Seventeen people. On a Wednesday night in Lake Wales, seventeen people walked into The Thirsty Dragon on North First Street. Nobody was selling anything, and nobody was giving a speech. The only question on the table was whether this town could grow its own businesses. At those tables sat city commissioners, business owners, doctors and medical leaders, people who run nonprofits, attorneys, and students.
Seventeen people who usually only cross paths at a ribbon cutting or a public hearing spent two hours in the same booths. This episode is for everyone who wasn't there yet.
Seventeen people who usually only cross paths at a ribbon cutting or a public hearing spent two hours in the same booths.
Who was in that room
Commissioners know how the city actually works: permits, zoning, who to call. Business owners have made payroll in bad months. Medical and nonprofit leaders have run an organization on a tight budget with a mission on the line. Attorneys understand the contracts and structures that keep a new business from falling apart in year two. And the students are young enough not to know yet what's supposed to be impossible.
That's a whole startup ecosystem, and it was already here. Nobody had pulled up the chairs.
What Backtier does
Your customers used to type a question into Google and get ten blue links. More and more, they now ask an AI assistant and get one answer. If your business isn't in that answer, you don't exist for that customer — and ranking well on Google doesn't guarantee you show up. Backtier measures that. We take a fixed set of questions your buyers actually ask — something like "Best family law attorney in Polk County" or "Who does AC repair in Lake Wales?" — and run them across the major AI platforms.
- Does the AI know which company you are, or is it mixing you up with someone who has a similar name?
- Can it find and use your information? If it can't read your website, it fills the gap with somebody else's.
- Where do you show up, and where don't you — and which competitors show up in your place?
- Is what it says about you correct? Old phone numbers, retired services, and outdated bios hang around longer than you'd think.
Honest about the limits
Nobody can guarantee what an independent AI will say. Anyone who promises that is selling something. What we can do is measure it, improve the evidence, and show you what changed. If you want to see where your business stands, go to backtier.com.
A town of builders
Lake Wales has always been a town of builders. The groves ringing this city weren't an accident — people planted them and worked them, picking fruit in the heat. Generations of families here built a living from the ground up. Bok Tower didn't appear out of nowhere either: someone had a vision for the highest point in peninsular Florida and saw it through.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of small towns started believing that building happens somewhere else — Orlando, Tampa, Silicon Valley. The idea is that if you're ambitious, you leave. I don't buy it, and neither did the seventeen people who showed up that Wednesday.
AI is flattening the map
Here's what I see every day in my work: AI is flattening the map. A business in Lake Wales can now do things that used to take a team in a big city — answer customers at midnight, handle bookings automatically, show up in the answers people get when they ask for a recommendation. The tools are cheap and getting cheaper. A kid with a laptop at the public library has access to the same AI models as a startup in San Francisco.
Small towns have something big cities don't. You can call the commissioner. You can walk into the shop next door.
Startup Night is now monthly
The next one is Wednesday, October 21 at 6 PM at The Thirsty Dragon, 126 North First Street. It's free and open to all ages. This month, we have our first featured speaker: Denise Tessier, founder of the Tessier Law Firm, has more than twenty-five years in practice. She'll talk about startup legal strategy — picking the right business entity, the contracts that matter early, and how to protect what you build from day one. If you have a question for her, there's a spot for it on the RSVP form.
Who I want in that room
You don't need a business to come. You don't need an idea that's ready. Bring a friend. Bring a question. Bring the idea you haven't told anybody about yet.
- The person with a side hustle who's wondering if it could be more.
- The retiree with forty years of experience and nobody asking for it.
- The student who wants to stay in Lake Wales but doesn't see how.
- The business owner who's been doing it alone for too long.
- The city leader who wants to know what local builders actually need.
Seventeen is a start
Seventeen people is not a crowd. It's a start. Every thriving local economy started as a few people in a room who decided their town was worth betting on. Lake Wales has done it before — in the groves, on the Ridge, on Park Avenue. We can do it again, with new tools.
Lake Wales Startup Night is sponsored by jasonwade.com and Backtier. See you on the twenty-first.