Episode Details

Seventeen people came to the first Lake Wales Startup Night: city commissioners, business owners, medical and nonprofit leaders, attorneys, and students. They spent two hours at the same tables at The Thirsty Dragon, talking about how to grow more businesses right here at home.

In this special episode, Jason T Wade, founder of BackTier and author of AI Visibility, explains how AI is changing the way customers find local businesses, why ranking on Google no longer guarantees anyone finds you, and why a small town like Lake Wales is well placed to build its own startup scene.

In this episode:

• What happened at the first Lake Wales Startup Night
• What BackTier does, in plain English
• The four things AI gets wrong about local businesses
• Why AI is flattening the map for small towns
• Lake Wales' history as a town of builders
• Next Startup Night: Startup Legal Strategy with Denise Tessier, Esq.

Next Startup Night: Wednesday, October 21, 6 PM, The Thirsty Dragon, 126 N 1st St, Lake Wales, FL. Free, all ages. RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/

Lake Wales Startup Night is sponsored by JasonWade.com and BackTier.

YouTube description

Seventeen people came to the first Lake Wales Startup Night: city commissioners, business owners, medical and nonprofit leaders, attorneys, and students. This episode is for everyone who wasn't there yet.

Jason T Wade, founder of BackTier and author of AI Visibility, on how AI is changing the way customers find local businesses, and why Lake Wales already has everything it needs to build its own startup scene.

NEXT STARTUP NIGHT Startup Legal Strategy with Denise Tessier, Esq. Wednesday, October 21 · 6 PM The Thirsty Dragon, 126 N 1st St, Lake Wales, FL Free · All ages RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/

CHAPTERS 0:00 Seventeen people Who I am What BackTier does The four things AI gets wrong about your business Lake Wales, a town of builders AI is flattening the map Next Startup Night: October 21 Seventeen is a start

LINKS BackTier: https://backtier.com Jason T Wade: https://jasonwade.com Book a time with Jason: https://calendly.com/aimainstreets/backtier Lake Wales Startup Night RSVP: https://lwstartups.lovable.app/ Denise Tessier, Esq.: https://tessierlawfirm.com Contact: jason@backtier.com

ABOUT JASON T WADE Jason T Wade is the founder of BackTier, an AI visibility firm based in Central Florida. He focuses on how AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity identify, cite, and describe businesses. He wrote AI Visibility: How to Win in the Age of Search, Chat & Smart Customers (August 2025), hosts the AI Visibility Podcast, and organizes Lake Wales Startup Night, a free monthly gathering for local builders.

ABOUT BACKTIER BackTier measures how AI systems understand your business, fixes the gaps, and tracks what changes. Every engagement starts with an AI Visibility Baseline across five major AI platforms covering four things: entity accuracy, retrieval coverage, citation presence, and answer accuracy. No provider can guarantee what an independ