“…Drop everything else and make this happen”

Revolutionizing autism education

When she talks about autism and autism education, Katie Hench gushes with infectious passion. Katie on a mission is to change the world of autism education, entrepreneurship is just the tool to get there.

I was introduced to Katie, cofounder of autism education startup Infiniteach by my old boss Aksh Gupta. We met at Chicago Coworking space 1871. As Infiniteach was preparing to launch Skill Champ, their first company product.

RILEY MASUNAGA: So what’s the Elevator pitch for Skill Champ?

KATIE HENCH: Skill Champ is an educational app based on best practice autism strategies. We’re incorporating elements of autism intervention into an app that makes it easy for parents and teachers to customize lessons to teach their kids new skills and use data to understand how their kids are learning.

[my cofounder] Chris has been working and researching this idea for the past 10 years, but our company Infiniteach has been around for a year. We got funded last May, did a lot of R&D over the summer, created paper products and curriculums in the fall and have been doing app development for the past 2 or 3 months.

Do best practice theories from research differ from what really works in the classroom?

The real challenge is that teachers are always pressed for time. If they had all the time in the world they would set up their classroom and curriculum to be based on absolutely every theoretical principle — but the reality is that most teachers have to take [a school’s] standard curriculum and adapt it to fit with individual student’s needs.

Can you imagine how much time and effort that takes?

So I think in practice what we do is say, ‘Lets cut out some of those hours that you’re spending adapting your curriculum and let new technology adapt the curriculum [for you] in seconds rather than hours.’

So Skill Champ solves the standardization of teaching materials.

Yes, Recently in the education field, they’ve come out with Common Core standards which are adapted by nearly every state and basically say, ‘All 2nd graders should be learning this at this time’.

The challenge for special education teachers is that they have to follow these common core standards, but also need to come up with individualized goals to help their students follow those standards. So how do we help them adapt those standards?”

You use best practices and data to curate and track and customize lessons, but what differentiates you and your competitors?

A lot of our competitors in the autism space are creating apps that only teach a single skill. We see a lot of 99 cent apps that teach things like letters or colors, what we want to do is teach kids a learning routine. Once they’re really good at following that routine, we can insert different skill but use the same learning routine they’re good at.

We think [kids] are going to have a better chance learning more skills with one routine instead of using one off apps that teach a single skill. We want to teach a whole collection of [skills] using one familiar routine.

I think that’s a really unique difference. We want to teach you how to do something and help you apply it in other contexts. So, every time you get a skill with our app, you also get some principle curriculum that will help you generalize that skill off the iPad and into the real world.

How do you balance your ambitions with the business side of things? How do you focus on your MVP but keep your dream?

It’s a challenge because we want to do so much. It’s really been focusing on product development, taking a set amount of money and trying to give users the best experience we can with that money.

But on the other hand, my vision is one day solving the issue of adult employment within the field of autism. How amazing would it be if we could understand how to use technology to help kids [with autism] learn new skills, so that when they’re adults, we have a curriculum that we can use with Starbucks or Target to train [people with autism] to meet minimum job requirements. We could partner with companies and say, “If an adult meets these minimum requirements we’ll higher a certain percentage of them to fill that role”… That’s ultimate vision, but first lets understand how we can use the knowledge we’re getting from the Skill Champ to shape that vision of the future.

I’ve always found that there’s a solid divide between entrepreneurs that love building businesses the ones that have a truly passionate a specific issue.

It’s clear that you have a lot of passion for this cause. How does that passion drive what you do?

It’s definitely passion that keeps me rooted.

For me, it goes back to my younger brother who was diagnosed with autism. Clearly he’s shaped my life and he’s shaped my career. Growing up I never really realized what autism was — it was just “That’s Jon” and I learned how to adapt my behaviors for him.

Now that I’ve gotten older and into the [special education] field, I understand how those behaviors work, but I still face challenges, joys and surprises with him. It’s been interesting to work on a product that I hope will better the autism community, then going home and having that day to day of living with a brother (with autism) and trying to help him.

It definitely does motivate you. It’s not in me to be a risk taker, but the passion and belief in what we’re doing is what pushes me to say, ‘OK, I know this isn’t necessarily going to play out the way that i think it is, but I’m willing to do this because i know the difference it could make.’

It’s that change the world mentality.

Right.

You mentioned that you aren’t a risk taker. What was the jumping off point for you with Infiniteach?

Good question….

Chris brought me in last January or February, and I was so impressed with the idea and what it could mean to the community… The opportunity was there where I had time available and had resources available to pull together a pitch and present it.

There were a lot of people that were really interested with what we were doing, and I think that’s what I needed. I needed the confidence to tell myself,

‘This is really not your typical way of working, but all these people believe in you. You can do this, so just give it a 100%. Drop everything else and make this happen.’