Starting a business is an adventure filled with excitement, but let's be honest, it's also riddled with its fair share of hurdles.
Fear of the unknown, feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks, and the daunting prospect of standing out in a crowded market – these are just a few challenges that keep many aspiring business owners from reaching their full potential.
But these obstacles can be overcome. You just need the right tools, a clear focus, and a bit of guidance from those who have already paved the path.
And what better way to learn than from successful business owners who have been in your shoes? They’ve navigated these waters, turned challenges into stepping stones, and have stories filled with invaluable insights.
Keep reading to discover how Jordan Wilson and his team at EveryDay AI didn’t just overcome these common hurdles but thrived.
Their journey is an incredible example of the power of strategic focus, embracing the right digital tools, and the willingness to venture into uncharted territories.
You Don’t Have to Be a Unicorn to Build a Successful Business
Here’s the thing: you don’t need bucket loads of money, or a Forbes-level reputation to grow a successful business or online presence.
Yes, turning an idea into a profitable business can be a daunting venture – especially if you’re new to the world of entrepreneurship.
But, when you understand that growing a business is less about what you do or don’t have, and more on strategy, focus, and the willingness to try new things – you’re opening yourself up to a world of possibilities.
And with the right tools to build and grow your business, you’ll be surprised by what you can achieve.
To show you it can be done, Tony sat down with Jordan Wilson, a seasoned digital marketer and founder of Everyday AI, a top-performing podcast and online platform demystifying AI for the masses.
The best part? This podcast was only started nine months ago.
Keep reading to learn 5 key takeaways from the conversation, and learn how you can use Jordan’s business growth hacks to enhance your own projects.
Jordan Wilson
"We've found a very high level of success pretty early on. We're consistently a top 10 tech podcast on Spotify. We're technically the number one AI centric podcast right now."
You’ll also learn about how Thrive Suite has been a game-changer in turning Everyday AI into the go-to resource it’s become today.
Let’s dive in.
Breaking Down Business Growth: Five Practical Lessons
Here are Jordan's key takeaways, distilled into bite-sized wisdom. Dive in to learn several simple, actionable ways to turn your concept into an actual business:
1. Opportunities for Innovation Are Always Out There - You've Just got to Embrace Them
Often, innovation is about looking at an industry, observing what others are doing, and asking yourself, “How can I do this better and offer more value?”
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“...many of the other AI podcasts out there – I don't want to throw shade at any of them – but, they're kind of scripted.
There isn’t a lot of life in them. And that's what we wanted. We wanted a podcast that would be very easy to follow and digestible for all kinds of people – not just smart geeks or very bright AI developers.
We wanted to bring a certain level of energy, enthusiasm, and interactivity.” -- Jordan Wilson
You don’t have to go far to see that a lot of AI content currently available focuses more on sharing information and less on helping people learn how to implement this tech in their everyday lives.
Jordan and his team decided to take a different approach to sharing relevant, practical content on the growing AI industry and its use cases.
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“We wanted it to be community-focused while also being a place where people can truly learn things, ask questions, and connect with each other.” -- Jordan Wilson
As a result, Everyday AI has become a top tech podcast, with executives from major companies, including Microsoft, IBM, and Apple reaching out to share their appreciation for the work Jordan and his team are doing.
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That was the point where I'm like, “Oh, okay. I think that we're onto something here now.”
We're not just helping everyday people. Because that's the whole point of Everyday AI. It's to make learning and using artificial intelligence easy for non-technical people – because I think that is the future of work.
When at the same time there are technical people – people who are helping build the AI systems that we all know and love — reaching out to me and saying like, “Hey, I love what you guys are doing. Keep it up.”
At that point, I was like, “All right, this is working.” -- Jordan Wilson
You might not be in the AI space where there are obvious content gaps that can be filled. But you do have competitors you can analyze to understand what they’re missing.
You have access to a target audience who are constantly on the lookout for solutions to their challenges.
Sometimes, the biggest opportunities for innovation lie in the questions you need to ask.
“What isn’t being addressed and how can I take advantage of this?”
What can you do to improve your potential customers' (or subscribers) lives, differently?
2. No Matter How Experienced You Are, You'll Always Face Challenges
Turning an idea into a business can be tough, even for the most experienced marketers and business owners.
If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed at the thought of starting or scaling an idea – you’re not alone.
After coming up with the concept of Everyday AI, Jordan and his team were faced with the challenge of breaking through the noise in the industry and building a legitimate audience of their own.
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There’s always challenges and one of those is getting an online presence up, right?
Because so much of creating a successful podcast isn't actually the podcast itself.
It's what happens before. And it's what happens after the podcast that really depends on if it's successful or not.
You can have a podcast where the actual content itself is unmatched. But it won’t be successful if you don't have the right engine powering it and the right kind of process after the fact as well.” -- Jordan Wilson
These words don’t just apply to podcasts or blogs. The same goes for a business. You could have a great product or service to offer, but if you don’t have a solid marketing plan you’ll struggle to harness your target audience and turn them into customers.
What helped Jordan and his team navigate these challenges can help your business too – leveraging prior experience, building a repeatable, step-by-step system, and embracing the discomfort that comes with starting something new.
Jordan and his team had spent years building Accelerate Agency and, through that business, their clients’ ventures as well.
The advertising and marketing knowledge from this work helped them set up processes to grow Everyday AI into a leading podcast that reached the 100,000 download mark in less than a year.
Having this experience didn’t stop the challenges from occurring, but it did help navigate them more confidently.
And for business owners with minimal experience, who may be thinking, “Well I don’t have that experience or a team, so how does this work for me?”
You have an idea, knowledge expertise in that field, and the ability to create written or audio content to build an online presence to draw in your target audience.
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“If I'm being honest, and if you listen to most seasoned marketers or advertisers, they’ll say in order to see something successful, you need to make a deep commitment to it.
No matter who you listen to, a good rule of thumb is, say, a hundred pieces of content, or a hundred blog posts or social media posts.” -- Jordan Wilson
Building a successful online brand requires consistency, commitment, and most importantly – the right tools.
This takes us to our next point:
3. You Need the Right Tech Stack to Lean On
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“For the last six years, we've exclusively used Thrive Themes products, both for ourselves and our projects like Everyday AI – and for our clients as well.
I've used everything in the Thrive ecosphere for a very long time.” -- Jordan Wilson
As we mentioned earlier, the set of tools and software you choose for your business – your tech stack – is incredibly important.
It's like the engine in a car; it keeps everything running smoothly and efficiently, directly influencing how well you can grow your business, come up with new ideas, and connect with your customers.
For Jordan, having a theme and page builder to create a custom website and blog post templates quickly became a key part of his tech stack. Initially, his builder of choice was Divi.
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“I was amazed early on, right? Just bear with me here. Because I came from a world where I’d build a lot of websites in WordPress.
So, you know, most people were using what was called WPBakery. Which at its time when it first came out was like, “Oh wow, this is great.”
And then when you leap to something like Divi that had a little bit better editing, you’re there saying, “Oh wow, this is even better.””-- Jordan Wilson
But after a while, as his business began to grow, Jordan felt a change was necessary.
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“Where my frustration with Divi came, in my opinion, and after all of my testing, was that it was so bloated at the time. Not just on the front end for the user, but the back-end as well.
I'm sure they probably made improvements ever since, but it was that frustration that led me to discover Thrive.
And in my early testing, one of the first five sites that I built with Thrive Themes was the Accelerant Agency site back in 2017.
At that point I thought, “Oh wow, this is so much better than any other WordPress page builder or block builder.
From there it was just Thrive only – for ourselves, our own projects, client projects, and everything after that.”-- Jordan Wilson
What does your current tech stack look like? If there is a tool, or two, that contributes to your daily frustrations – this could be your sign to make a change.
Your business toolkit is meant to help you grow, not hinder you from operating.
So take stock of your business, conduct an in-depth analysis of your website, and switch out the tools that aren’t helping you reach your goals.
4. Community is Key: Build Your Tribe
A strong community can be your biggest advocate, providing invaluable feedback, fostering loyalty, and amplifying your message.
Don’t just think of your audience as “targets” or faceless customers. Having this perspective will limit you from truly understanding their needs and connecting with them.
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“One of the coolest things for me is hearing from people that met in the comments section of our live streams and have created companies together. Like that's so cool. Right?
I can't quantify that type of accomplishment, but that's huge, right?
We’re setting out to do these things that we really wanted early on, which is to be the world's largest community of AI enthusiasts.”-- Jordan Wilson
Focus on prioritizing your audience’s benefits as much as you focus on what you stand to gain from their engagement.
For Everyday AI, their subscribers don’t just see this platform as a place to learn. They also see it as a space to foster meaningful connections and even change their lives.
You don’t need to be a tech or AI expert to make this happen. Encouraging audience engagement and building a community involves:
Speaking to your audience through addressing them directly and asking questions
Prompting engagement through calls-to-action and requests for feedback
Creating a central hub to merge your audiences from different platforms, and getting them to engage in this one space
For Thrive, this is our Official User Facebook Group. Users from all over the world join this group to ask questions, seek advice from other experienced business owners, and show off what they’ve managed to build.
For you, it could be something different – an actual membership platform built with Thrive Apprentice, a forum built with bbpress, or your own Facebook group.
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“It's almost like having your own social media network within and on your website.
So you can bring all your different audiences together to continue that flow of ‘Hey, people meeting in the comments and building something together.
How can we be intentional with that and set up a platform for people who want that? They won’t have to find it somewhere else. They can come and find it with Everyday AI.”-- Jordan Wilson
Building a community around your business is about creating a space where your audience can connect not just with your brand, but with each other.
Focus on fostering a sense of belonging and shared purpose.
As shown by Everyday AI, when you prioritize community, you're not just building a customer base; you're building a tribe that grows with you.
5. Aim for Strategic Growth = Build a Solid System + Rapid Implementation
One of the hurdles that trips up most business owners is creating a consistent content schedule. The truth is, there is no “quick and easy” way to hack this.
If you want to build a solid audience, you need to go beyond posting once a week or a couple of times a month.
And you can’t approach your content strategy blindly.
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“We put probably way more emphasis on the processes than anyone would put that early on.
Normally, I think you only pay that much attention to your systems and processes after something gets successful. But we really focused on it early on.
From documenting our processes in a spreadsheet, step-by-step, noting the tools we use at each step, and focusing on things like timing.
How long does it take to do step three? And then we revisit it probably every month because as we add or tweak things, we always want to make sure that we aren’t putting more time into it than the results that we were getting out of it.”-- Jordan Wilson
The best way to track your content’s success is to study your analytics regularly. Where is your traffic coming from? How much time are people spending on your blog posts or listening to your podcast?
Are these views leading to clicks, opt-ins, and sales?
Without a solid analytics tool for your website, you’ll struggle to make data-driven decisions for your content strategy – which could cost you a lot of time in the future.
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“I think it goes to show how important it is to build systems, especially if you are creating a content first or a content heavy business, like a podcast, live stream newsletter, right?
It is so important because if you don't get that piece done and figured out ahead of time, all you're doing by creating new content each day is really just drowning yourself in busy work. Especially if you don’t have smart repurposing, in our case AI tools, figured out ahead of time.”-- Jordan Wilson
Since April 2023, when Jordan and his team launched Everyday AI, their daily output involves hosting a livestream which is then repurposed into a podcast episode and blog post, and promoted through a newsletter.
By adapting one item into multiple formats, you're not only saving time and resources but also ensuring that your message resonates across different mediums. It's about working smarter, not harder, by making each piece of content work in several ways.
Your content output might not be as intensive as Everyday AI’s, but it needs to be consistent.
As you publish more relevant content on your different platforms, you’re signaling to both your audience and the algorithms that you’re someone to pay attention to.
And the bow on the ribbon, that convinces your readers or watchers that they should follow you or opt in to learn more from your business is in how it's presented.
Once again, the tools you use to create your content, particularly your website content, is key.
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“Thrive Architect has been a huge part of our success. As I mentioned before, creating daily content is not easy.
From helping us create nice templates to being able to easily duplicate those same templates, symbols, and other nice little features – all relates to being able to quickly reproduce content. It has been a huge driver for our website's growth.”-- Jordan Wilson
One More Gem: Work on Your Communication
When people think about the future of AI and its role in day-to-day business operations, their minds travel to complex tools, sophisticated algorithms, and futuristic technology.
However, the true impact of AI lies in its ability to simplify processes, enhance human decision-making, and streamline everyday tasks.
Regardless of what your stance on artificial intelligence is, it’s here to stay and will continue to become a part of all the current software we use today. In addition to that, we, as users, will have an active role in how AI shapes the future and work we do – through prompting.
Prompting in AI is like giving directions to a smart robot: you tell it what you need in a clear and simple way, and it uses those instructions to give you the right response or help. It's about guiding the AI to understand and do exactly what you're asking for.
Using AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and the likes are only as effective as the prompts you use to generate copy or other information.
There are a lot of platforms offering free and paid prompting courses, guides, and tutorials, but according to Jordan, the key is to learn how to write well.
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“Having a good grasp on your communication and language is so important.
The book that I’ll recommend for everyone has nothing to do with AI, nothing to do with prompting, but it's “On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
I'll tell you, even if we're talking about generative AI and prompting different generative AI systems, you will get so much more from that book and just real human prompting advice than you will from any prompt engineering course.”-- Jordan Wilson
To learn more about Jordan's journey and the future of Everyday AI, tune in to the full interview on our YouTube channel:
This is Just the Beginning…You Can Do This Too
Jordan and his team’s success with Everyday AI is super impressive. And it’s attainable for smaller business owners, too.
As you read through this post, you’ll notice that Jordan puts emphasis on the importance of strategy, working smart, and using the right tools.
For Everyday AI, Thrive Suite has played a big role in the success they’ve been able to achieve.
Jordan Wilson
"There are so many things, little ones too, within Thrive Architect and Thrive Suite that keep people engaged and on our site, improving the user experience.
For our customers and audience who use our website every day."
Take Your Next Step with Thrive Suite
Interested in taking your business idea to the next level?
Consider exploring Thrive Suite, the same toolset that helped Jordan and his team at EveryDay AI.
It offers a range of solutions for building an online presence and effectively managing your digital marketing.
You’ve waited long enough to bring your new ideas to life. There’s no better time to start like now.
Purchasing this bundle saves you from spending $1000+ on five to six plugins to try to achieve the same results. Giving you more time and resources to implement marketing strategies that lead to more sales for your business.
These plugins are easy to use, offer an expansive library of customizable templates, and are updated regularly – helping you stay ahead of the competition.
What are you waiting for?
