Noah Wiggins and Nolan Pye did not come to Penn State and Schreyer Honors College with designs on launching their own business. Wiggins’s interests lay in biomedical and health-related areas while Pye focused on the science of technology.
And even though they called opposite ends of the state home – Wiggins from the Pittsburgh area and Pye from near Philadelphia – they struck up a friendship when a volunteer opportunity brought them together. That shared desire to help others and a pressing need in the healthcare field laid the foundation for what would become their business partnership.
Research from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services shows that approximately 12% of American citizens are proficiently health literate. According to the National Institutes of Health, this type of literacy allows individuals to “find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.”
Wiggins, a Scholar alumnus who graduated from Penn State in 2023 with a bachelor of science degree in biobehavioral health, saw firsthand how a lack of health literacy has a detrimental effect on overall patient care. So, he set out to make a change.
“I worked in an optometry clinic and I saw how the doctors were talking to their patients as if they should know what diabetic retinopathy is, or even just diabetes, and there was a disconnect,” Wiggins said. “I’m trying to bridge that gap with a very simple tool.”
“I worked in an optometry clinic and I saw how the doctors were talking to their patients as if they should know what diabetic retinopathy is, or even just diabetes, and there was a disconnect,” Wiggins said. “I’m trying to bridge that gap with a very simple tool.”
Noah Wiggins ’23
That tool, an app called Preventi, has launched Wiggins and Pye, a current Scholar, on an entrepreneurial journey with the potential to help many people. It has also provided them with some valuable learning experiences along the way.
The pair describes Preventi as a “user-friendly digital platform that delivers personalized health education directly to patients.” Along with improving users’ health literacy, Preventi is designed to increase adherence to medication plans.
Their business partnership is structured so that Wiggins takes on the responsibility of working with physicians to build out Preventi’s content such as medical conditions, drug formulary and health descriptions. Another important feature within the app will be what Wiggins describes as a “simplified disease and drug description base.”
Pye, meanwhile, handles the app’s technical development and coding. Both Wiggins and Pye have honed their leadership skills by managing interns from the Honors College who were brought on board to help with various aspects of building Preventi.
The Preventi team began in earnest in the spring of 2022 when Wiggins and Pye met as members of ServeState, a student organization dedicated to volunteerism and philanthropy focused on the State College community. While their friendship took root as members of ServeState, it wasn’t until about a year later that Wiggins and Pye put their technical skills together and started building their business.
“Earlier this spring, I saw in a Schreyer email message that Noah sent out a call looking for a programmer,” said Pye. “I saw it and thought to myself, ‘Hey, I’d love to work for Noah,’ and that the app was an awesome idea. Since then, we’ve just been grinding.”
Aside from his interest in working with Wiggins, Pye was intrigued by the opportunity to marry his passions for technology and helping others. A computer engineering major who is on track to graduate in the spring of 2024, Pye admittedly was less familiar with the healthcare system than Wiggins, but he’s been learning a lot on the fly.
“A lot of what I know on health literacy is from what Noah has told me, and some of my own basic understanding of the healthcare system,” Pye said. “I’ve heard so many people say that they feel that healthcare is broken, so my work on Preventi really resonates with me because it’s going to make an impact on people’s lives.”
As is the case with most new ideas or projects, Preventi needed additional support beyond what its founders brought to the table so that it could become a viable product. While Wiggins and Pye were skilled and knowledgeable in the areas related to their majors, they were entrepreneurial neophytes in need of some financial backing. Fortunately, Penn State offered a home-grown solution that could provide the support they needed.
The Happy Valley LaunchBox, a signature program from Invent Penn State, was introduced to the Penn State community in November 2015. In the nearly eight years since its services came online, the LaunchBox has issued over $20 million in funding and awards to founders who have completed its programs. Those founders have gone on to launch 150 startup businesses.
Budding entrepreneurs, whether they are Penn State students or not, have access to a variety of services at the LaunchBox free of charge. They include a co-working space, a full-service legal team and an intellectual property clinic. It’s also the “home” of Invent Penn State’s Summer Founders program which provides $15,000 grants and mentorship to startups with at least one founder who is a Penn State student. Preventi was selected for the 2023 Summer Founders program which proved critical for the company’s viability.
“I don’t know if we would have been able to work on our venture this summer if we weren’t able to get that funding,” said Pye. “On top of that, all the advisors willing to help have really given us a crash course on how to run our own business.
“All of the resources offered by the Summer Founders Program are valuable, I think, because they help us learn things that aren’t exactly taught in the typical college setting,” Pye added. “[To be successful] you sort of have to be a jack of all trades and know a little bit about finances, marketing, advertising… sort of everything. Those types of resources at the Summer Founders Program feel almost limitless, and I think that’s pretty special, especially for budding entrepreneurs at Penn State.”
With his time at Penn State and Schreyer complete, Wiggins leveraged the Summer Founders Program to make Preventi his full-time job immediately upon graduation. The experience has been so rewarding that he’s hopeful his story will inspire others to take a chance on entrepreneurship.
“I say jump into the deep end and get your feet wet in something that you may never get to experience down the road when more responsibilities pop up,” Wiggins said. “Absolutely take advantage of this while you can, while you have so many free resources around you to help grow your business.”
Wiggins credits a few members of the Honors College staff for helping to provide the confidence and support needed to make that jump himself.
“Dean Mather always showed support and told me to ‘go for it’ when we talked about this journey,” Wiggins said. “And Doug Martin, the assistant director of development, stressed the importance of reaching out to Schreyer alumni to ask for help or make connections for possible funding opportunities. Then we talked to Sarah Lyall-Combs, academic and international programs coordinator, about how to get Schreyer Scholars on our team and supplementing that with summer grants.”
Both Wiggins and Pye also point to Happy Valley LaunchBox director Elizabeth Hay as an integral part of helping them understand the process of building a business. They say she has helped keep them grounded amid the excitement of bringing their idea to life.
“We talk a lot about how, when you’re starting up you have to build a little thing, check if it works, see if the customer likes it and then just keep building and building,” said Pye. “It’s really just a process that’s going to take time, but as long as you’re building each part of the way then it has a chance to be successful.”
“You hear a lot of stories about successful startups beginning in a garage,” added Wiggins. “Our ‘garage’ is a very nice entrepreneurial building with a beautiful co-working space and really helpful advisors. But that doesn’t take away from the timing of the whole thing. It’s going to take time.”
With Preventi now available to the public, Wiggins and Pye are one step closer to joining the ranks of successful tech startups. Wherever their paths take them, though, they’ll enjoy the benefit of valuable lessons learned from their time at Penn State and their entrepreneurial journey.
