Amy Briggs

Bio

Amy Briggs is the founder and CEO of Aviva, an AI-powered scheduling app designed specifically for parents to lighten the mental load and free up time for more joy and connection in parenthood. Amy is a licensed and certified speech and language pathologist, and has spent her career supporting parents and children.

Intro

Amy Briggs, a speech pathologist by profession, embarked on an audacious journey to create an AI-powered application, despite possessing no formal background in technology. Her insights into the pervasive mental load faced by modern parents inspired her to develop Aviva, a solution aimed at alleviating the burdens of scheduling and logistics inherent in family life. Through her participation in the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, she transformed her idea into a tangible prototype, utilizing resourcefulness and determination to validate her concept without incurring marketing costs. The episode unfolds as Amy shares her experiences navigating the challenges of entrepreneurship, emphasizing the power of resilience, adaptive learning, and the importance of community support in fostering innovation. Her story resonates deeply with aspiring founders, reinforcing the notion that a lack of technical expertise should not deter one from pursuing visionary aspirations.

Conversation

Jothy Rosenberg engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Amy Briggs, a speech pathologist who has successfully ventured into the tech world with her app, Aviva. The discussion commences with Amy reflecting on the overwhelming burden of parenting, characterized by what she describes as 'invisible labor.' Having witnessed firsthand the challenges faced by parents in managing myriad schedules, activities, and appointments, Amy became determined to create a solution. Her journey to entrepreneurship began at the 1871 tech incubator in Chicago, where she was encouraged to develop a minimal viable product (MVP). Jothy and Amy explore the initial stages of her venture, including the challenges of building her app without a technical background. Through her narrative, Amy illustrates the importance of resilience and the ability to pivot while navigating the complexities of entrepreneurship.

Throughout the episode, listeners are treated to an insightful exploration of the methodologies Amy employed to validate her app concept. By conducting trials with her family and early users, she gathered crucial feedback that informed the app's development. This iterative process, coupled with her unwavering commitment to addressing the needs of parents, underscores the essence of successful entrepreneurship. Jothy emphasizes the significance of community engagement and organic growth, as Amy recounts the immediate downloads her app received upon launch, attributed to the genuine need for such a solution.

The conversation culminates in a compelling discussion about the broader implications of Amy's work, touching on themes of empowerment and the transformative power of technology in improving everyday lives. Listeners are left with the inspiring message that one need not possess a traditional technical background to innovate — rather, it is the passion for solving real problems and the willingness to learn that can drive success. This episode serves as an energizing reminder for aspiring entrepreneurs that grit, adaptability, and a keen understanding of user needs are essential ingredients in the recipe for building a meaningful business.

Takeaways

• Amy Briggs, a speech pathologist, successfully transitioned into the tech industry despite lacking formal coding skills.
• Her startup, Aviva, addresses the mental load parents face by automating family scheduling tasks through AI technology.
• The journey to building Aviva emphasized the importance of resourcefulness, grit, and a willingness to learn new skills.
• By leveraging community support and organic marketing, Aviva achieved initial success with immediate downloads upon launch.
• Briggs' experience illustrates that a non-traditional background can foster innovative problem-solving in technology.
• The MVP development process for Aviva taught the significance of testing ideas manually before investing in technology.

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Hello. Please meet today's guest, Amy Briggs.

I feel like I've never had this feeling before where it's like a faucet was turned on and I always have ideas. I don't have any shortage of ideas. So I'm not fearful if one of the ideas doesn't pan out because I'll have another idea and we can try other things.

What if your background had absolutely nothing to do with tech? No coding, no computer science, not even a single programming class, and you decided to build an AI powered app anyway?

That's exactly what today's guest did. Amy Briggs is a speech pathologist who spent her career in schools and private practice watching parents drown in the invisible labor of parenthood.

The mental load of managing two kids, schedules, activities, appointments, and a thousand tiny logistics that never stop. She couldn't stop thinking about it, so she figured it out.

Her company is called Aviva and her story is a masterclass and and how resourcefulness, grit and relentless optimism can replace a technical co founder. This one is for every founder who's ever thought. But I don't have the right background. Yes, you do. Let's go. Hi, Amy, welcome to the show.

Hi, Jothy. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to having this chat with you. I always like to start with a simple question, which is where are you originally from and where do you live now?

Sure. So I am originally from where I live now, which is a very small suburb on the north shore of Chicago.

That's unusual that you live in the same suburb that you're originally from and a small one at that. And then do you still have other family that lives in the same suburb?

We do. That was part of the draw that brought us back.

So until very recently, my parents were still in my childhood home, which is down the street, and my husband had a sibling and an aunt who are local. My brother and sister in law and nephews are here. So lots of family and we've lived lots of other places where we didn't have family.

So we are very appreciative to be here now.

So it sounds like you've known your husband a really long time if you grew up in the same neighborhood.

We did not. So we didn't grow up here together. I just lured him to Chicago. He is from upstate New York.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, got it. In our previous discussion, you told me that you were a speech pathologist. You, you didn't take any classes in coding.

You weren't, you know, hanging around with computer scientists. And yet you're now, you've started a startup, which we'll talk about a lot here, where you're building an application, an app.

And so how did you go about building an app without those skills?

Yeah, it's a circuitous journey and I'm sure there are probably listeners who can relate who started their careers in one capacity and are now shifted into a different capacity. And I think we'll only see more and more of this with the advent of AI and people's roles and jobs changing so much.

So I went into speech and language pathology. I was really passionate about communication, really passionate about families and supporting children, supporting parents, building capacity.

And it really, as I started my career and I was in public school schools, it really lit me up when I had opportunities to kind of impart my knowledge or my skills onto other adults who are going to be interacting with the kids on my caseload, because I knew that that's where the progress was going to happen most quickly if, you know, we could extend the therapeutic paradigm beyond just a therapy session.

So I was always on these kind of like strategic committees to reach parents, to reach other stakeholders, all always working, you know, closely in tandem with the families I served and started to really see, even early in my career what, what parenthood was looking like, what kinds of challenges modern parents were facing. Before I was a mom myself, and then right around the time of COVID I had had my own kids. They were young.

I pivoted into private practice from public school. And in this really unique socio ecological moment where I had my own young kids at home.

And I felt what that was like in, you know, my own dual working parent household. And I was going into the homes of many other families and sort of seeing what life was like peeled behind the curtain.

Not when everything was running smoothly, not when they had put the mess away before guests were coming, but a real raw view of what day to day life was like for other parents like me.

And I was so struck over and over again that beyond the meaningful therapeutic work I was doing, I was having the same conversations with parents about how hard it was to keep up with all of the demands, how hard it was to keep track of the schedules, the activities, the appointments, the toy rotations, the perfect birthday parties. And I came to realize that all of this extra Noise was really the mental load that people were carrying. It's the invisible labor of parenthood.

And I saw that it was standing in the way of what I knew clinically was the most important part of parenthood, and the part I wanted all parents to be doing, which was connecting with their kids, being able to really put everything else aside and dial in even for short amounts of time and be in the moment and enjoy their parenthood and enjoy their children. And I felt like all of these other jobs to be done were really standing in the way.

And I started to dream up what could I do that would meaningfully solve a piece of this problem that I can see so clearly? I couldn't stop thinking about it.

So after I would work and get our house back together and put my kids to bed, I would kind of ideate on this with my husband. Finally came to an idea that felt sticky.

And I asked some mentors of mine who had scaled a speech pathology business, how did you scale fail so quickly? You know, where did you get the tools? And assured them that I was not coming into their competitive space.

And I left the meeting and I applied and I thought, I'm gonna just come in with, you know, my idea and I'm gonna hit the ground running and I'm gonna get as much as I can out of this program. And if it feels like it's a fit and I, you know, working on this feels the way that I think it will, I'm going to keep going.

And if it doesn't, I still have a private practice and another, you know, thriving business. And I'll, I'll keep doing that and I'll kind of put this on the shelf. And of course, I'm sure again, many people can relate.

I started down the road with this idea and I. Every step I took, I was hungry for more. Every step I took, I wanted to learn something new.

And the pleasure of learning something when I had been out of that mode for such a long time was so great. So I just, I would ask anyone who knew more than I did in that community, you know, what low code, no code tool should I learn? What should I try?

How can I turn this idea that I have into an mvp? And that was really the biggest challenge was as a non technical founder with a very technical idea that was heavily underpinned by AI.

How am I myself going to build out some MVP to test if this is even viable? But that's kind of how I got to that part of things.

Yes. It's a fun connection to the city of Chicago. So that was the rebuilding after the Chicago fire.

So I think their whole idea and motivation is, let's always be in a rebuilding mode. Chicago has kind of like brought itself up from the bootstraps many, many times.

Well, sounds cool. All right, back to the thread we were on. You've got this idea, you've gone to this incubator. You still hadn't it.

It wasn't like you had been trained how to write the application, but you had some ways of doing some prototyping. Is that, is that right?

Yeah. So I got what I think was really good advice. I guess time will tell, but it felt, it has felt so far like really amazing advice.

Don't, you know, try to do something elaborate.

What's the smallest iteration of this idea that you can do to prove out the idea and refine it and get it to a point where it's worthy potentially of, you know, your own investment or someone else's? So I had that caution in mind and I took that advice seriously.

And as someone who was not technical, I really kind of circled around Robin Hood's barn many, many times, trying to wrap my head around how am I going to get something working. So the idea that I had at this point, when I knew that I wanted to build an MVP, was I'm going to take the scheduling piece of the mental load.

So finding all of the activities for everyone in the family, getting them reliably on a calendar with all the correct information. I'm going to take that.

And my theory was, I think AI can now fully do this job and I can automate it, and that would meaningfully save parents both time and stress. So I had three conversations.

And I asked my mentors who I was already working with, who in our network should I talk to, who has excellent technical skills, but who also has excellent communication skills and can explain to me as a layperson what I might try, what tools I might use, or how I might set up an mvp? And I had three meaningful conversations that really led me to the solution. I built myself as an alpha prototype.

So each of those conversations had one kind of like, aha, unlock for me of how I could get something going. So my MVP had no front end. There was no app for users to interact with. It was all kind of behind the scenes.

And I always tell people I felt like a woman in an old fashioned, like, telephone company connecting the wires, because there was a lot that was still very manual. It was not scalable. But I figured out how to do a solution that I thought would work.

I tried it on my family and our calendar and our email, and it worked. And then I bravely invited some other people who I had emails for to try this for two week trials and give me feedback.

And right out of the gate, feedback was very positive. People wanted to stay in the product. I didn't have a product for them to stay in. I even explored like, is this scalable?

Because there was a desire for it to continue and it wasn't.

But what I did along the way, I had a technical advisor at this point and he said whatever you're doing manually is fine as long as it's the same process and you've documented what the process is and it's repeatable every time, then you can translate someone, you know, a developer can translate that into code.

So I was really disciplined about, you know, having a set way that everything processed either through automation or manually, and then wireframed out what I thought the application in full would be. And with my technique, when you say.

Wireframed out, you mean drew on paper.

First drew on paper and then used figma. But yeah, literally pencil to paper. Like, what do I want this to look like? What's going to be involved, how many screens?

You know, what's my dream of what's in my head translated out into what this could be in an app. And then we started interviewing candidates to hire as a developer to build this thing out and build it into something that would be a scalable tool.

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It helps, of course, that in the modern age you're using different applications all the time, so you have a sense of what you like and what feels similar enough to what you wanted to build that you could sort of model on an existing application, correct?

Absolutely.

And I think it was to my advantage that I wasn't deep in the technical weeds because maybe I would have been daunted to even start had I known, you know, everything that I know now, and I'm sure a year from now, even more. Um, but instead I feel like I.

There was no limit to what I could imagine, and then I could take everything I could imagine and try to fit it into the constraints of what was possible.

And then I have an excellent developer who, you know, I ended up hiring, who was one of the three mentors I had those initial conversations with, actually.

And I'll take my wild ideas to him and explain them or show him, you know, a wireframe or prototype and he'll let me know if this is doable or not, which a lot of the time it is like he dreams right along with me.

And it's so exciting because the technology now is like keeping a pace with, you know, creativity and dreaming basically, or even maybe is further ahead of it. Every time we're like, maybe we can't do xyz, there's, there's a new way to do it. There are always new ways to crack the nut.

For people that are listening to kind of slightly in the weeds questions, one, which AI did you decide to use?

We used OpenAI. It was the most reliable option for us when we were initially in our beta testing and we did try several other off the shelf providers.

We tried Anthropic. It's funny, I feel like Anthropic is doing an excellent job with their marketing right now.

And I'm seeing so much, you know, noise about like, I'm switching everything from OpenAI to anthropic and Claude is better than Chad and I don't know if you're seeing that too. But I will say that for us, in the early days of Claude and Innoviva, it really functioned like a wacky uncle.

It did crazy things that we didn't want it to do. And like, not even that it was hallucinating, but it really got, you know, way off track.

Even with very explicit prompts and chat, we were able to kind of layer up our models and use a variety of different models, some of which are really lightweight and are some of the older models that are less expensive to run that do some of the more explicit tasks for us where like we didn't want a lot of intuition or thinking, we just wanted like, you know, put the eggs in the cart kind of tasks.

Speaking of code, that was my second going to be my second in the weeds question.

Sure.

So what programming language is your developer using?

He's using Python.

I would have guessed that he was using Python.

Yeah, yeah, he's a full stack developer, but yeah, that's what he's using.

All of this you've been described, by the way, this is like a textbook great expose on how to create an mvp. In fact, I, I, as I mentioned to you, I have this online course and I talk about very low cost ways to build your mvp.

And sometimes it's even just a bunch of pieces of cardboard with a storyboard on it. Right.

It, it as long as you can get somebody who's a potential user to understand what you're trying to get them to understand and they can react to it, you know, so that's absolutely, and.

I use them.

Okay, great. And they started with an Excel spreadsheet that was their mvp.

So I was like, if they can start with an Excel spreadsheet, then I don't need to be afraid to start with my super clunky manual version of things. Like they've scaled all the way to, you know, I think they recently had an exit. So just start and give it a test.

All of this that you've been describing ended up being your startup, which is called Aviva.

Yes.

And where'd the name come from, by the way?

Good question. So I was looking for a name that was temporally related and I couldn't find anything that I liked.

And a lot of the names that I was thinking of or you know, that AI was generating for me seemed just really clunky and didn't have the feeling that I was after. So I decided to look up baby names that had to do with temporal concepts.

And Aviva was the first in the list, I think, because it starts with A, because it means springtime. And I just thought I love this concept of sort of a spring cleaning with your time or like a fresh start.

I loved that it was the same forwards and backwards. I loved that A and I were tucked into it if I ever wanted to use them. There were just so many things about it that I thought felt right.

Now there are other Avivas out there if you search for it, there are.

Luckily none of them are commercially similar enough and we are in the trademarking process of the name just because it is such a common name that other people enjoy using as well. But the big player who uses that name currently commercially that people might be familiar with is an insurance provider in the uk.

So luckily they're not, you know, selling selling Sass.

This is a consumer product by, you know, definition. Yes, the, the customers are going to be parents.

Yes, consumer products are hard if you're not Proctor and Gamble or Apple or, you know, somebody like that. And in my experience, just not that I've ever built one, I. That's not an area I've touched.

But in talking to people, the key is finding channels that can get you into the right communities because you're going to start small and you're not trying to boil the, you know, United States entire customer base. What have you. What. What kind of channels have you been finding?

This is an interesting question too. So from the beginning, even before I had an alpha prototype, something that I noticed about this, first of all, I'm my own use case.

I needed this product like part, part of the invention was to solve a need that I deeply felt, a pain point that I.

And how many kids do you have just to see?

I have two and they're a grade apart. So when the activities like the busy schedule started, it was double right away and everyone I knew had this problem also.

And I think because I am like a prime user, I am a power user for my own product and all of my friends are all of my clients were everyone in my community who has young kids is. I've worked in public schools, so I've already been like immersed in that world.

I. I felt like I had probably less of a gap to close for what you're talking about than maybe other B2C tech products.

And don't be disgruntled if you don't see downloads. But right away we saw downloads. Like the first day it was there. There was a lot of searching, there were a lot of downloads.

And I think that this is because this is an area of need that people naturally talk about, even if they're really busy and their attention is fleeting.

Because again, it's a pain that we're experiencing multiple times a day, every single day when we feel like, ooh, I forgot, you know, pickup time changed or oh my gosh, when is that birthday party? Oh, I didn't buy a gift. When is sign up for camp? Snow is on the ground, but like 7am tomorrow, I have to be there like a fire drill.

I think it's ever present on people's minds. And I think the other big leverage that I had was like a good diaper or a good, you know, baby product or children's product.

As a parent, it feels good if you found something that works for you to share that knowledge with friends.

So also right from the beginning, in small numbers, we saw trends that are little pockets in various geographic areas where it looks like one person downloads it, uses it, likes it, and must be sharing it with other parents that pick up or something like that. So I think we had those things on our side and we actually, because of that, I really tried to focus on just like straight organic growth.

What are we going to get without any kind of partnership channels at the beginning?

And now I had a partnership channel teed up early on, which was a previous school district of mine because obviously schools are a great channel to work with if you are a product that's marketing toward parents and they were ready to go from before I launched and said, sure, we would love to pilot this for you and partner with you and have our, our district do this. And I held off on it because I thought there's going to be a lot more refinement once I have real users in here and I'm getting feedback.

And I really wanted.

I had a vested interest, I think, especially because it was my former district and you know, my former neighbors, that, that I wanted the product to be really tight by the time I was leveraging a channel so that I was able to look at explicitly.

Is this channel impacting growth rather than feel like there might be a leaky bucket here or there were lingering, you know, development needs that I was longing to solve. And is that why we're not seeing traction?

So I wanted as cleanly as possible to like phase things out and take those bigger channel opportunities once I felt like I could take them and really look at that data that came back our way.

Critically, what sort of search terms would people be using to find you without there having been any outbound kind of marketing?

Family calendar AI, shared family calendar, family calendar automation. But family calendar AI, I feel like is probably our top. Just generic search term.

So you've got revenue coming in. Is it starting to be significant?

It's not significant at this point. My goal, you know, early on, we're not even a year into our launch is just to work toward like a break even point with our expenses.

And we've had months that did that. So that was great, you know, but obviously would love to scale further beyond that.

And without having, I see in the future, you know, kind of a path of I doubled down on this organic acquisition and trying to understand like what messaging resonates. I don't have a big marketing team. I've bootstrapped the company, so I'm doing that myself.

So that was really important to me to get right and be disciplined about once. I feel like we've had now, you know, a strong foothold with organic marketing. We can layer on partnership channels and see how that works.

We can layer on things down the road. I assume we will get into some kind of like paid ads or something like that, but we haven't done any of that.

So that our customer acquisition cost at this point is zero.

Very few people can say that. Has everything gone perfectly or have you had setbacks or have you made mistakes? It sounds.

Oh my gosh, I mean, it sounded like a great, you know, path that you took.

Yeah. Everything has not gone perfectly. Does it ever. Have you ever met someone who said yes to that question?

No, no, I have. And actually, but I thought I was about to.

No, no, no, no. I'm a very optimistic person. So I should preface this by saying that.

And I was gonna say, I think that if I were building a business adjacent to my own deep professional expertise, if I were building a speech pathology practice, the level of critique I would have of every move that I made would be so much greater and I think I would probably stand in my own way quite a bit because I know that I don't know what I'm doing and I'm making This up as I go along and learning kind of on the job as I go. I'm not hard on myself in the same way, I guess, as I would have been, you know, if it were in my, like, primary domain of expertise.

And I think that that's allowed me to experiment and try things and let go of the things that don't work and move on from them faster.

I feel like in the world of startups, one of the things about it that, you know, becoming a founder and doing this job that I find the most satisfying is a solving problems. And there's always a problem to solve. Multiple.

There are always new problems to solve, and especially the creative problem solving with other teammates, I love. I find it really invigorating and creative, and I love that.

And the other piece of things is I feel like I've never had this feeling before where it's like a faucet was turned on and I always have ideas. I. I don't have any shortage of ideas.

So I'm not fearful if one of the ideas doesn't pan out because I'll have another idea and we can try other things.

And I think that in other aspects of my professional life and my career, I probably would have been a little bit more attached to my ideas because I would have felt strong, more strongly that I was right here. I. I'm, I'm, you know, kind of. I don't know. And we're just trying things out, so. Please. Plenty of things have gone wrong. Yes.

So by being on the App Store, you're exposed to at least all of the US and so how much of your customer base is still local in the Chicago. Oh, you guys say Chicago land. Chicagoland area.

The Chicagoland area, yes. Very good.

Versus, you know, versus broader, you know, geographically broader.

I would say we still have the. The highest number of users live in the Chicagoland area, but it's not by much.

And then we have clusters in, like, other major metro areas where you would expect, like, in theory, before I built this product where I would have expected the demographic who was our ICP to be living, we see those pop up pretty consistently, even though I don't have a personal connection there. So our initial wave, absolutely, you know, there was a Chicago presence, but it's not, I would say, like, I didn't have.

It wasn't like I had friends coming in necessarily. People downloaded it if they wanted to, but more so my first PR exposure was in Chicago on tv.

So that drove a lot of Chicagoland area downloads and, you know, some local like magazines and newspapers and things like that. I think built local awareness and I think people like to root for their home team. For sure. Chicagoans like to root for their home team.

So I think it feels good to support a business that, you know, is, you know, coming out of your own community.

Hi. The podcast you are listening to is a companion to my recent book, Tech Startup Toolkit how to Launch Strong and Exit Big.

This is the book I wish I'd had as I was founding and running eight startups over 35 years. I tell the unvarnished truth about what went right and especially about what went wrong. You could get it from all the usual booksellers.

I hope you like it. It's a true labor of love. Now back to the show. So what's your next big step to scale it further?

Yes.

So we are, we are on dev in the final home stretch, I hope, of testing a big new feature which has been something that I wanted to be a part of our initial launch. But of course the things that I wanted to be a part of our initial launch like we would still not be launched.

So we launched when we were ready enough and have added things along the way. But we're testing out this new feature. Once the new feature is in place, it will.

We've done some things to kind of like lay the railroad tracks for the app itself to become a tool for people to share it, which we think will, you know, enhance that kind of viral growth, which seems to be an engine of growth for A this type of a product, B parents with a parenting tool and C Aviva specifically. And then once those things are in place and I feel like they're, you know, well received in our user bases, using them, liking them.

We've looked at that feedback a little bit. My next move is partnership channels with like school district that I have lined up. I've thought about other types of channels too, like benefits.

I think this would be an incredible benefit for employees at work, especially with return to office mandates and a lot of pushback on lack of flexibility.

I think if you had an assistant who was managing your schedule for you while your phone was in your bag, that would lift a load off of, you know, working parents shoulders. So exploring other partnership opportunities and my last stop would be paid ads and things like that.

I know that that's par for the course and consume, you know, B2C apps, but I'm really trying to hold off as long as possible and use other kind of more organic means in the meantime.

And what about integrations with all kinds of apps that.

Oh yes, good question.

That like create. Like for example, if I know that the probably the people that organize the kids sports are probably. It would be ideal if they did.

But they're probably not likely to use any kind of app that you could integrate with. But it would be super cool because those things do get changed.

Yes, absolutely. So early on I reached out to my local park district and found out who their third party contracting was for all of their scheduling.

And that is another channel for sure I will explore. And then there are a lot of other tools. I joined a consortium, this might be interesting to you or your listeners.

I joined a consortium that I found out about kind of by happenstance called famtech.org and it's not for profit organization.

It has an arm of it that does policy work for kind of just FamTech in general and the care economy and then an arm of it that's more focused on, you know, investors who are in the fam tech space, builders who are in the fam tech space, founders who are in the fam tech Space. And through FamTech.org and some of the early conversations I had there.

There are a lot of other products that do something adjacent to Aviva but don't have this component and who maybe have a component that we don't have.

So for example, there are calendar devices that are a physical device that are wall mounted, that are not AI native products who are now trying to push AI into their systems, but they're a visual display for the family of what's going on that the user still has to manually update or forward their emails to appear on that display. So something like Aviva could turn that tool into a much more powerful device and a much more meaningful device for the primary user who's usually.

It's usually one parent who's updating that just like it is with, you know, the regular calendars. Even if it's a paper calendar, it's usually defaulting to one parent if that person didn't have to do that job.

And it happened, man, or automatically, I mean through Aviva, think how much more powerful that wall mounted calendar is now. So things like that too. I have on the horizon, as you know, potential partnership opportunities.

That sounds great. I'm going to roll into my last question.

Okay.

The word grit is kind of defined by words like resilience and fortitude and drive determination. I like stick to it. I ness and also courage. Courage is a big component of it.

And so far as, as I can tell, every startup Founder under the sun has grit, and they have to. To. To do what they're doing. And. And obviously, so do you, but. But I would like to hear you tell us your story of where does your grit come from.

Oh, I love this question. I can't remember a time in my life where I. I didn't feel like I had grit.

And my parents were probably frustrated by my grit as a young kid because it was often, you know, I think. I think I've always had this drive and this grit and this deter. Just dogged determination. If I decide I'm going to do something, I will do it.

And I think that I've never, before I started Aviva had the perfect channel to express that grit through. And I feel like now I do, because it really does. Like you said, you can't keep going unless you have that.

No one's going to be there for all the bumps in the road to, like, lift you back up and give you a pop talk and keep you going. You kind of have to do that for yourself. I think a big part of my grit, too, is just an eternal optimism.

I'm very optimistic about people resilience, people's capacities. What of my favorite quotes that I think about, you know, all the time?

One of my college professors, and I wish I could attribute this to someone, because I'm sure someone famous said this first, but one of my college professors would always say to us, your capacity is clamor for expression, meaning you have so much more capacity within you than you could even use in your lifetime. And I think that, you know, other people are incredible.

And my whole mission in doing what I'm doing and the work that I've always done is really just to support and enhance other people's greatness, I guess, and, you know, positivity and optimism and connection. So I think optimism is a big part of grit for me too.

Do you see your kids developing grit early on?

This is really interesting. So I have two children. They're 22 months apart. Same parents, same household, same everything.

And I think this is just the way when you have, you know, multiple children, you have siblings, they could not be more different. So my older daughter is. She definitely will see things through. And certain things for sure, like a physical challenge, she won't give up.

She's very persistent. If she thinks she can accomplish something, she thinks she can do it perfectly. She has grit all day long.

If she feels she may fall short, it's very hard for her to get started. My younger daughter came out like a self Help book. I don't know where it came from, but she has positive self talk all day long.

I remember taking them to a climbing wall, and my younger daughter was, like, barely tall enough to reach the handholds, and my older daughter was tall enough to really get herself up. So my younger daughter is, like a foot and a half off the ground, and she's saying to herself, I'm almost there. I'm getting to the top.

Look at me, mom and dad, here I come. And then she'd fall down. She'd be like, I'm gonna get a little higher next time. Here I go.

My older daughter was, you know, inches from ringing the bell at the top and was like, I'm never gonna get there. I can't do this. It's too hard. I'm too far away. So it's like, I think some of that is just how people come out.

I think some of it is natural, and I do think some of it is taught. You can change your self talk? Absolutely.

Like, if I get into the weeds with, like, the cognitive research that I've engaged with as a speech pathologist, you can absolutely change your self talk and your self messaging and give yourself more grit. But I think that there are people who, like, I look at my younger daughter and I'm like, she's going to be an entrepreneur. She's going to.

Because she follows her ideas through, and it doesn't matter how far off the target they are. She keeps working at them. She's not discouraged by that.

And she has a role model.

Oh, thank you. Yeah. And she has a role model.

Amy, this has been just delightful and excellent for anybody listening. This is gonna be highly motivational.

Oh, I hope so. That would make me feel so good. So, like, I. I hope that I didn't sound too. Too optimistic about everything I'm doing, because absolutely. I.

We could have a whole other, you know, probably hour about all of the weird things that have happened and all the pivots we've had to make and all. All of it. It's, you know, the. The road to everything in entrepreneurship is very bumpy at best, at, you know, but I hope that.

I hope that people feel seen in their entrepreneurial journey and will feel like they can keep going and stick to their grit.

I think they will after hearing you talk. That will be fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Toolkit number one, don't build it. Simulate it first. Amy's first MVP had no app, no front end, and no scalability. She manually connected the pieces herself to prove the process worked.

Before you hire a developer or spend a dollar, ask yourself what's the most manual ugly version of this I can test on real users today? Your lack of expertise in adjacent field is actually a superpower. Amy said it herself because she didn't know what was impossible.

She could imagine everything. Then she found people who could tell her what was actually buildable. Don't let expertise in the wrong domain stop you.

Build the vision, find the constraints later. 0 Customer acquisition cost is a real strategy.

Amy launched publicly and got downloads on day one through organic search, word of mouth and a community that already talks about this problem constantly. Before you spend a dollar on paid ads, ask is there a natural community where my problem is already the daily conversation?

Now go find the most embarrassingly manual version of your idea and test it on five people this week. Because your perfect MVP is the enemy of your actual one. And that is our show with Amy. The show notes contain useful resources and links.

Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designingsuccessful startups. Also please share and like us on your social media channels. This is Jothy Rosenberg saying TTFN Tata for now.