Transforming a Prototype into a Scalable Platform with AI-Accelerated Strategic Development

Dan is magical. I can't describe it as anything other than that. He's otherworldly. He brings in so much experience and knowledge. My name is Suzanne Goldstein. I split my time between Boston and Los Angeles, and I run a company called Better Human that is addressing the behavior crisis in the world by helping people learn to interrupt their automatic behaviors so that they can be more thoughtful and choiceful in life. My story is kind of, uh, uh, miraculous. I have been working on this 125 codes that I call the Energy Operating System. I've been teaching and coaching and b- building programs about and speaking about for almost four decades. And then I decided that I wanted to make it more available to the public. And when I was l- looking for someone who could build the back end, I had someone who built my prototype, but I didn't feel like it was gonna be as extensible as I needed it to be. And so I started looking for someone new, and I saw Dan demoing a product he had built for a friend of mine. And in the chat, I wrote to him and I said, "I need to talk to you." And that's how I actually met him. What was really cool about our particular experience is that we had this working prototype, so Dan knew the experience architecture that I wanted. And so he was able to very quickly kind of put us on a big platform that could expand with us over time. But also because Dan is so strategic, he could think with me as we're going through things, ask me questions I hadn't thought of yet, help me be in the build so that I could be immediately putting feature requests, bug reports, everything inside of it. And, um, our platform became a communication vehicle for our team, even though that's not what the platform's about because of the cool admin panel that we have to access everything behind the scenes. It became an all-in-one for us. My directive to everybody on my team is understand the vision, understand the mission, understand the next steps that we're taking together. And what has happened as a result of that is Dan just, like, took that and went and built stuff I didn't even know we needed in the platform. One of the things that we noticed at the very beginning was that people were signing up for the platform, but that didn't lead them to actually activating in the platform. And so we had a huddle, me, Dan, and someone else from our team, and we decided that we needed to get the person to a big win very quickly. And so with Dan and the way that he works spiritually in the world, it-- we came to the idea that when someone first signs up for the platform, they don't give us a credit card. They don't do any of that typical stuff. We literally have a screen that says, "Please take a deep breath." And that idea wouldn't have come if we hadn't had that huddle with Dan. It has revealed a lot of what I didn't know yet, and I think that's true of any startup, is that you don't know what you don't know until s- people start playing with it. So the example of getting people to stop and breathe when they came into the platform was really important. Giving them a win was important, so we actually added in, "Imagine yourself in six months." And so we have a journal in the system that allows them to track who they've becoming. And so we started noticing when people are upgrading or not, and we can start really pinpointing and addressing places in the platform where we wanted to improve interaction. He builds things faster than anything I've experienced before, but solidly. It's not like build it to build it. It's build it to test it. He's, he's fast, he's smart, he's innovative, he's great to communicate with, and we have fun. We have a weekly product call where we get on and we talk about what's working and not working in the platform, what we wanna add, what we're prioritizing. And often in those calls, we're creating new things at the same time. And so it's having that space with him as a thought partner that really makes a difference for a founder. I see Vision Software as a place where a founder can go to literally have the paints and the paintbrush to start painting what they want, and Dan is incredible at bringing that to life. And one of the funniest things is I'll be on a call with him and the team, and we'll note something in the platform that isn't quite working, and while we're talking, he is able to multitask, and he goes in and he's like, "All right, refresh the page," and it's working. Vision Software isn't just about one-and-done coding. It is literally strategy, planning, introductions. It's all-encompassing. It's 360 degrees of support.