967 Brittany Moser, Jamie Pastrano, and Rebecca Matchett:

Wings of Inspired Business Podcast EP967 – Host Melinda Wittstock Interviews Synchrony co-founders Brittany Moser, Jamie Pastrano and Rebecca Matchett

Melinda Wittstock:

Coming up on Wings of Inspired Business:

Jamie Pastrano:

Synchrony really starts, begins and ends with the fact that I’m a mom to my son Jesse, who is 21 and he is autistic. When my son was little, and I was fortunate to be able to find some really great tools that worked. But as he got into his later teen years, I started to see some real big gaps, and it terrified me. I started to ask a question I couldn’t answer, which was, what would his adult social life look like? And I kept on coming up empty.

Jamie Pastrano:

As I was thinking about all this, I met Britt. And Britt worked at a practitioner’s office where my son was seeking services. And very casually and informally, we started talking about the show Love on the Spectrum. And the casual talking turned into somewhat of an obsession. And we kind of joked within the first time, meaning that we were going to jokingly, ha, ha, we’ll build a dating app for adults with autism. And those talks got further and we both realized that the missing gap, the missing resource wasn’t surrounding dating. It was really surrounding community and friendship.

Melinda Wittstock:

We’ve never been more digitally connected, yet we’re all living through what the former U.S. Surgeon General called “the loneliness epidemic”, craving belonging and understanding. So, if you feel weirdly isolated or disconnected, imagine the challenges of social connection for those on the spectrum. Jamie Pastrano, like many female founders, turned the challenges faced by her neurodivergent son Jesse into a promising new social coaching app. 

Melinda Wittstock:

Hi, everyone – wishing you all strength, grace and inspiration in these crazy times we’re living in. I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, the podcast where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a five-time serial entrepreneur, and I started this podcast to catalyze an ecosystem where women entrepreneurs mentor, promote, buy from, and invest in each other. Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together and lift as we climb. If you’ve been listening to any of the past 966 episodes, please help us get the word out about the show. Please subscribe so you never miss an episode. Tell your friends and colleagues, share the episode and leave a quick 5-star rating and review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. We really appreciate it. Thank you! 

Melinda Wittstock:

Today we meet three inspiring co-founders on a mission to provide genuine connection, friendship, and social support for autistic and neurodivergent adults—meeting a massive need that has long been overlooked. This month, Rebecca Matchett, Jamie Pastrano, and Brittany Moser are launching Synchrony, a platform pairing AI-powered social coaching with intentional interest-based matching, in a safe, simple, and supportive space. We’ll be hearing Jamie Pastrano’s inspiring journey as a mom seeking resources for her autistic son, and how she joined forces with autism specialist and digital learning expert Brittany Moser and serial entrepreneur Rebecca Matchett, who you may know as the founder of fashion brands Alice+Olivia and TrioFit.  

We talk about what it takes to bring a new social app to life, all the challenges along the way, especially for non-technical founders navigating AI and tech, and plus the big vision for creating real-life community beyond the screen for the neurodivergent. If you’ve ever watched Love on the Spectrum, you’ll get where they’re going with Synchrony. We also dive into the technical and ethical foundation of their AI, plus what happens when women build meaningful solutions from the heart.

Melinda Wittstock:

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Rebecca Matchett, Jamie Pastrano, and Brittany Moser.

[INTERVIEW]

Melinda Wittstock:

Rebecca, Jamie, Brittany, so many of you. Happy to have you all on Wings. Welcome.

Brittany Moser:

Hello.

Jamie Pastrano:

Thanks for having us.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah. So, well, look, tell me about Synchrony. You’re launching a first of a kind app. Tell us all about it.

Jamie Pastrano:

Yeah.

Brittany Moser:

Well, hello, I’m Brittany. Nice to meet you. Virtually, Synchrony is launching early in February. We’re so excited. We’ve been working tirelessly on this social app for neurodivergent adults for about two years now. Its whole goal is to bring neurodivergent autistic adults together and put a number of different supports in place to help foster really genuine connection through AI driven social coaching.

Melinda Wittstock:

What led you to launch this? It sounds really important, something that people need. But what was the spark that got you all together to begin with and said, this is what you wanted to do?

Jamie Pastrano:

This one will be my story. So really, the whole heart and mission behind Synchrony really starts, begins and ends with the fact that I’m a mom to my son Jesse, who is 21 and he is autistic. And I think like any really good business idea, you have to start with a need and see a gap. And so, as a mom, and of course I have experience in the business world, but for this, as a mom, I really saw a huge gap in the social resources that were available to emerging young adults. We had tons of available options, if anything, too many. When my son was little, and I was fortunate to be able to find some really great tools that worked. But as he got into his later teen years, I started to see some real big gaps, and it terrified me. I started to ask a question I couldn’t answer, which was, what would his adult social life look like? And I kept on coming up empty.

Jamie Pastrano:

And there were camps and social groups that met once a week, but nothing that really built a sustainable resource for building community and fostering connection. And around that same time, I started watching Love on the Spectrum. Loved love, loved that show. And it was an aha moment for me because we finally saw some attention on this age group. Like, right, there’s tons of autistic kids, but they grow up and they still have autism when they’re adults. And so, I was happy to see, you know, this showcased. But it also left me quite sad, because in between these dates, there would be weeks or months, stretches. And what I saw was this kind of pervasive loneliness, this pervasive longing to find belongings on connection.

Jamie Pastrano:

And around that same time, as I was thinking about all this, I met Britt. And Britt worked at a practitioner’s office where my son was seeking services. And very casually and informally, we started talking about the show Love on the Spectrum. And the casual talking turned into somewhat of an obsession. And we kind of joked within the first time, meaning that we were going to jokingly, ha, ha, we’ll build an app. We’ll build a dating app for adults with autism. And those talks got further and we both realized that the missing gap, the missing resource wasn’t surrounding dating. It was really surrounding community and friendship.

Jamie Pastrano:

And, you know, how do you date successfully when you struggle with maintaining friendships and just common, everyday connection? And we made a decision fairly early on that we were going to find a way to address this gap. We didn’t have the answer, but we knew we had a problem. We knew we had a community of people that we care deeply about, and we wanted to find a way to fix that. And I don’t have startup experience. I have business experience. I have mom experience, but I never started a business. So, I did what I guess most people would do or what I would do was phone a friend. So, I reached out to Becky, who is a serial entrepreneur, very successful one.

Jamie Pastrano:

She is the mom of my daughter’s friends, and I just took her to lunch and said, hey, here’s my idea. You know, help me. What’s the order of operations here? What do I do? You know, do I get marketing? Do I get an app developer? I had done a little market research prior to that and knew that we were onto something and there were no other resources, but I didn’t know what to do next. And after that lunch, kind of jokingly said, hey, why don’t you be our COO? We didn’t even have a name at this point. And Synchrony was started born, and two years later, here we are.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s an amazing story, Jamie. Just the inspiration from your own personal experience. I think a lot of women in business, we tend to launch things that are very personal to us. Finding co-founders really early because a lot of folks kind of struggle and they try and do it all themselves. So, Rebecca, or I imagine you prefer, do you prefer Becky?

Rebecca Matchett:

Yeah, either one is fine. I answered it.

Melinda Wittstock:

You get this call from Jamie, and you’re like, okay, well, like, I can help you. What was the spark where you said, oh, actually, you know, like, I’m all in on this. You know, I’ve built Alice+Olivia and TrioFit and all these other companies, and I’m just gonna go double down on this. 

Melinda Wittstock:

What made you interested?

Rebecca Matchett:

Well, it’s funny, because I didn’t know what my next move was going to be. I had been in fashion for many years, and I knew that I had to. I wasn’t going to go back to working for someone else or a corporate job. But beyond that, I needed something that really lit a fire within me. I have a super busy life with my kids, and I have so many other outside commitments and things like that. This was going to have to be something that absolutely sparked something in me. And hearing Jamie talk with the passion that she had, understanding the need in the market and understanding that the isolation of this population was completely neglected just spoke to me on so many different levels. You know, certainly as an entrepreneur, I could see and envision the business side of it and the growth and the opportunity and the market gap that should be addressed. But on the personal level, which is really what I was waiting for, it. It was something that I. It filled a need in me that I had never really addressed professionally. And so, it ended up checking every single box I could have hoped for. And, you know, the fact that I get to work with Jamie, who’s amazing, and Brit, who’s so talented in her field. It all came together in this completely fortuitous way that I wouldn’t have known to look for it, because it’s kind of a unicorn.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. That’s so interesting how opportunities land at the right time, in the right moment. I’m so much about entrepreneurship is timing. So, Brittany, how did you find your way into this?

Brittany Moser:

Yeah, so I’m very similar to Jamie in this way where I was watching the show and in my background, I’m. I started off as a teacher and autism specialist, and I’m very much in the field of theoretical understanding and the education space. And when I had met Jamie again, I was watching Love on the Spectrum and was just in love with it. I’m such a visual person. And so, when I was watching the show, I could see in my head what this app would look like. I’m like, oh, a dating app. Autistic adults, we put the right supports in place, just like I would do for my students, but at an older scale.

Brittany Moser:

And I could just envision it so clearly. And then as soon as I met Jamie and we were on the same track, and it was just very easy to. To pursue that and get involved. And then when she introduced me to Becky, I was like, oh, my God, it’s happening. What a dream come true. And that was kind of how I got into the fold. 

Brittany Moser:

I know we’ll talk a little bit about challenges later on, but I think that to what you’re saying, so much of the success that we’ve had working together over the past couple of years has just been those natural connections and trusting your gut around working with different people. And we’ve. We’ve been lucky, knock on wood, around all of the different people we’ve brought on board just because they are great to work with. And we could tell straight away.

Melinda Wittstock:

There’s an obvious need and market for this. It’s so interesting when you talk about isolation in this neurodivergent community, where you have, like, isolation almost everywhere. Like social media and all these dating apps and all this stuff was supposed to… It sort of brought us together, but it’s actually not. It hasn’t succeeded at all. And in fact, people are more divided, people are more alienated, people are more isolated. 

Melinda Wittstock:

So, when it comes to architecting this app, how do you avoid some of those pitfalls in the social context? How do you do it? 

Jamie Pastrano:

I think that’s a great question. And obviously, first and foremost, I think is because we’re thinking about the audience we’re serving. We’re not thinking about the end game. So, when you start with what we’re building, we’re nothing like the current social media platforms, right? I don’t want to even mention their names. We are not a platform for sharing thoughts, for sharing pictures, for sharing blogs, to get attention. It’s really quite simple. The app is built around matching people with, like, people with common interests, with similarities, looking for similar things to form friendships. There is no community forum.

Jamie Pastrano:

There’s no community board. We have pretty strict community guidelines. And the whole goal of synchrony is really simple. To help neurodivergent autistic adults find their people, build community, one person, one connection at a time, in a secure authentication platform. So, if you can maybe imagine what a dating app would look like in this simplicity of functionality, right? Like, you can only meet with. You’re talking with one person at a time; you’re not on a community board. And imagine scaling it back and building that through the lens of somebody that struggles with social anxieties and struggles with how to communicate where we’re really tailoring it to the needs of the community based on experience as a mom, based on experience as a social worker, based on birth experience, and based on a lot of team members experience who also are neurodivergent. If you guys want to add, feel free.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, I just wanted to follow up with a really quick question there. Are you helping people actually meet in real life?

Jamie Pastrano:

So initially, no. Right now, the goal is to build the community down the line. When we get enough members and we have a healthy community, we. We want to host Synchrony sponsored events in real life.

Melinda Wittstock:

Got it.

Jamie Pastrano:

Okay, so the members first though, right?

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. So, the AI is working kind of like a recommendation engine in a way, right? Like you’re learning about connecting them.

Jamie Pastrano:

Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you off so fast.

Melinda Wittstock:

It’s all good.

Brittany Moser:

I can explain the AI portion a little bit. So, what you’re thinking about the recommendation portion is somewhat true, but that’s more to do with the matching algorithm. And how that plays out is the people who are showing up for you on the screen are the people that you’re looking for. So, they have similar interests to you and they’re in a similar geographical location to you, if that’s how you’ve set your settings. But our main goal is the interest-based matching. So, whoever’s showing up on your ‘for you’ page are likely to have similar interests to you. Or at least those are the ones who are popping up first and then you can see the rest of the people later. Where the AI driven social coaching comes in is when you have matched with somebody you’ve synced up, you’re a sync mate, which is what we call them, and you, you’re able to mess that person.

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Melinda Wittstock:

And we’re back with Rebecca Matchett, Jamie Pastrano, and Brittany Moser—the co-founders of Synchrony.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUES]

Brittany Moser:

The AI driven social coaching comes in as the, as the social coach, as the structured supports to help you continue and generate the conversation with the other user. And our AI social coach, his, his or her name is Jesse. It’s not a bot; it’s a social coach where it has been trained to help with very commonly known social communication differences amongst neurodivergent people. And that includes like being able initiate and express yourself. It includes being able to digest social nuances such as emoji meanings or jokes that seem to have bypassed the user and then also protect boundaries as well.

Melinda Wittstock:

I’m really curious about how the user experience works on this, like what it looks like. I’m trying to imagine it, I guess. Right. Can you paint someone picture for me?

Brittany Moser:

Most definitely. And I think when you talk about it, it’s sounds. I’ve been doing demos for this all day today and it sounds really. It’s kind of complicated to describe because there’s so many small pieces that have gone into every single element of the app. But when you open it up and look at it, it’s very simple, user friendly, easy to use. There’s only a few different sections of the app really. But when we’re thinking about the AI social coaching, you would. You and I are messaging.

Brittany Moser:

You open it up and there’s a little Jesse icon within the messages and you can press him or her and that pops up three different buttons. The top button says express yourself. So, you can get help to express yourself in many different ways, like initiating the conversation or just what do I say next? The next button under that is understand what’s happening and that is that social decoding. Being able to figure out what is going on in this conversation. I feel like I’m missing something. And that last button is protect my comfort. And that is the boundary setting. Like how do I leave this conversation while still being kind to this person? Or they made me feel uncomfortable.

Brittany Moser:

How do I address that? And so, what’s different about the way that we’ve structured with those three buttons is that it’s different to like a ChatGPT or an OpenAI in the way that you ask anything. And so that requires the person to think of the question and then also take it back and interpret how I can put that into a response to the other person. So, there’s kind of a few different steps involved there. So, supporting the executive functioning of the member, we’ve broken that down and preprogrammed the prompting to help them with those targeted social communication differences.

Jamie Pastrano:

But to visualize that, Melinda, if you imagine taking your phone and being in a text exchange, the app looks very much like the way your phone would work if you’re texting and messaging. So, imagine you’re messaging, you’re texting a friend, and there’s a little circle at the bottom of it that you can click to get help with what to say. Almost like a, you know, a ChatGPT button included in your text messages to give you guided support if you need it, when you need it. It’s very, very simple. And it looks just like your phone would look.

Melinda Wittstock:

Got it. Okay, interesting. So, the AI at the backend of this, and I’m going to put AI in this context where a lot of people are afraid of AI and other people are really enthusiastic about AI. AI pushes a lot of buttons. Right. So, tell me a little bit technically about how that AI is actually working. Is this derived from a large language model? Is it derived entirely from private data? Is it training on the people who are using it? Like, how did that all come to be?

Jamie Pastrano:

So, first of all, we have to say that the AI is named after my son. So, my son is Jesse.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay. Oh, nice.

Jamie Pastrano:

We’re using Amazon Bedrock. So, we shop for the best, most effective LLMs within Amazon bedrock. And we built a platform to kind of test out different efficacies across the model so that we can use what’s best on Cloud or what’s best on Sonnet to best meet the needs for synchrony. We are not using any data to train any other language models at all. We, our team, particularly Brit and the CTO and the app team, are training the AI to use language that best meets our members need. And obviously, safety and confidentiality. Nothing is being shared outside of the Synchrony team.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rebecca Matchett:

I think it’s also a number of sort of guardrails that are set up. So, if a member wants to ask, ask, you know, where can I get the best taco? Or, you know, I. Or asks another member, what’s your address? Where do you live? The idea is that we’ve set up these boundaries and these guardrails to say, you know, that’s not an appropriate question, or let’s get back on track here. You know, let me. Let’s talk. Let’s come up with some ideas that you can communicate, you know, more that. That moves this relationship forward, right.

Rebecca Matchett:

And so, it’s supportive and it’s helpful, but it’s also keeping things on track because this is not to replace ChatGPT. This is, you know, very specific to the conversation in the community. 

Melinda Wittstock:

So, I guess, Brittany, this might be a question for you. You’re an autism specialist, right. And a digital learning expert, so you understand kind of how people communicate and the different things. So presumably, I mean, do you have, like a data database of some kind of, like, research? Is there some sort of specialized training to be able to identify what’s going on in these conversations? Like, how is the AI working in that aspect of it?

Brittany Moser:

Right, yeah. Oh, that’s a great question. I didn’t explain that part. So, what happens when you press this button? And I think this is a big differentiator to our original idea was to have like people could meet and there would be just general conversation prompts and tips, social tips on the side of the app where you could go and access these different resources and materials. The way that the AI has been helpful is it brings a lot of that existing knowledge around where people tend to struggle and it puts it into context with the support in the conversation itself. So, if you and I are messaging and we go into the app and I’m like, hmm, I don’t really know what she meant by that.

Brittany Moser:

And I press the understand what’s happening button. It scans your conversation and it interprets what’s going on and starts to generate a back and forth between the AI, Jesse and the user to get to the bottom of what’s going on and coaches them through what’s happening and gives them some response ideas that they could edit, use themselves. So, I think that what is most beneficial about this is that it puts all of the knowledge around social communication support into the real context of what’s going on with you and the other member in that message in real time.

Jamie Pastrano:

And maybe to further that. Melinda, we’re not a therapeutic app. We’re not clinical. So, we’re not in any way trying to say that we’re evidence based and empirical data on offering therapeutic advice. We’re really there to offer social guidance to help further communication on obvious gaps that are very well known in the neurodivergent community. You know, furthering conversation, answering questions. But no, we don’t have, you know, a research database of language and proven stats that have worked. I wish we did. And as we build our members, we will be studying the AI responses, the Jesse responses. Specifically, we have a feature that’s asking for feedback and if you ask us this in six months, we’ll be able to tell you what, what exactly has worked, what hasn’t worked, what language we need to model, what language we need to change. But we’re, we’re, we’re pretty much breaking new territory here. And so that research and that data will come with the users and more information as we gather it.

Melinda Wittstock:

Interesting. Yeah, because I think there is an opportunity on that therapeutic side. I’m a venture partner and entrepreneur in residence at a fund that looks at a lot of female founded startups. We’re seeing a lot of really interesting applications of AI in the health space.

Jamie Pastrano:

Like actually met with somebody recently. I’m looking to do something like that. But female.

Brittany Moser:

I think that, yeah, what you’re saying before about a lot of people either love AI or are terrified of AI. And I think that we like to consider that we’re using AI for good and that we’re channeling it in a way that we know can directly help with social communication and not just like, you know, a quick Google about or you know, ChatGPT search of something unnecessary. Like this is truly on demand support. And whereas before you would have to wait until you go to a speed dating event or you would have to wait until you go to your social group session next Saturday or whatever that is. And so, I think it just provides that little bit of extra on demand in the moment support. So, you’re not waiting until. We’re not trying to replace anything.

Jamie Pastrano:

Right.

Rebecca Matchett:

But at the same time, we are sort of tailoring it to our members. Right. So, while there’s, we’re not creating our own AI model at the moment, we are sort of laying our need, the needs of our community on top of an existing AI model. So it is, we are going to continue to hone it to make sure that it is serving, you know, our members very, very specifically. And we are hoping that Jesse will be able to provide this guidance that, that they would not really be able to find elsewhere. And we will be using the data that we are receiving in order to, to further hone Jesse.

Melinda Wittstock:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, I’m curious how you go to market and maybe Rebecca, this is a good question for you. I mean, how do you get the word out about this app? Tell me a little bit about your marketing and how you’re reaching these communities and how you expect it to grow.

Rebecca Matchett:

Yeah, so we have a sort of multi-pronged approach, and we are going down the traditional marketing route with a marketing firm who’s helping with digital ads. You know, we’re on social media. We are. Brit is the sort of the, our social media face and you’ll see incredible demos and videos from her on social media and we’re trying to engage the end user that way. At the moment, the call to action is to sign up for the mailing list. Of course, that will ultimately be in a few weeks from now to download the app, but so we have those traditional channels. But another area of growth or avenue that we’re pursuing are real partnerships with nonprofits, with universities to, to get the word out on a level that builds trust and makes and puts some meat on the bones of our company before we’re launching. So, in part, the association with big, with big organizations gives us a legitimacy that we need to reach to launch in the market.

Rebecca Matchett:

In addition to sort of approaching end users, we are hoping to speak with these larger organizations to create a community for them, an internal community for them, a synchrony community for them. So, let’s say a university has a large neurodivergent population and they have an adult center, autism center that services that group. We are talking to them to create an internal synchrony, specifically white labeled for them so that they have a way to communicate with their internal community. And that of course, it’s a very, very different sort of business-to-business growth model where you will be able to access a larger group of people more efficiently. I think both approaches are really vital at this, at this time. You know, we want to be able to grow organically member by member, have that public facing app that services anyone and everyone who’s interested and who is qualified in an authentic, will add to our community in authentic way. But then you have this business-to-business approach where we feel that we can provide a solution, a communication solution to entire organizations at the same time to make communication a little bit smoother within that organization.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right, that, that seems like a very good go to market. Right. In a way because you can get a lot more volume into the app, you know, much quicker and organization. So, what are some of the examples of organizations that could use this?

Rebecca Matchett:

Well, at the moment we are speaking with a couple of universities who have autism departments, excuse me, that specifically cater to their autistic students. If we could create a sort of very, a communication system within that organization where they’re not just on general message boards or they’re not just receiving emails in their inbox, but there’s actually a closed community, we feel that we would be able to service that, that community really well. But in addition to universities, you know, there are many, many organizations out there, businesses for profit businesses, employment agencies that are trying to, you know, find employment for this population, are trying to integrate, make sure that their members feel integrated into the larger community. And this is just a, it’s, it’s a way to ease communication.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Jamie Pastrano:

So, Melinda, there’s a huge network out there of Neurodiverse employer companies that employ neurodivergent adults throughout different companies. That’s our whole business model. And then there’s probably over 500 universities nationwide that just have programs just for autistic students or neurodivergent students. And so, you know, I just went to a summit in Pittsburgh a couple of months ago, and there were 150 universities there. They had neurodiverse students. They had an entire board. And we’re marketing strategically to a lot of those universities to say, wouldn’t it be great if your 200 students, instead of texting or chatting or being on these other platforms, had an internal platform where they can communicate with each other, but also communicate with their teachers and with their advisors in this safe platform? So, on a partnership standpoint, the opportunities are really endless. And fortunately, we’ve been receiving a lot of very, very positive feedback, both on the employer side and on the university side, looking for demos and looking for ways to integrate our cost model into the tuition so that they can offer it to their students.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, that’s really exciting. I can imagine a lot of companies, you know, it really. It would just even improve company efficiency in a way. For companies that have, say, I don’t know, a lot of AI developers that are on the spectrum.

Jamie Pastrano:

What’s funny, I feel like on most of the podcasts we’re on, what’s really cool is it seems like most people, their mind opens up and goes, wait, we can use it here or we can use it there. And I think for us, if there’s anything, I think we’re not anything. I think one of the many things that we’re doing really well is focusing on one mission at a time and making sure that we’re starting out just authentically being great as a social app for neurodivergent adults. In the back of all of our minds, and I’m sure Becky’s the most, is the buzzing of, you know, how much more we can take this and the scalability and how many more ways in which our model and our innovation can really help on a larger scale. But we have to just get it right first.

Melinda Wittstock:

One step in front of the other. So that focus is very, very critical, you know, in building a company. What have been some of the challenges along the way? You mentioned that you’ve been working on this for a couple of years, and here you are at launch.

Melinda Wittstock:

Like, were there particular challenges that you guys had to overcome to be able to get it this far? Like what, what’s the journey been?

Jamie Pastrano:

Yes, of course. So, I think, you know, the first challenge, of course, is just trust. I think, I don’t know if I can say this about Brit. I think Brit, you know, being, being younger, you’re less jaded, which is a wonderful thing. But I think for Becky and I, being a little bit older and seasoned and women in male dominated businesses, you know, have probably been used to not trusting and letting run the show. And so, I think the first challenge is just really letting people who excel at what they’re great at do what they’re great at and not micromanage and having faith that they’re going to get it done. That’s been a challenge, but I think we’ve done a great job of it. Everybody’s really stepped up to the plate.

Jamie Pastrano:

And the other challenge is not knowing. We don’t, we’ve never, we’re not tech people. We don’t know, you know, the app space. We, we know the need. And so, you know, going into something with, with, without the knowledge and knowing how to do it, that requires a trust that I don’t think I anticipated. You know, our app team can, you know, we have to have faith that what they’re telling us is accurate. We don’t, we don’t know that part of it. That’s hard.

Jamie Pastrano:

And I think also what we didn’t know is how long this was going to take. It does take a long time, longer….

Melinda Wittstock:

…Than you think, especially in app or any kind of technical.

Jamie Pastrano:

Oh, my gosh.

Melinda Wittstock:

And actually, Jamie, you raise a question that’s come up in this podcast quite a bit. And I know I’ve experienced it, you know, in the very beginning, my first, well, my second company, well, my first company, we had a lot of tech innovation. I remember that first experience of working with technical, you know, with developers and whatnot. Coming at it without a technical background myself and how challenging.

Jamie Pastrano:

Right.

Melinda Wittstock:

Was. Yeah. And a lot of female founders do struggle with this because you, you, you, you. I don’t know, it’s kind of akin to a woman walking into a hardware store and like how you treat it, you know. Right. It’s really difficult and it’s difficult to know like, what are they telling you? And then it is very, very challenging. So, I want to break this down a lot more because I, I think a lot of women founders do struggle with this in, in, in the tech world. So, so give me some examples of the kind of things like how you found the right people, how you knew they were the right people, how that whole development process is working, like, do you guys have a CTO? Or like, how is all that working?

Jamie Pastrano:

We do. I mean, I don’t want to simplify the answer on this one, but I will, because I don’t know how to be anything other than authentically honest. To me, we were really fortunate in finding what we consider to be the right people pretty quickly. I think it was word of mouth initially and talking to a few different people on. At the end of the day, the people that we really chose to bring on were people that didn’t look at us as a product and as a business, but really got the mission and had some level of passion about what we were building. And that really created a level of trust right out of the gate. We were fortunate to find our app developer pretty early on through word of mouth, and we, I mean, rather quickly created a really great, trusting relationship with him. I don’t, you know, we’ve had a couple of the hiccups along the way where, you know, you don’t know.

Jamie Pastrano:

I’ll give you a silly example. Going to beta testing and, you know, having a million bugs at the 11th hour, walking in, and, you know, we don’t know that. That’s apparently normal and apparently often happens. Our CTO is telling us this, what we don’t know. And so, there’s this moment of, well, this guy’s great and he’s our CTO and we trust him, but why are there all these bugs? So, it’s something as silly as that. And at the end of the day, you have a couple choices to make. You know, when you make a decision to put your faith and your trust in someone and you, you, you have to trust them, right? You just have to. You can express when you feel someone hasn’t missed, hasn’t made a deadline or missed the mark.

Jamie Pastrano:

But at the end of the day, if you really want to see success and you really want the team to work, you have to trust and let them do their job. And I think, think if there’s anything we’ve, the three of us have done collectively really well is allowing everybody to do what we’ve hired them and allotted them to do. It’s hard, but I don’t think you can be successful if you try to micromanage people that you put in a position of power.

Melinda Wittstock:

Oh, God, certainly not. Certainly not tech people. I mean, one of the things I encountered very early on is something called malicious obedience, right? And malicious obedience is where the, the founder says something like and, and confuses, starts to get into the how okay. As. As opposed to the why. And the why okay. And, and the, the tech people carry it out faithfully. But it, it wasn’t actually what you actually wanted.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right.

Rebecca Matchett:

Even though. Right. But I, and I also think that, you know, there’s a level, we’ve been very fortunate and been, it’s been very important for us to communicate when we have questions, when we don’t understand something. And we need to work with people who are willing, and not only willing to talk us through and explain something to us, but able to talk us through and explain something to us. And that those are two very different things. Especially I found in this sort of app development tech world, someone can be a genius at what they’re doing, but if they’re not able to explain in simple language to me, it’s not, there’s something missing there. They’re not making the connection to how is someone going to use this app, how is someone going to interact with it? And so we’ve been able to find that perfect balance with our development team where they are incredible coders, they know what they’re doing, they’re very capable, but they are also able to explain to us, us as sort of equivalent of a, of the end user type of person that, you know, this is how we, how it’s going to work. This is the functionality, this is if you need a tradeoff, this is what we suggest.

Rebecca Matchett:

And it’s just very practical. And you know, for people who are very ignorant in this field, that’s very valuable.

Jamie Pastrano:

Well, and I think we didn’t do what Melinda said. Right. But fortunately, we didn’t know enough to do that. We didn’t tell them the how. We were very specific in creating a vision and a feeling and what we wanted it to be and trusted them to help us build it and let us know where there would be pitfalls and collectively we would decide what feature is important and what’s not or what are our tradeoffs.

Rebecca Matchett:

But I also feel that one of my truisms, at least that’s worked for me in starting companies, is to a certain extent, ignorance is bliss. And knowing too much can really hamper a process and also hamper creativity. And I think that if we had all the answers ironed out and we knew exactly the path we wanted to follow, we wouldn’t have been as willing and able to diverge and to sort of pivot when needed and to see another perspective. And I just Think it’s really, it’s critical to allow yourself to pivot and to say, okay, maybe what we laid out before isn’t exactly the right route for the moment and being ignorant makes that process a little bit easier. We don’t necessarily know what we’re skipping over or avoiding at the moment. But yeah, I mean, I think we’ve all been on the same page for the entire journey so far.

Melinda Wittstock:

And so how has this been funded? Have you all bootstrapped it, or do you get investment money or how did that all work?

Rebecca Matchett:

Yeah, it’s self-funded at the moment. We were, we’ve just been in some financial projection conversations this week a little bit. You know, there’s, there’s such an unknown with our user base. Right. We really don’t know what those numbers are going to look like. Right now, we’re trying to get some numbers sort of based off of social media following or wait list signups. But, but it’s just a poor approximation. You know, we, it’s going to be very, very difficult to, to understand what those numbers look like until we launch.

Melinda Wittstock:

Right. And so, what’s the business model? How do you make money?

Jamie Pastrano:

Paid? Yeah, go ahead, Becky, continue.

Rebecca Matchett:

No, through subscription fees, through membership fees. So, our individual, you know, one member at a time fees and then, and then the plan is through larger agreements with universities or employment agencies or these other organizations.

Melinda Wittstock:

Amazing. And so, what is your ultimate vision for where this is going to be? Say, like paint the picture for me, five years from now, where do you think your company will be? How big will it be? What, what, what’s your, like what in your wildest dreams, what would be success?

Rebecca Matchett:

Well, I mean, I’m, I’m sure we all have slightly different versions of this, but for me it’s, it’s. Jamie alluded to it a bit. You know, I, I would love to be able to create, to build this member community and eventually take it offline and expand what we are offering. And so, what that could look like, for instance, are social events in real life. Social events, you know, at a sporting event or a section, you know, at a Yankees game or a once a month meetup at a, at Applebee’s where there’s a section roped off with a special menu and there’s a synchrony member there sort of facilitating and making sure that the community is able to take those social skills that they’ve honed on the app and implement them in person in these events. I would love synchrony to be able to match our members with employment opportunities or to work with local flower shops to get discounted rates on Mother’s Day, you know, and to facilitate sending home flowers. And, you know, so there’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of potential growth that we are trying to facilitate. And I see that not just necessarily in the social sphere, but it could also fill gaps and make it a little bit easier to connect with employment or family life and other aspects that, that are, you know, really fall on the individual.

Melinda Wittstock:

Wonderful. Well, I want to make sure that everybody knows how to find synchrony on social media and follow all of you three. We’ll make sure we have all that in the show notes. But what’s the best way for people to connect with you? If they’ve heard this and they know someone who could really use the app and, and, and, or they want to partner with you in some way? What’s the best way?

Brittany Moser:

So, for our waitlist, you can wait list, TikTok, Instagram, Meta, all of them are Join Synchrony. And so, if you look for that handle, you’ll always be able to find us. Our big call to action is we’re desperate for people to sign. Not desperate, but we really want people to join our wait list because we have so much exciting news coming out with the launch. We have our launch party coming up in February, and so we just want everybody to get those communications. So, if you sign up for our waitlist, you’ll get detailed info on the app actually launching and being able to download. But then, of course, you know, follow our journey on all of the socials.

Jamie Pastrano:

And the wait list is on our website and it’s all Join Synchrony.

Melinda Wittstock:

Okay, well, fantastic. Thank you so much, Rebecca, Brittany, and Jamie, for putting on your wings and flying with us today. Very inspiring story.

Brittany Moser:

Thank you.

Jamie Pastrano:

Melinda, thank you. Appreciate you having us. I know it’s probably a lot for you to have three women, three voices. I’ll talk.

Melinda Wittstock:

Great way to start my day today. Thank you so much.

[INTERVIEW ENDS]

Melinda Wittstock:

Jamie Pastrano, Rebecca Matchett and Brittany Moser are the co-founders of Synchrony, the new AI-powered social app for the neurodivergent community.

Melinda Wittstock:

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Melinda Wittstock:

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