We were lucky to catch up with Jon Miksis recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jon, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

For most of my adult life, my identity was built on staying in motion. I started a travel blog, Global Viewpoint, back in 2017 and grew it into a platform reaching hundreds of thousands of readers a month. I’ve been to 73 countries. On paper, I’d built exactly the thing I set out to build.

But back in 2020-2021, Long Covid took away the one thing my whole life was organized around: I couldn’t go anywhere. For the first time in years, I was forced to sit still and figure out how to heal myself. And in that stillness, a quieter question surfaced, the kind that’s easy to outrun when you’re always moving: “Is this actually the life I want to keep building?” I realized that this condition was due to a lack of balance in my life: i was over-working and prioritizing many of the wrong things.

That question kicked off years of inner work. Coaching, mentorship, retreats, and a lot of honest self-examination. After investing tons of my own money into my personal development, I started facilitating retreats and doing high-level coaching for people walking a similar path as me. But something nagged at me the whole time: this kind of transformation was wildly expensive and out of reach for most people. I’d spent well over $100k and years of my life on tools to understand myself better. Most people will never have that access.

The idea finally crystallized late last year, on a trip through Central Asia. I was traveling the old Silk Road, and I kept thinking about how much upheaval those ancient societies had to navigate. Trade routes shifted overnight. Empires rose and fell. New technologies spread. Belief systems collided. Entire cultures were forced to adapt or disappear.

And it struck me that it didn’t feel that different from the world we’re walking into now. The details are new. The human experience is ancient. We’re living through one of those rare hinge moments in history, and AI is accelerating it fast. Careers that felt safe don’t anymore. The economy feels shaky. Burnout is everywhere. And a lot of people are quietly realizing that hitting all their goals didn’t make them feel the way they expected.

I came home and started building. By late February 2026, Make the Leap was live.

The insight underneath it is simple: people aren’t only questioning their careers right now. They’re questioning everything. Their work, their beliefs, their relationship with money, their health, their sense of freedom, their identity. Transitions don’t just ask us to change what we do. They ask us to reexamine who we are.

So I built a set of AI-powered assessments to meet people exactly there. The flagship is Career Leap, because for most people work is the most pressing entry point. But I’ve also built programs around beliefs, money, and life direction, with health and wellness just launching. The goal is to take the kind of clarity that used to cost thousands and make it genuinely affordable. AI is uniquely equipped to help with this work – helping to distill many complex signals into something clear and actionable.

What told me it was worth doing was how fast it resonated. In about three months, we’ve had over 1,300 customers and 12,000+ assessments taken. Thousands of people getting clearer on what they actually want next. That last part is what gets me most excited.

What lights my soul on fire the most, however, isn’t the product. It’s the mission behind it: everyone deserves tools to understand themselves and move through change with clarity, not just the people who can afford a high-performance coach.

Make the Leap will become the go-to resource for personal change & transformation. It’s the most affordable, accessible, and comprehensive tool on the market that helps real people navigate real change in their lives. It’s an industry and business that won’t be displaced by the coming changes, because it’s built exactly around them.

Eventually I’d love to bring this into universities and companies. But right now, I’m focused on one thing: helping real people take the next honest step.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Jon Miksis, and at the core of everything I do is one thing: helping people navigate change. For most of my career that meant helping people explore the world. These days it’s about helping them explore themselves.

I’m the founder of three companies. The first and biggest is Global Viewpoint, a travel platform I started in 2017 and grew to hundreds of thousands of readers a month (over 12 million people to date). I’ve been to 73 countries, and for a long time travel was how I understood the world and my place in it. The second, which I started last summer is AI Hustle Guy – which was basically more of a side-hustle & excuse to go way deeper into AI to understand its full capabilities. And the third, and where most of my energy lives now, is Make the Leap, a personal transformation company I launched in early 2026.

The path between Global Viewpoint and Make the Leap was personal. After going through a major life transition of my own, I spent years on the inner work: coaching, mentorship, retreats, a lot of honest self-examination. Eventually I started facilitating retreats and coaching others walking a similar path. But the deeper I got, the more one thing bothered me. This kind of transformation was wildly expensive. Real self-understanding was effectively locked behind wealth, available to the people who could drop thousands on a coach or a program, and out of reach for almost everyone else.

Make the Leap is my answer to that. It’s a suite of AI-powered assessments that help people get clear on what they actually want next, then hand them a concrete, personalized roadmap to get there. The flagship is Career Leap, because for most people work is the most urgent question right now. But I’ve built programs around money, beliefs, and life direction too, with health and wellness just launching. Alongside it, Global Viewpoint still helps people travel better and its absolutely a core passion of mine that I wish to continue alongside this new venture.

What sets Make the Leap apart comes down to a few things. Most tools in this space are single-purpose: a career quiz here, a budgeting app there. I’ve built something comprehensive, because real life isn’t compartmentalized. Your work, your money, your health, your beliefs, and your sense of freedom are all tangled together, and a real transition touches all of it. Second, it’s genuinely affordable by design. Third, AI is uniquely suited to this work in a way that wasn’t possible even a couple of years ago. It can take dozens of messy, personal signals and distill them into something clear and actionable, which is exactly what people drowning in uncertainty need. And finally, I’m not selling theory. I built this after living it and spending well over $100k of my own money figuring it out.

What I’m most proud of isn’t the numbers, though I’m grateful for them: over 1,300 customers and more than 12,000 assessments taken in our first few months. What I’m proudest of is that I took the hardest, most uncertain chapter of my own life and turned it into something that helps other people through theirs. When someone tells me an assessment helped them finally see their situation clearly, or gave them the push to make a change they’d been avoiding for years, that’s the whole point.

If there’s one thing I’d want readers to know, it’s this: you don’t need to have it all figured out, and you don’t need thousands of dollars to start. Everyone deserves tools to understand themselves and move through change with clarity. My whole focus right now is helping real people take the next honest step. That’s it.

Have you ever had to pivot?

For years, blogging was the thing I’d mastered. Global Viewpoint was humming. Hundreds of thousands of readers a month, a healthy mix of ad and affiliate revenue, and a system I understood better than almost anything. I knew how to research a topic, rank it, and turn that traffic into income. It was the engine that funded my life and my travel. I felt, honestly, pretty untouchable.

Then Google changed the rules.

In 2023 and 2024, a wave of Google updates – the “helpful content” update chief among them – tore through independent publishers like me. Sites that had been built carefully over years lost enormous chunks of their traffic almost overnight. Mine was one of them. There’s a specific kind of helplessness in watching something you’ve spent years building get devalued by an algorithm you can’t argue with, email, or appeal to. I’d done everything “right,” and it didn’t matter. A big portion of my income evaporated, and there was nothing I could do to directly fix it.

Then AI Overviews arrived and made it clear this wasn’t a bad season I could wait out. It was structural. Once Google started answering people’s questions directly at the top of the page, the entire model I’d built my career on – earn the ranking, earn the click – started breaking at the foundation. The disruption I now talk about constantly was happening to me first.

I had two options. I could pour my energy into clawing back rankings and fighting a battle that was only going to get harder. Or I could accept that the ground had permanently shifted and rebuild myself around it.

I chose the second. I started diversifying every way I could – new traffic sources beyond Google, new income streams, digital products, and getting far more creative and deliberate about how the business actually made money. But the bigger shift was internal. I was forced out of my comfort zone and into learning entirely new skills. I went deep on AI. I taught myself to build software. And that willingness to branch into unfamiliar territory is the only reason Make the Leap exists today.

Here’s the part I find almost funny in hindsight. The exact force that nearly broke my business – AI upending an entire industry overnight – is the same one I now help other people navigate. That experience, as brutal as it was at the time, taught me the lesson I now build my whole company around: you don’t survive a transition like this by clinging to what used to work. You survive it by being willing to change with it.

If I’d never gotten hit that hard, I’d probably still be comfortable, still doing the same thing, and far worse off for it. Sometimes the disruption you’re dreading is the exact push you needed.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Honestly, on paper I shouldn’t be able to compete in this space. Personal development is full of people with twenty or thirty years of experience, and I’m relatively new to building a business around it. If reputation were purely about tenure, I’d be at the back of the line.

But I’ve come to believe tenure isn’t the only thing that earns trust. What I lack in decades, I make up for by using the best tools available today and using them to their absolute fullest. A lot of established players, even big companies with real resources, are barely scratching the surface of what’s now possible with AI. I’m not. I’ve gone deep enough on this technology to know exactly how to push it, and being newer actually helps here, because I’m not anchored to the way things used to be done.

The biggest thing, though, is that I refuse to cut corners on the actual product. Where a lot of companies quietly use the cheapest, fastest settings to protect their margins, I let the system do its most thorough, highest-quality work, even when that costs me more for every single customer. I’d rather make less per person and hand someone something genuinely excellent than pad my profit and ship something average. That choice shows up in the product, and people feel it.

The same principle drives how I price. I could charge several times more than I do. Truthfully, I could probably triple my prices without much impact on sales. But the moment I do that, I’ve lost the entire point of the brand. I do want people to invest in themselves, because something free or cheap rarely gets taken seriously, and the investment is part of what makes it work. But I’m not willing to put this out of reach for regular people. Affordability isn’t a discount strategy for me. It’s the whole mission.

Put those together – genuinely excellent, deeply personalized, and actually affordable – and something happens that no marketing budget can buy: people tell other people. Word of mouth and referrals have quietly become the engine behind this whole business.

That’s the lesson that surprised me most. I assumed building a reputation this fast would take the catchiest content, the cleverest hooks, the smartest marketing. It turns out the fastest way to earn trust is simpler than that: do a genuinely great job. Offer real depth and real value, help real people in a way they can actually feel, and the reputation builds itself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.maketheleap.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maketheleapco
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MakeTheLeapCo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-miksis/
• Other: My travel Instagram where I show my adventures around the world: https://www.instagram.com/global.viewpoint/

  My travel blog: https://www.myglobalviewpoint.com/