Yeah. So you take a little while.
Jason Carroll: 13:21
You.
John Corcoran: 13:22
Take a little while to get comfortable there instead of ripping stuff up as soon as you step in.
Jason Carroll: 13:26
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because I wasn’t the president of the company at first, right? I was just a technology lackey, essentially. It was okay.
Kind of how I brought myself in. You know, knowing that deliberately.
John Corcoran: 13:36
Was that your choice? Was that your father’s choice?
Jason Carroll: 13:39
It was mutual. He didn’t want somebody pressing his buttons. But I also didn’t want, you know, these guys, you know, Bill was the director of ops. He had been there for 14 years. Yeah, just a machine.
Like guy’s awesome. And I know that he’s going to see me coming in as a threat. Yeah. And I don’t want that. Yeah.
Because I also don’t want his job. I don’t want to do ops. And so yeah, I just came in, you know, stayed in my lane with technology first. Then started doing a lot of culture initiatives and people and, you know, eventually started saying, hey, what if we put some other strategic initiatives in place like overall company, not just culture, but company vision? I mean, the company had no vision, no core values, no mission statement, nothing.
Wow. For, for.
John Corcoran: 14:29
30 amazing to get to 20 million without those pieces in place.
Jason Carroll: 14:33
Yeah, yeah, it was pretty, pretty incredible. So that’s really, I think what won over the leadership team was I scheduled this retreat. We went out. We ended up implementing EOS eventually, but this first retreat was just more of a, let’s get away from it all and let’s talk strategy from a super high level and used some of the Traction EOS methodologies for determining things like core values and vision, you know, five year, ten, year three, one quarterly, that kind of that whole shebang, which I’m sure your listeners are familiar with. Yeah.
And that’s when, you know, Bill pulled me aside later and he goes, okay, I’ve been looking at you like a wild card, jumping out of the plane with no parachute. And I know you see me as a stick in the mud, not willing to do anything new or different, but I think you’re the right guy for this job. Well, and I was like, hell yeah, let’s go.
John Corcoran: 15:26
And that’s been quite a moment.
Jason Carroll: 15:28
That was a huge moment. Yeah. And so from that point forward, I had his trust and it was like full on, I’m steering the ship.
John Corcoran: 15:37
Why do you think that this team was open to that? Sometimes, you might get people that are sabotaging new efforts like this feel threatened by it.
Jason Carroll: 15:44
Yeah. They weren’t at first. And this is where Aptive Index comes into play because I got introduced to psychometrics in like 2015 or 16. And we started seeing from a behavioral scientific lens just why we were so different and had such different approaches. It was a total game changer for me personally with my own self-awareness.
Also in the, you know, 2015 to 2020 range, I ended up meeting Brene Brown. If you’re familiar with her and got trained by her. And so I just got into this self-awareness flood, which was great because I needed it. I was making plenty of mistakes in leadership despite the growth. And being able to kind of see that on paper, so to speak, and explain why we were just butting heads brought a lot of clarity and we started it.
John Corcoran: 16:44
Sorry. You, you and you’ve mentioned, you know, Brene Brown, we’ve mentioned EOS Traction by Gino Wickman, who I’ve had on the podcast before is the book that inspired all of that. Any other tools that you’re using at this time? Culture Index, Bristol Myers, Squibb’s, and any other of those tools that you’re using? Kolbe.
Jason Carroll: 17:02
Yeah, there’s a couple that we did that were kind of one offs, but we focused a lot on the Strengthsfinder and Culture Index. I think strengths came first, and then Culture Index was more of like, you know, dots on a page. And I just happened to have like their top rep in the entire nation was, was my advisor with a culture index.
John Corcoran: 17:23
Strengthsfinder if you haven’t done it is so cool. I did it when I was in the accelerator program, and I remember the trainer across the room was like, all right, John, here we go. You are a woo. And I was like, what’s a woo? And he explains it.
And I was like, bingo, that’s me. You know, and it was just amazing to hear it. Yeah.
Jason Carroll: 17:41
Yeah. So I still give, you know, a culture index. It’s sort of a competitor these days, but I’ll give them plenty of shout outs. Like them, you know it changed the game for us. It was awesome.
John Corcoran: 17:51
Well I do want to ask about that because you have been kind of poking the bear a bit. You know I looked on your LinkedIn following me. Yeah, yeah. And on LinkedIn, you posted something quite critical of culture index saying that they’re kind of like comparing them to the blockbuster of the industry in a, in a streaming, you know, kind of environment now. So talk a little bit about that, about that, that approach of, you know, calling out these legacy, you know, systems.
Jason Carroll: 18:21
Yeah, you know, you can give somebody props and also point out some blind spots at the same time. And I’m in early startup mode, right? And which is kind of the right time to push the envelope a little bit. It’s not my forever marketing strategy, but what happened there was, you know, they’ve all gotten wind of me. I’ve had multiple advisors from them reach out.
Their founder came and took our assessment. I don’t know if I should have said that, but, you know, I started getting their attention and it was right as Aria 2.0. Aria is our AI. You know, version one was pretty cool. Version 2.0 just changed everything.
I mean, it really pivoted the Aptive Index permanently. And you know, customers are talking about it. Their use cases are expanding. And then the hiring piece, which is kind of why it was built in the first place, is now 20, 30% of what we do. And clients are using AI every day.
I mean, like 90% of our clients are using Aria at least once a week. Most of them multiple times, which.
John Corcoran: 19:29
It is really good.
Jason Carroll: 19:30
Crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Because usually these assessments, you get a sheet of paper and it collects dust after you kind of make sense of it for the first time. And so there’s no compounding strategic value.
So all that, all that Aria stuff is going on. You know, we’re getting some good press. EO network starts talking about us not just in my chapter in Austin, but we start getting referrals everywhere. I’m like, how did you hear about me? I don’t know anybody in DC or, you know, San Francisco or Boise or whatever.
Right. And so at that same time, Culture Index sent a blast email to all of their current and past clients with their new quote unquote AI policy, which was, don’t you dare use it. Don’t plug any of our information into a ChatGPT, Gemini or other. You are not authorized pursuant to the contract you signed, blah, blah, blah. I mean, they threatened their clients, not just not just like giving a warning of, hey, be careful with AI.
You know, it can hallucinate. Like they threatened them. And I thought that was just marketing gold. Like I, I’m going to print that and frame it and I was like, all right, let’s go LinkedIn.
John Corcoran: 20:41
Right. Which is funny because it’s not their clients that are probably doing it. Maybe they are, but it’s their non-clients. So it’s like they’re chastising their clients. But I mean, I just wanted to chat to you right now and I just typed in what is culture index?
I could do the same for all those other tools. And it’s got pros limitations. It explains exactly what it was. I’m sure if I asked how to apply it to my situation, it would. So, you know, the cat’s a little bit out of the bag.
And that’s a bigger problem than, you know, is beyond the scope of this interview. Right? That’s something that anyone who’s got a particular IP needs to figure out, you know, figure out how they pivot their tool into something that adds additional value beyond what is in, you know, ChatGPT and Gemini and Perplexity.
Jason Carroll: 21:30
Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s 2026 now, right? And, and just, you know, a couple of years ago, as I’m starting up the Aptive Index, which was never me, science led me to where I am. It was actually an emotional intelligence assessment at first, but then, you know, led me to where I am. But the entire assessment industry is like a culture index.
They’re all stale. They’re using decades old science terminology, algorithm, methodology, you know, the on the statistical and like the, the validation strategies are decades old. None of them, none of them are even thinking about AI. Predictive index got really excited and released their AI. It’s a meeting note taker that helps you with interviews.
You know, like that’s not AI like, right? You know, there’s a million of those already out there. Like Aria is taking the behavioral data and turning it into daily strategy.
John Corcoran: 22:34
Well, these companies, it’s classic, you know, innovator’s dilemma, you know, that they’re, they’re, they were the innovators. Now they’re being disrupted. They need to disrupt themselves, which is hard to do when you’ve got a legacy business model, paying customers, that sort of thing. Let me ask you this. Why?
So you had you built up a champion to 80 million, which then was acquired. So you have an exit. You have a couple of years of doing leadership advisory, it looks like. And then you decide to start this. So at what point did you decide that I have to get in the game?
You know, AI is revolutionizing things. And I want to take on this challenge.
Jason Carroll: 23:17
I knew from the start that I wanted to be in the world of psychometrics and leadership development, because it was just a game changer. I either wanted to be talking to leaders about culture, or I wanted to be talking about behavioral science and how it can inform hiring and leadership and teams, etc.. And the only reason there was a delay was, you know, I had to stay on with the buyer for a year. That was contractual. And then, you know, I had a nice severance and I was like, man, I’ve been burning it at both ends for so long.
So I took about six months to just work out every day and, you know, travel a little bit and deal with some heavy life stuff too, that was going on with just personal stuff. And then finally it was I started doing the leadership development and it was pretty quickly after that that I was just like, I, I need some better assessment data to understand these leaders and their teams. I don’t want to use one of these decades old things. So I tried out a couple of like newer ones that were looking at EQ, emotional intelligence, because, you know, I was seeing anecdotally, this has a bigger impact on leadership than maybe the hard wiring piece does. And just as a thought experiment, I wanted to see if I could develop my own just, just the mindset, right?
We’re just, we get bored and like, what can I do next? Yeah. And started learning more and more about behavioral science, which I had already nerded out about. I hired a data scientist, an I o psychologist, and a psychometrician just out of my own money before I even had a business bank account and started because that experiment, which was in a Google sheet at first, turned into a full on obsession after about 20 days. 20.
Yeah. I mean, it became Everything. And you know, then, because we live in the world of I know enough about coding to be dangerous, but not enough to build something from scratch. But in the world of AI, I can absolutely code and check its work and go really, really fast. So it’s kind.
John Corcoran: 25:29
Of like, yeah.
Jason Carroll: 25:29
I guess it’s kind of coding, but it’s my own stack. Like it’s not like a service. I mean, I’m just writing code.
John Corcoran: 25:36
You’re not using lovable or polite or any of those tools. Okay. Okay. I’m curious. Why not?
Jason Carroll: 25:43
I wanted full control. I wanted this to be a fully contained app that there’s no service I’m paying anybody other than a server. Yeah. And it was also the best way to learn.
John Corcoran: 25:54
Yeah. Yeah. And so do you. So you build this up and then how do you start? What’s your go to market plan?
How do you release it out to the market and start to get some traction around it?
Jason Carroll: 26:07
I knew a couple hours and hopefully EOE is something that your listeners know what that is.
John Corcoran: 26:12
But yeah, entrepreneurs organization, I’ve mentioned it a bunch of times before. Great organization. Yeah.
Jason Carroll: 26:17
CEO network. And so I got some of them on beta testing, you know, just free of charge. Try this thing out, break it, tell me if it’s accurate, that kind of thing. And while they’re doing that, I’m doing multiple validation studies. We did six official ones where I’m like, I’m paying a third party to get a, you know, an official write up.
And once that is done, I’m building the software in the background, tweaking it, fixing bugs. So it was November 1st of 2024 that I’m ready to go. So I launch, I get some of those beta clients.
John Corcoran: 26:53
Let me think, November or December of 2022, I think is when ChatGPT launches. And so this is actually only two years after ChatGPT took the world by storm. So it’s not that much later.
Jason Carroll: 27:06
My, my, my first code commit in GitHub was late February 2024. That’s how fast I was able to build an enterprise grade, API powered. Web portal from scratch. It works on phones. It works.
I mean, it’s got a native experience. Tons and tons of features. And of course, a lot of those features came later. It wasn’t just ten months. But yeah, I mean, now it’s just.
John Corcoran: 27:36
Let me ask you a couple of questions. Let me ask you a couple questions that I’m curious about. Do you worry about that? So help me help me understand. Does it take information from all these different assessments and put it into your portal?
Jason Carroll: 27:50
No, we have our own assessment. And so everything is, is our own proprietary assessment. We have eight attributes that we’re measuring. They do differ quite a bit actually from like a culture index, predictive index, just because that’s where science led us.
John Corcoran: 28:06
And then you don’t have to worry about getting sued or licensing the different formulas that they use. Okay.
Jason Carroll: 28:13
Yeah. I mean, there’s, I don’t have access to that anyway, but I don’t like a lot of the things that they use. They don’t, they don’t stand the test of time. I mean, CINPI for example, both have what they call the C trait, which they call patience. And they’ve wrapped multiple distinct attributes into one trait and it doesn’t work.
So in their view, if you want somebody who is kind of like routine based, systematic approach, who’s also like internal urgency is high, you can’t to them, that’s a contradiction. Which is, you know, all of the scientific data showed us it’s completely distinct. You know, you can be super hyper regimented and predictable and love routine and also be going at 100 miles an hour all the time. And so we’ve. And there’s some other things about traits that they.
I mean, pie doesn’t. They only have four. See, I, I think has. Seven. The one that they have that has to do with emotional state is just off it.
They use disempowering language. It’s, it’s just it’s unkind. And it’s not even, I don’t think accurate. It is sometimes, right? All of these assessments are going to be pretty dang good 60, 70% of the time.
Yeah. So maybe a little generous, but like when it’s wrong, when it’s off, it just, it’s, it’s like destructive, not.
John Corcoran: 29:44
Just yeah, damaging. You can promote, promote the wrong person or keep the, the wrong person in the wrong role, that sort of thing. Let me ask you a couple other questions. So similar question to what we were talking about earlier with Culture Index. So, you know, why let me be the devil’s advocate here.
Why wouldn’t someone just go to ChatGPT and use that for their hiring. Why? You know, how did you build the product deliberately in order to make it something that people are willing to pay for separately?
Jason Carroll: 30:12
Yeah, I mean, go for it. Like I, I actually, I haven’t released it yet because I just, you know, entrepreneur and a million other things, but I built a framework of four primary attributes that I plan to just give away for free. Like, hey, take this PDF, upload it to ChatGPT and use these questions to, to ask in an interview setting to see if you can get a gauge for it. It’s not scientific, but you can still probably get a sense. And if you know what your targets are here, then you can make some pretty informed decisions.
You know, and so you can do that. The problem is every single time you do that, you’re uploading or creating a custom GPT, or you’re guessing you’re not really using a validated method to do it. And it’s, you’re, you’re using a platform that’s not built for that. So ChatGPT will hallucinate. It will give you bad information.
Yeah. The culture index clients who’ve tried using their CI results with ChatGPT, like they don’t like them. They’re like, oh man, this is way off. You know, that kind of thing because you really have to if you’re going to train an AI, you have to understand what’s going on in the background, like how it searches the context and how to create that hierarchical knowledge base and everything else. And that’s just not something that people are going to bother doing, you know?
And if they are, you know, what’s it worth to them? You know, if you, if you’re a 50 person company and you’re hiring even just three people this year and you get and you avoid one mis-hire, you’ve paid for our software for like five years. It’s like a no brainer. Like, so why would you go do all of that effort? Plus, most SEOs in our world love innovative solutions.
And so yeah, I think to answer your question, go ahead. Go for it.
John Corcoran: 32:03
Yeah. And I’m curious also, you know, we’re rapidly moving towards this world where people are discovering companies like yours through ChatGPT, Gemini, perplexity versus from Google or other forms. It doesn’t mean that they won’t use Google anymore. It just means that they’re going to be discovering from those. How do you approach that?
You know, because we were talking earlier about there’s fears of putting your information into these eyes. Do you fear that or do you embrace that as a new company embracing the new world that we live in?
Jason Carroll: 32:37
Yeah, it’s the latter for sure. In fact, you said you had ChatGPT pulled up. You ought to just ask it. How does this compare to Aptive Index and see what it says? You’ll see it’s going to be pretty dang favorable towards us because I am just of the opinion.
Put it all out there. Worst case, somebody just steals some of the IP and makes one of their own. Like okay, yeah. Healthy competition. I’m all for it.
You know, we put our pricing on our website, which our competitors hate. Yeah. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 33:11
You gotta book a call.
Jason Carroll: 33:12
Yeah. It’s just, it’s just the world we live in. Like, yeah, information is power. And if I put that information out there, it’s going to gain me credibility with people looking at my website, which is about to get a little bit of an overhaul as well. But it also helps ChatGPT and Gemini and all these others.
Claude. Yeah. Like they know how to index now. Yeah. And, you know, I don’t know if you just did it or not, but.
John Corcoran: 33:34
I, yeah, I did. I’m coming up with it here. So a culture index is a self-report workplace inventory intended to measure work relevant traits. Aptive Index is a workplace behavioral assessment positioned as a selection tool for hiring and development. So yeah, it has a full explanation here of kind of background.
But yeah, I think the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, or whatever metaphor you want to use. This is a new world that we live in. And it’s like, you know, there are many companies that are putting their head under the, under the, in the sand, like, just like they did in the 90s, you know, and they didn’t realize that the internet was here to stay. And it’s going to really evolve and change businesses dramatically. Like Yellow Pages comes to mind, you know, things like that.
Yeah. I also want to ask you about venture capital funding. As you mentioned earlier, one of your big regrets with your previous company was that you didn’t raise VC funding, but yet you said you’re bootstrapping this, you’re self-funding it. So talk a little bit about that decision.
Jason Carroll: 34:30
Well, I thought, you know, I’ll just bootstrap it until I need more. And the way it kind of happened is the universe just started dropping people in my lap. You know, people in my network started signing up as customers. Yeah. And this guy Joe in Boise, he’s an EO or he was, you know, Austin for a while.
And then he, you know, Boise after he moved, he became a client. He had been a culture index client for ten years. Actually, I converted him over and the day after training he calls me and he goes, Jason, this is even better than what you sold me on. Like, I need to sell this for you. I’m like, okay.
And so he’s signing up eight, ten new clients a month now. Wow. And I’ve had other people just kind of like that, right? So now Eoas are going, ooh, this is a pretty lucrative side hustle. You know, I’ve been, I’ve been recommending pi or psi for years and haven’t gotten a penny for it, you know?
Yeah. Let me go.
John Corcoran: 35:31
So you built a referral commission program to incentivize people to sell it to others.
Jason Carroll: 35:37
For full on advisors. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, Joe is running this company for 20 plus years. He’s trying to sell that off or retire or whatever. So this is his retirement plan.
And he can make real good money doing it too, you know, because I’ll pay somebody a big old chunk of the farm reoccurring if I don’t have to pay him a salary.
John Corcoran: 36:00
Yeah. And even that is an innovative, different approach that is disruptive to what the legacy, you know, your competitors have been doing is just that way of selling. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think this has been fascinating learning about the Aptive Index.
Before we get done, I want to hear about you mentioning a client, a customer of yours that said that Aria, which is your AI within Aptive Index, basically saved his marriage. I want to hear this story.
Jason Carroll: 36:30
Yeah, dude. Aria is being used for so many different use cases. D1 sports clubs have picked us up now, and coaches are using it with their players for.
John Corcoran: 36:40
Giving, for motivating players or selecting the players or yeah.
Jason Carroll: 36:44
Understanding like Aria is like running over 90% accuracy. predicting what football position players play just based on the behavioral data. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 36:55
Based on their personality, based on the way they behaved in the past. Like they should be a tight end versus they should be a quarterback versus they should be a quarterback. Wow.
Jason Carroll: 37:04
Yeah. It’s like this guy, like one of them was predicted outside linebacker and specifically called out not middle linebacker. Because you know this guy is somebody who studies film. He’s got great technique, but he needs somebody else to really do the directing traffic. Wow.
And this guy, you should have seen his face. We were in a Zoom. He was just like, are you kidding me? Like, it was like.
John Corcoran: 37:26
His reaction was that that is good. Or like, I didn’t expect.
Jason Carroll: 37:30
That is 100% accurate.
John Corcoran: 37:32
So he hadn’t been playing this position. So he’s thinking like, no, he wasn’t.
Jason Carroll: 37:35
So this is a guy who’s in his 50s. Okay. And we just kind of did an experiment.
John Corcoran: 37:41
Oh, so this is like a coach.
Jason Carroll: 37:42
Yeah.
John Corcoran: 37:43
Okay. Yeah. So he was surprised that one of the players who’d been playing a different position that Aria is suggesting put them at outside linebacker.
Jason Carroll: 37:51
So no, I’m not explaining it. Right. So I’m on with the coach.
John Corcoran: 37:54
Okay.
Jason Carroll: 37:55
And all I have is his behavioral data. And I just out of just for fun, I said Aria predicted what position this guy played in football.
John Corcoran: 38:03
Oh what he played in football. Yeah. You didn’t know what position he played. Okay.
Jason Carroll: 38:07
I had no idea.
John Corcoran: 38:07
Okay.
Jason Carroll: 38:08
Okay. And it got so accurate that it was just eerie. Wow. But yeah, back to the story I told you before we hit record. Yeah.
I mean, there’s a client who thinks that had been on the fritz between him and his wife, and they have a daughter as well who’s in her teens and just kind of everybody, the whole family at each other’s throats. And they just decided one night to sit down. They had all done Adaptive Index and they’re like, let’s see if Aria has anything to say about this. And they start typing in just like for like three hours in their living room, like projecting Aria up onto their TV screen, just chatting away about getting this objective readout to understand why they had been butting heads the way they had. And yeah, he swears today he’s like, this saved my marriage.
John Corcoran: 38:56
Wow. Wow. That’s incredible. And then, you know, people are using it in the US context to find the right integrator, find co-founders, find business partners, of course, hiring, firing, you know what role, what seat on the bus people should sit in. Any other applications or any other case studies you want to share?
Jason Carroll: 39:16
Yeah. All of that. Building out a team. Resolving conflict at work. Meeting tips.
I mean, just like quick, like, hey, who should even run this meeting between these people? Like, who’s actually going to be the one who gets all the ideas out of folks? You know, who’s the guy who should have just sent an email instead of showing up to me? Yeah. Yeah.
All that, all that kind of stuff.
John Corcoran: 39:40
Yeah. Yeah. Super interesting. Jason, thank you so much for being here today, for sharing the story. I’d be super interested to follow your journey with Aptive Index and see where it goes.
So where can people go to connect with you, learn with you, learn about you, and learn more about Aria and learn more about Aptive Index.
Jason Carroll: 39:58
Yeah. I mean, it’s a made up word. So aptiveindex.com. That’ll get you a pretty good baseline of information. You can try the assessment yourself at least right now.
We might be changing that soon. So go do it soon. But Jason P. Carroll on LinkedIn; find me there. Connect with me there. I try to be pretty good about replying to DMs and all that, and eventually I’ll strike up my podcast again and you can help me with that.
John Corcoran: 40:26
Excellent. All right. Thanks so much, Jason.
Outro: 40:31
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.