winner of the wager. While we do that, how do we get in touch with Technology Rivers and both you individually?

[26:11] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Yeah, so Technology Rivers website is technologyrivers.com, R-I-V-E-R-S dot com. My personal website is ghazenfer.com, G-H-A-Z-E-N-F-E-R dot com. On the personal website, you can find more about my podcast, which is Lessons from the Leap. You can also learn about my speaking engagements. You can also find out about the business, even from there as well.

[26:38] Jim Beach: Fantastic. How often is your podcast and what is the topic?

[26:44] Ghazenfer Mansoor: The podcast is Lessons from the Leap. This is where we interview business leaders, entrepreneurs, learning about the different leaps that they have taken in the business.

[26:57] Jim Beach: Fantastic. Oh, I’m so sorry for you. I just got your score from the Quick 10. You got a 94. It is an excellent score, but you have to have a 95 to win, and so you owe us a Tesla.

[27:12] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Oh, okay, that is fine. Now it is much cheaper than that.

[27:15] Jim Beach: Absolutely. Excellent. Thank you so much for being with us. A great story. Congratulations. And this is a book that I’m going to read. So thank you so much for that, and we would love to have you back.

[27:31] Ghazenfer Mansoor: Absolutely. Thanks for having me on the show, Jim.