We were lucky to catch up with Kevin Jordan recently and have shared our conversation below.
Kevin, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Throughout my life, I have struggled with ADHD and achieving my goals. It can be exceedingly hard for me to sustain focus day in and day out. Adderall or Ritalin alters my personality and makes me irritable, which can be hard on my family and friends. I create lists and daily schedules to solve my problems with maintaining focus. However, I do not consistently stick to my daily schedule nor achieve most items on my lists due to procrastination and getting easily distracted. What works best is having an accountability coach or an external consequence severe enough to cause me to focus on achieving my tasks. An accountability coach can be expensive and does not always work,
So I thought of building an AI application that is proactive in reaching out to me to get me focused on my goals for the day, helps plan tasks to achieve my short-term and long-term goals, and tracks my progress towards reaching those goals. An AI that initiates conversation with you about your goals, smart schedules your calendar, and auto-manages your projects would go a long way to helping address my problems with ADHD and anyone that wants help achieving their goals.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I am a US Navy veteran and serial entrepreneur. I got my start in AI and machine learning when I joined Leidos in 2018. At Leidos, I was a machine learning engineer working on Cyber AI research projects. In my off hours, I created startups focused on using AI to help webinar authors improve user engagement with their webinars and a mobile app that used AI to measure your body fat percentage with just your smartphone camera. These efforts ultimately failed but the lessons learned from them paved the way to creating Actimate.
I’ve gotten to where I am now cause of my passion for entrepreneurship, learning from some painful mistakes, and always striving to execute ideas better. One of the great privileges and joys is getting to do it with some great friends who are just as driven and passionate as I am.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
On several occasions, I have had to pivot in my life. In my sophomore year of college, I realized I didn’t want to be an investment banker anymore and decided to get serious about my life, so I joined the United States Navy accepting whatever job they had for me. In the Navy, I spent 6 years doing cyber warfare operations and became a certified malware reverse engineer. As soon as I got out in 2018, Leidos wanted me to become a machine learning engineer, and I immediately pivoted to learning AI and machine learning.
In business, with my first startup, I learned the sales cycles for learning management systems (LMS) were very long and the application was very complex to build. While at an AI conference, I met my brother and his friends who were digital marketers. They informed me that my emotion recognition and eye-tracking AI models for the LMS would be amazing features for a webinar creator. So I decided to pivot to creating a webinar platform instead. That decision introduced me to a great friend and business partner who is now building Actimate with me.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
My first startup was focused on building an AI-enabled learning management system (LMS) for colleges and universities, I bootstrapped it with my own money. We ended up pivoting to building a webinar platform instead. In short, I lost over $100,000 on the effort and am just now finishing paying off that debt. For some, this understandably would cause them to stop trying to be an entrepreneur and maybe take a break for a long time. I learned from my painful mistakes and pressed forward with other ideas of mine.
For my next startup ideas, I didn’t spend more than $500 and was able to validate if the ideas were worth pursuing or not. These painful setbacks have all led to this moment now in taking a lean approach to building and launching Actimate in less than two months with great partners. Resilience to me is about how fast one can get back up and keep pursuing their goals after suffering a setback.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://actimate.io