What is Extraordinary? (And why is everyone grinning?)

Extraordinary builds software, websites, and apps for founder-led companies. you own every account, asset, and line of code. We are builders with 20+ years of experience across 500+ companies. Five engines run under the hood: brand, media, growth, comms, and incentives.

What does Extraordinary actually build, besides awkward small talk?

Extraordinary builds five connected engines. Brand sharpens the story. Media publishes it. Growth turns attention into pipeline. Comms aligns external messaging with internal culture. Incentives reward the behaviors that move the business forward.

What does the Comms Engine include?

Extraordinary's Comms Engine connects external messaging and internal culture. It includes customer, investor, partner, and press messaging; newsletters and launches; leadership updates; team rituals; onboarding communication; and change or crisis playbooks, all in one voice and cadence.

What does the Incentives Engine include? (Other than paying us.)

Extraordinary's Incentives Engine aligns rewards with the result the company wants. It includes compensation and bonus design, referral and partner programs, customer loyalty, team scorecards, recognition rituals, and incentive modeling so leaders can see the likely behavior and payout before launch.

Is the comedy thing real, or is that a bit?

Yes. Extraordinary produces Arizona After Dark, a live variety comedy show in Tempe, Arizona hosted by Aaron Bare and Forbes Shannon. It also produces the Extraordinary Stories podcast and hosts Extraordinary Friends, a weekly online meetup. Extraordinary runs its own engines before selling them.

Do I really get improv training? What's the catch?

Every Extraordinary client gets improv training as part of the engagement. Founders and teams learn to think on their feet, say 'yes, and,' and communicate under pressure, the same skills Extraordinary uses on stage at Arizona After Dark. There is no catch; funny is a strategy.

What is Extraordinary Friends? (It's not a cult. Probably.)

Extraordinary Friends is a free weekly online meetup hosted by Extraordinary. Attendees are introduced to people worth knowing and bring one real problem, which the room solves live. Clients and future clients are both welcome. Sign up from the Extraordinary home page.

How long does an engagement take? Six months or six years?

Neither. Timelines are set by product, not by calendar padding. Websites ship in 30 to 60 days, software in 60 to 90 days, apps in about 90 days. Scope is fixed per product and the price is fixed too, quoted after the free 100-point audit so nobody is guessing. At handover you own every account, asset, and line of code. If you want us to keep going after that, we can, as an ongoing partnership, not a retainer you forget you are paying.

Who is Extraordinary for? (Be honest with yourself.)

Founder-led companies with existing revenue, a real product, and a founder with something to say. It fits leaders willing to be on camera and on the page who would rather own one engine than rent five.

Who runs Extraordinary? Three people walk into a bar...

Extraordinary is led by Aaron Bare, who runs strategy, innovation, and AI implementation; Forbes Shannon, who runs production, narrative, and storytelling; and Christine Butler, Editor in Chief. They lead a specialist bench that builds every strategy into working infrastructure.

Does the client own the work, or do you hold it hostage?

Yes. Every asset, account, automation, and dashboard is built in the client's own accounts and owned by the client. Extraordinary does not hold logins, audiences, or data hostage, and the system keeps running after the engagement ends.

Do I have to keep paying after the work is delivered?

No. You buy a product with a fixed scope and a fixed price, quoted after the free 100-point audit: a website, software, or an app. It ships on the timeline for that product, ownership transfers at handover, and you can walk away owning all of it. Plenty of clients keep us on afterward as an ongoing partnership. That is a choice you make once you have the thing, not a subscription we sneak in first.

How does someone start working with Extraordinary?

Book a thirty-minute call with Aaron Bare and Forbes Shannon at joinextraordinary.com/contact. The call covers what the company sells and what it wants next. There is no pitch deck, and the output is a short list of the one thing to focus on.

What kind of clients has Extraordinary worked with? (Name-drop away.)

Work spans large brands and public agencies through to founder-led companies, including Coca-Cola, Walgreens, NFL Alumni, and Arizona Department of Public Safety. Case studies and video testimonials are published at joinextraordinary.com/proof.

What is Extraordinary Stories?

Extraordinary Stories is Extraordinary's podcast and research engine. Roughly 500 conversations with founders and leaders shaped Extraordinary's point of view: fund one priority, build a weekly media habit, and keep one partner accountable for the number.

Capabilities

The technical half. Opened up.

Everybody sells strategy. Fewer people can show you the machinery. This is the layer that decides whether the words you paid for ever get read, by a person or by a model.

Continuous work, not a one-time audit. Sites rot quietly.

Talk to Forbes See the build sheet

01 · The premise

An AI does not look up your keyword. It asks smaller questions first.

Before answering, the model breaks the question apart and retrieves evidence for each piece. Rank for the headline phrase and you can still be missing from every branch that decides the answer.

One buying question

“Who should a founder-led company in Phoenix hire to fix its website and pipeline?”

What the model retrieves first

/Best digital strategy agencies in Arizona
/Company versus in-house marketing hire for a founder-led company
/How much does a website rebuild plus CRM build cost
/What is answer engine optimization and does it replace SEO
/How long before a rebuilt site produces pipeline
/Who owns the accounts and the work when the engagement ends

02 · Signal

Find the questions. Watch the answers.

01 · Growth Engine

Question mapping

Nobody asks AI your keyword. They ask a question that splits into thirty.

The short answer
Question mapping is the practice of listing every sub-question a model retrieves against before it answers a buying question, then scoring each one by commercial value so publishing follows evidence instead of vibes.

What breaks without it
You can rank first for the headline phrase and still be absent from every smaller question that actually decides the answer.

/Pull the real questions from sales calls, support threads and podcast interviews.
/Expand each into the sub-questions a model would need answered to reply with confidence.
/Score every branch on commercial value, difficulty and whether you can answer it honestly.
/Nothing gets written until the map exists. Writing first is how agencies bill for guessing.

02 · Growth Engine

Answer tracking

Ask the machines about you, on a schedule, and keep the receipts.

The short answer
Answer tracking runs a fixed set of buying questions against the major AI assistants on a schedule, stores the full responses, and reports whether your name appears and who appears instead.

What breaks without it
Without a tracked prompt set, AI visibility is a feeling. Feelings do not survive a board meeting.

/Agree a prompt set that matches how your buyers actually ask.
/Run it on a cadence and keep the raw answers, not just a score.
/Report movement: cited, mentioned, absent, and who the model preferred.
/Feed the misses back into the question map so publishing has a target.

03 · Foundation

Make the site readable to machines.

03 · Brand Engine

Crawl and render clearance

If the crawler cannot read it, it does not exist. Pretty does not save you.

The short answer
Crawl and render clearance means the words on your page are present in the response a crawler receives, on a URL it is allowed to fetch, fast enough that it does not give up.

What breaks without it
Heavy client-side rendering, blocked paths and slow responses hide good writing. The page looks perfect to you and is blank to the machine.

/Check what the raw response actually contains versus what the browser paints.
/Fix crawl access, redirects, canonicals, sitemap accuracy and AI crawler rules.
/Hold Core Web Vitals at real thresholds, on mobile, on a real connection.
/Re-scan after every deploy, because a routine release is how rendering breaks silently.

04 · Brand Engine

Entity and schema graph

Be a known thing, not an ambiguous string of text.

The short answer
An entity graph is one connected set of structured data with a single organization node, stable identifiers, and the same facts everywhere, so a model can state who you are, who leads you, what you sell and who you serve without guessing.

What breaks without it
Schema pasted per page, three different company names across the web, and a founder bio that changes by platform. The model hedges, then names a competitor.

/One organization node, referenced by every page, person, service and article.
/Validate it, then wire it into templates so new pages inherit it instead of reinventing it.
/Reconcile off-site facts: name, address, founders, category, links.
/Publish a machine-readable summary of the business and keep it in sync with the site.

04 · Reach

Publish it. Get it corroborated elsewhere.

05 · Media Engine

Answer-shaped publishing

Lead with the answer. Models quote openings, not build-ups.

The short answer
Answer-shaped publishing writes the direct answer in the first two sentences, then the evidence, in short self-contained passages a model can lift without losing the meaning.

What breaks without it
Long warm-ups, buried conclusions, and paragraphs that make no sense pulled out alone. Unquotable, so uncited.

/Brief every piece from a scored branch of the question map.
/Question, answer, evidence, example, next step. Same skeleton every time.
/Original data, named frameworks, real numbers. Information gain or it does not ship.
/Human expertise in the public words. AI helps with structure, not with the knowing.

06 · Comms Engine

Third-party corroboration

A claim on your own site is marketing. Repeated elsewhere, it becomes a fact.

The short answer
Corroboration is getting the same core facts about your business stated on credible third-party sources so a model has independent confirmation of what your site claims.

What breaks without it
Everything a model can find about you comes from you. That is the definition of an unverified claim.

/Announcements built on real developments, not manufactured news.
/Podcasts, associations, partners, local press, research citations.
/Same name, same numbers, same links, everywhere. Consistency is the whole trick.
/No bought links. They are a liability with a monthly invoice attached.

05 · Loop

Rewrite what slipped. Report what moved.

07 · Growth Engine

Conversion plumbing

Traffic that cannot become a conversation is a very expensive hobby.

The short answer
Conversion plumbing is the tested path from a page to a booked conversation: one primary action, a form that validates, storage, notification, confirmation and a CRM record.

What breaks without it
Forms that submit into nothing. Booking flows with dead ends. Nobody notices until a quarter of leads are gone.

/One primary conversion per page, ranked CTAs, no shouting.
/Submit, validate, store, notify, confirm, follow up. Tested end to end.
/Objections answered on the page: cost, timeline, fit, risk, effort.
/Attribution preserved from first touch so you know what actually worked.

08 · Incentives Engine

The loop

Published is not finished. The internet moves; so do we.

The short answer
The loop revisits published work against current model behaviour, rewrites what lost ground, reinforces what is winning, and reports the movement in numbers rather than adjectives.

What breaks without it
Launch month looks great. Month seven nobody has touched the pages, the answers changed, and the reporting is a screenshot of vanity metrics.

/Re-run the tracked prompt set and compare against the last run.
/Rewrite the pages that slipped, expand the ones that are working.
/Retire what is not earning its place. The So What test applies forever.
/One dashboard, one growth number, both sides accountable to it.

06 · Honesty

Where we are not a fit.

If you need a logo refresh, a freelancer to take orders, or a one-off project with no owner on your side, this is the wrong shape. The work is continuous and we run it ourselves. If it is not a fit we will say so on the first call instead of selling you something adjacent.

Scan your company across all ten systems

Next step

Bring the number you are trying to move.

Thirty minutes. We run the audit, tell you which capability is actually blocking you, and map the first thirty days on it. If it is not a fit, we say so on that call.

Talk to Forbes

Thirty minutes, no pitch deck, straight answers.

See the work