This month Katie sat down with Sasha Shtern the CEO of Goally. Goally makes bedtime & mornings way less stressful with a safe tablet built for kids. They help with routines, social skills, and more! Their tablets are designed for kids ages 2-10. There are no ads and parents have total control via their phone.
They are dedicated to helping kids learn and be independent.
When you buy Goally, you join a community of thousands of parents, educators, and therapists.
This video was recorded in our new studio at Enterprise RiNo! If you would like to book the studio click here to go to the booking calendar.
Katie: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome to this month's Community Spotlight. This month we're sitting here with Sasha from Goally, and we're coming to you from the new Enterprise RiNo Studio space. Isn't this fabulous? We just launched this earlier this year. This is a rentable event space for members and non-members for all sorts of studio needs. You can record product shoots, video shoots, interviews like we're doing here. Options are very endless.
Sasha: [00:00:29] Headshots.
Katie: [00:00:30] Headshots are a big one.
Sasha: [00:00:31] We've got backgrounds for headshots. There's a green screen, there's professional lighting, there's a little makeup stand. There's a lot of stuff in here for video.
Katie: [00:00:41] It's a really cool space. If you haven't seen it, ping me or Lauren and come check it out. Sasha, thank you so much for taking the time and being here with us today. Hello. Tell us a little bit more about you and Goally.
Sasha: [00:00:55] All right. Goally We've been here in Enterprise all through Covid. So I guess it's been, like four years. Something like that. I grew up in Denver Boulder, Denver area, and went to high school in Westminster, went to CU Denver. Got a finance degree and really been an entrepreneur my whole life. I started a company that sold home improvement products on the internet, and we became much more of a manufacturer over time, and by total happenstance, one thing led to another. I ended up running Goally many years later.
Katie: [00:01:32] How? When did you launch Goally? How long is Goally been around?
Sasha: [00:01:36] Goally has been around since 2016. A long time. Yeah. I actually didn't start Goally. Goally was started by a dad in Boulder. Their son was facing a lot of behavioral challenges, and they started taking him to behavior therapy. I think he was seven years old at the time, and they learned all these things in therapy, but they had a hard time implementing them at home. And so his idea was, I'm going to make an app that helps people implement these ideas at home. Well, specifically, one type of idea was called a visual schedule. So it's like, you know, if you if you want to if you tell a child, go get ready for bed, that instruction is too broad sometimes. So a behavior therapist mean what does it mean? What is it getting ready for bed. It's like this abstract thing. And so a behavior therapist will break it out into smaller chunks that they can understand. It could be like, brush your teeth, put on your pajamas, and then they'll give them visual guides to help them do that. And that actually helps everybody. I mean, that's kind of like what your Google Calendar is, right? It's kind of like a visual guide to your day. So that's really the core of what Google does today is how do we make these visual schedules and tools that kids can use.
Katie: [00:02:50] I bet that kind of boomed during covid, right?
Sasha: [00:02:54] We were still in our nascent stage during Covid. Candidly, we were really struggling at times. Covid was a weird time, but we're doing well now. I think people during Covid realized that they could actually successfully implement a lot of things at home with their kids, whereas before they thought like, oh, that's for the professionals somewhere else to do. But when they saw what the professionals were doing, they were like, oh, maybe I could do this.
Katie: [00:03:25] Are you primarily just in the Colorado market or does Goally reach all the states or outside.
Sasha: [00:03:30] Yeah so we make software and we make a tablet. So we all of our apps and our video content are on this kid's tablet. There's no YouTube. There's no web browser. There's none of that. And our customers are all over the place. We focus on kids with special needs. Often there's an ADHD diagnosis. Maybe there's an autism diagnosis, maybe there's no diagnosis. About a third of our customers just want like something for young kids that they know that they won't be on, like YouTube on totally, but they still want some educational tools and stuff like that. So our customers are all over the world, really. We just had some orders in Singapore. We had some orders. We have a bunch of customers in Australia, but the US is where we primarily ship our products to.
Katie: [00:04:17] Awesome. Very powerful. Powerful stuff. You're really helping people, which I think is really amazing.
Sasha: [00:04:23] We're trying to we're trying to digitize these things so that ordinary people can implement them so that you don't need a professional. I mean, having a professional is always better, right?
Katie: [00:04:35] But not everyone can afford it or has resources to get to take a kid to a professional where you're providing a software and a tablet that can be used at home. You make it easy. Yeah.
Sasha: [00:04:48] Maybe they can't do everything a professional can do, but can we allow them to do like half of what a professional would do? Because that's a big deal.
Katie: [00:04:55] Huge.
Sasha: [00:04:56] Yeah. And then for our customers that do have a professional in the loop, it's just like really helps them implement at home what they're kids doing in session with a speech therapist or a behavior therapist or a pediatric OT, which is pediatric OT. Have you ever heard of that? No, because when I heard of it, I was like, OTS, these kids don't have jobs. What do they need? Occupational therapists, occupational therapists, that school.
Katie: [00:05:20] I guess it's kind of an occupation.
Sasha: [00:05:24] Apparently OTS work largely on fine motor skills and and gross motor skills, and so, like, if you if you're an adult who has to see an OT, it's like, you know, it's like picking up objects, lifting yourself off a toilet, that kind of thing. But if you're a kid, it's like handwriting, right? It's like fine motor controls like that. So, yeah, OTS worked with a lot of kids, too.
Katie: [00:05:52] You know, I saw a speech therapist when I was a kid, and I remember my parents picking me up from school and taking me out of the afternoon to this other school and saying I was going to meet with this lady. And I met with her, and and that's when I realized I had a speech impediment. I didn't know up until that point. And I gotta say, it was really embarrassing for me. She did say I was the the fastest learner that she ever had, but I think it's because I was so embarrassed and a tool like Goally If I could have done that in the privacy of my own home, in my bedroom, on an iPad with my siblings, it would have been so much easier for me as a child to get through it. I'm sure I would have learned just as quickly, but to be pulled out of my normal like afternoon school every like Wednesday for a year. It was it was tough. And I wish this would have existed when I was growing up.
Sasha: [00:06:48] That's really interesting. So I hadn't thought of kids being embarrassed, but it must be the case. I but you're you're really a success story, right? Like, I never knew you had a speech impediment. So like, these services work. But, yeah, I think we could help. Probably not. We're not there yet. Like, our focus is really on pre-verbal kids who are struggling with language acquisition. The challenge with speech impediments is they're all
Katie: [00:07:21] I had trouble with my R's.
Sasha: [00:07:22] Yeah. So there's like lots of different words, letter sounds that kids struggle with. Yeah. And so like identifying what is this kid doing wrong. Are they like putting their tongue in the wrong place?
Katie: [00:07:34] Which was exactly what was happening to me. Yeah.
Sasha: [00:07:36] Maybe they're like breathing at the wrong point.
Katie: [00:07:39] Right.
Sasha: [00:07:40] So that's harder for us to digitize. But when, you know, no words. Yeah.
Sasha: [00:07:48] Use Goally
Katie: [00:07:50] So you've You've been a long time Enterprise member. Yeah. You were actually. I'm pretty sure you were a member before you launched Goally?
Sasha: [00:07:58] Yeah, before Goally. I was a member, too, in my last company. So. Yeah.
Katie: [00:08:03] Why did you choose enterprise coworking?
Sasha: [00:08:06] Okay. Great. Management number one. Right.
Katie: [00:08:10] Shout out Lauren.
Sasha: [00:08:13] The location is awesome. So we're at 30th and Lawrence, there's a park nearby, so, like, I'll do walking calls out there. There's like a bajillion restaurants and bars, so it's, like, easy for the team to go walk somewhere and just, like, grab a coffee. Location is awesome. Second is amenities in the building are cool. It's.
Katie: [00:08:37] You guys do a lot of rooftop workouts.
Sasha: [00:08:40] Yeah, we used to work out on the roof. The rooftops nice to just, like, get away from the office environment, but we're really just, like, 25ft away. I think it's 25ft directly above us.
Katie: [00:08:53] I think so, yeah, it's pretty spot on.
Sasha: [00:08:56] Yeah. So, like, rooftop, the kitchen. We've done events here as well. So it's like really nice to be able to rent these bigger spaces as well. Like all of that in one package makes this just like, convenient for us.
Katie: [00:09:12] Awesome. Well, we greatly value you guys being members here. We love your whole team. Thanks. We appreciate you. We're happy to have you. We hope you stay forever.
Sasha: [00:09:22] We will.
Katie: [00:09:22] We've got larger offices for when. You're ready to grow your team and move into bigger offices. We can accommodate that as well.
Sasha: [00:09:29] You actually did that once we we grew up and then we had to scale down. So there's a testament. It does go both ways. It goes both ways. Like it? It's convenient.
Katie: [00:09:41] Great. Do you have anything else that you want to say to our viewers about yourself or Goally or your team or enterprise?
Sasha: [00:09:52] www.getgoally.com and enterprisecoworking.com.
Katie: [00:09:59] Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit with me today and chat. This is a pleasure. And as a reminder, we're coming from our studio, so come in and check us out. We're here for your video and product needs.
Sasha: [00:10:13] You too can record a video just like this.
Katie: [00:10:15] Just like this.
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