317–Turn Your Expertise Into Software with Jason W. Johnson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bhn1i4PK3o Jason William Johnson, PhD, Founder of SoundStrategies, is driven by two lifelong passions: creating and teaching. Through SoundStrategies, Jason designs AI-powered learning experiences and intelligent coaching systems that blend music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations. We explore Jason’s journey as a musician, educator, and business coach, and how he fused those disciplines into an AI-first company. Jason shares his AI for Deep Experts Framework, showing how subject-matter experts can identify an industry pain point, envision a solution, brainstorm with AI, leverage AI tools to build it, and go after high-value impact—turning deep expertise into scalable products and platforms without needing to be technical. He also explains how AI accelerates research and product design, how “vibe coding” enables rapid MVP development, and why focusing on high-value B2B impact creates faster traction with less complexity. — Turn Your Expertise Into Software with Jason W. Johnson Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, developing the Summit OS Business Operating System. And my guest today is Jason William Johnson, PhD, the Founder of SoundStrategies. His team designs AI-powered learning experiences and deploys intelligent coaching systems for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations blending music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement. Jason, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited to have you and to learn about how you blend music and learning and all that together. But to start with, I’d like to ask you my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’ and how are you manifesting it in your business? I would say my personal ‘Why’ is creating and teaching. Those are my two passions. So when I was younger, I was always a creative. I did music, writing, and a variety of other things. So I was always been passionate about creating, but I’ve also been passionate about teaching. I’ve been informally a teacher for my entire adult life—coaching, training. I’ve also been an actual professor. So through  SoundStrategist, I’m kind of combining those two passions: the passion for teaching and imparting wisdom, along with the passion for creating through music, AI-powered experiences, gamification, and all of those different things. So I'm really in my happy place.Share on X Yeah, sounds like it. It sounds like you’re very excited talking about this. So this is quite an unusual type of business, and I wonder how do you stumbled upon this kind of combination, this portfolio of activities and put them all into a business. How did that come about? So Liam Neeson says, “I have a unique combination of skills,” like in Taken. I guess that’s kind of how I came up with SoundStrategist. I’ve pretty much been in music forever. I’ve been a musician, songwriter, producer, and rapper since I was a child. My father was a musician, so it was kind of like a genetic skill that I kind of adopted and was cultivated at an early age. So I was always passionate about music. Then got older, grew up, got into business, and really became passionate about training and educating. So I pretty much started off running entrepreneurship centers. My whole career has been in small business and economic development. SoundStrategist was a happy marriage of the two when I realized, oh, I can actually use rap to teach entrepreneurship, to teach leadership skills, and now to teach AI and a variety of other things.Share on X So pretty much it was just that fusion of things. And then when we launched the company, it was around the time ChatGPT came out. So we really wanted to make sure we were building it to be AI-first. At first, we were just using AI in our business operations, but then we started experimenting with it for client work—like integrating AI-powered coaches in some of the training programs we were running and things like that. And that really proved to be really valuable, because one of the things I learned when I was running programs throughout my career was you always wanted to have the learning side and the coaching side. Because the learning side generalizes the knowledge for everybody and kind of level-sets everybody.Share on X But everybody’s business, or everybody’s situation, is extremely unique, so you need to have that personalized support and assistance. And when we were running programs in the entrepreneurship centers I were running and things like that, we would always have human coaches. AI enabled us to kind of scale coaching for some of the programs we’re building at SoundStrategist through AI. So with me having been a business coach for over 15 years, I knew how to train the AI chatbots. It started off...