A Compelling Offer Beats A Convincing Argument Every Time

Steven Krein: Hi, this is Steven Krein from StartUp Health, I'm here with my Free Zone podcast partner from Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan. Hey Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Steve, how are you this morning?
 
Steven: I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I'm excited to dig in to today's episode, which is around the topic of creating compelling offers versus making convincing arguments. And I think the genesis of this is from Dean Jackson's motto from many years ago, which is, "It's much better to make a compelling offer than a convincing argument." I think it's actually "A compelling offer is 10 times more persuasive than a convincing argument."
 
Dan: One of the things I've really noticed is that our world is very, very influenced by the educational system that people went through. And in the teaching world, the vehicle that the teachers use, and I guess the people who write the books and everything, is that you make a convincing argument, okay? That you show why what you're teaching is right, and that other views are not right. So you want as much proof to convince people that what you're saying is right. And so you can convince somebody with the argument, but it doesn't get them to take any action. It doesn't take them, you know, any action.
 
In the market world, where we all live as entrepreneurs, people don't want to be convinced, they want to be compelled. Okay? And that is, you have a solution for them. And if you just do a few simple steps, you'll get a solution, you know. And they've done all the work for the solution. And you get, it's like, you know, it's like Tylenol: I'm not going to try to convince you why Tylenol is really, really great. What I'm going to do is encourage you to take it because the headache that's driving you crazy will disappear in about 15 minutes. So one way of saying that is that the convincing argument is about the speaker, but a compelling offer is about the listener.
 
Steven: So I think we've got some great examples of what a compelling offer is. Let's talk about what it convincing argument sounds like?
 
Dan: Yeah, well, I think a convincing argument would be, "We've studied data from the economy. And it looks like we're entering one of those periods. And I've been through this about five or six times in my entrepreneurial career. And it looks like we might be heading into a recession. Okay? And that is calculated that if you have two quarters, two economic quarters in a row where there's a loss, then you're in a recession. And everything's pointing to this direction. And we'd like you to know that we're kind of getting close to our recession. And you should think about that, because it's very, very important for you to understand that things might have to change, and you might have to do something different. And you may have to correct your whole approach to the marketplace." Okay? That's a convincing argument. And then you bring enough data forward just to convince, but it doesn't leave the listener with any solution.
 
Steven: Yeah, you basically just dumped on them. And spent time, by the way doing it, interestingly enough, convincing them to stop spending.
 
Dan: Yeah. Which when people stop spending that speeds up the recession. [laughs]
 
Steven: Exactly. So let's flip it around. What's the version of that? That's the compelling offer?
 
Dan: "You know, a lot of people are really scared today that we're going into a recession. And we've got two steps, two-three step process that makes you recession-proof."
 
Steven: Sounds like a lot fewer words. It's about you, not them. I mean them, not you. What are the characteristics of that compelling offer?
 
Dan: Well, that it's going to happen really fast, and they don't have to do much work to get it. They don't have to know what a recession is. They don't have to understand what is the recession is, they just need to be-- What's going to be really bad for other people isn't going to be bad for them.
 
Steven: So you don't need to go through the DOS and tell them all the Dangers. And you don't need to tell them about all the big Opportunities. And you don't have to talk about all the Strengths that you're gonna maximize. So you're giving them just a compelling offer.
 
Dan: Yep.
 
Steven: All right. So are you now able yourself to filter this faster, when you look at your own messaging, tool names, book names, even Strategic Coach overall?
 
Dan: First of all, just a little background, I'm an advertising guy. So I was a copywriter in a big agency in the early 70s. And advertising is all about compelling offers. My creative director took me to a steak restaurant first week I was hired into the agency. And it was one of those steak places where they bring a cart with raw meat and you choose the piece of meat that you want. I don't find that a particularly positive experience when they do that, but some restaurants insist on it. Then it comes back, you know, like half-hour later, it comes back. And it smells great. You know, you can almost hear it on the plate that you can still hear cooking on the plate. It's got all sorts of neat things like potatoes and gravy and fried onion rings, or whatever, round it. So when the steak came, he asked the waiter to bring the cart back. And the cart was there. And he says, "Now look at the cart, what's on the cart, and look what's on your plate." And he says, "We're selling what's on your plate, we're not selling what's on the cart. We're not selling steak, we're selling sizzle." So I've got that background. So for example, the document that's up on the screen here, it's called "Best Compelling Offers." And the sheet itself is a compelling offer. Okay, because people say, "Oh, my gosh, a way of thinking about best compelling offers."
 
So to a certain extent, all the tools we have have a compelling offer title. And compelling offers, you know, they're a compelling offer because they're usually seven words or less, and they're not abstract words. You instantly get the essence. Okay?
 
So I've got a new book coming out, which is called You Are Not a Computer. Okay? People say, "Well, what's that about? That's really interesting," you know? And then I tell the story, that there's a narrative out there that we're just lousy computers, and that the faster, more powerful computers are going to obsolete the human race over the next 30, 40 years. And that's because it's all just information processing: We process information, computers, process information, and therefore we're going to be obsoleted by the computers.
 
So my book says that it's all based on the premise that we're all information processors, but humans aren't information processors, humans are meaning-makers: We take our experience, and we rearrange the experience, and we make meaning out of the experience. It's not about information, it's about experience. And it's not about processing, it's about taking experience and creating something brand new.
 
So, you know, so anyway, I just give that as an example, that book titles, is that you have two or three words and when you say-- It's like the punchline of a joke, you know? People are thinking this way, and you hit them with a punch line, and all of a sudden their brains are disrupted. And that's kind of the basis for a compelling offer, is that everybody's thinking in one direction, and then you present a message that immediately just shocks them and changes the way they're thinking about things.
 
Steven: So how effective was this conversation at shifting people who think they're making compelling offers when they talked about their business now into actually really making sure they're doing it all the time? So you brought this up in the workshop yesterday, I want to talk through the--
 
Dan: So the setting is 30 highly successful entrepreneurs. I mean, 25, 30 years' experience, all the incomes are in the seven figures, all their, you know, business are in the eight, nine figure, some of them 10-figure companies. So these are people are really successful. They're really good salespeople. And I just said, "Based on your experience, what would you say are the three best compelling offers that you have created so far in your entrepreneurial career?"
 
You know, I give them a couple minutes to brainstorm that they'll come up with five or 10 things. I show them what I've done with my three and my three are: Who Not How is a very compelling offer, The GAP and The GAIN is very compelling offer, and number three is 10x is Easier Than 2x is my suggestions for a compelling offer. And these just happened to be three book titles—two that are already out there with a major book publisher, and they've been best sellers and they've delivered to Coach an enormous number of new clients over the last three years. And number three is the third book which is coming out next year. But these all started with thinking tools in Strategic Coach.
 
Steven: And for you what might be the convincing argument version just to contrast it with all three of those. If you weren't making a compelling offer on Who Not How, what would be your a convincing argument version of Who Not How?
 
Dan: "Well, you know, when you study how businesses become very, very successful, what you notice is that there's a particular pattern in businesses, that as a person becomes more skilled then it's possible for that person then to develop a team around them, where some of the activities that the skillful person is doing can be given to other people who are trained just to handle individual activities. And as a result of that, the skillful person in the business can make a lot of progress. I just want to show you some statistics from Harvard Business School to show this, you know, from 1950 to 2000, the people who are the best delegators went the highest in the corporation."
 
Steven: I don't think I've heard you ever recite data to support your ideas and 20-plus years, Dan.
 
Dan: But data is what you need to actually convince. Data is one of the things that you need. And you have to quote an authoritative body, like Harvard Business School is an authority. So you quote authorities, you quote data, but you talk in generalities like "the business world", "skillful people delegating", and everything like that. But at the end of it, the listener is sitting there saying, "Well, that's interesting." Or not. You know, but if you were trying to sell something that wouldn't move anyone closer to being compelled to buy.
 
Steven: Yeah, well, it's interesting. So for us, and I brought this up on the last episode around our moonshots. But our moonshots are compelling offers, right? The T1D moonshot is about finally getting to a place where we can see the roadmap to how innovators can help us prevent, manage, but ultimately cure type-one diabetes. The moonshot is all about a compelling offer.
 
Dan: Yep, yep.
 
Steven: One of the things I found fascinating is how many different entrepreneurs and investors and philanthropist and others are out there, either funding or working on or donating to things that they hope will just be added to the cure formula, but no one's out there saying, "Let's just organize a collaboration around getting to a cure." And that's really what, for us, what we've done to productize a moonshot and turn it into a thing that is a cross-disciplinary collaboration to solve a problem.
 
Dan: Yeah. And if you go back to the origin of the term "moonshot," it was President Kennedy in 1961, upon learning that the Soviets were planning a project to the moon, because we were in the middle of the Cold War, he gave a speech, I think it was in Houston. And it was broadcast live and went, you know, across the country. And he says, "By the end of the decade, we are going to launch a rocket that lands, the man on the moon, and that man will come back safely. We will do this by the end of the decade." And at that point, the United States had no ability to actually do that.
 
Steven: No technology, no money, none of the skills or capabilities, but there were 400,000 people and 20,000 companies that helped make that happen.
 
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. And they were compelled to join the effort by his speech.
 
Steven: Yeah, I want to talk about this here. I wasn't planning to but I think it's an interesting perspective or lens to put on, to talk about moonshots. So we've had a "cure disease" moonshot since we launched the moonshot probably seven years, that moonshot, seven years ago. And "cure disease" is very amorphous. Cure disease. [unintelligible] We put a bunch of companies into that moonshot. As soon as we turned it into a single mission, like type-one diabetes, or Alzheimer's, or Youth Mental Health, or pancreatic cancer, all the sudden, it's almost like it catalyzes all the people that care about that one particular thing.
 
So "cure disease" is just a general category. But type-one diabetes—there are mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and lots of children diagnosed with that. And then they-- people go through a process of learning and seeing and then finding out there's no cure, finding out that there's been a lot of failed attempts at that. And that while there has been a lot of great progress and a lot of great money, but at the end of the day we still are sitting in 2022 Without a cure. And there's always been this promise "We're only five years away."
 
As soon as you put a framework out there, a compelling offer like "There is a T1D moonshot that is a collaboration across entrepreneurship and business and philanthropy and investors and everybody that is going to focus on bringing every resource around the world to the table to make sure that we get there in a compelling way. And we're just going to iterate our way there quarter after quarter." Everybody's reaching out, and we created an email address, T1D@startuphealth.com. And the difference between a general "cure disease" moonshot and a type-one diabetes moonshot is night and day.
 
Dan: Yep. Yeah, no question about it. You want to join, you want to find out. You want to write a check.
 
And you really find that great things in history have actually happened with very compelling offers. In 19—I think it was 1938, Albert Einstein, already a Nobel Prize winner, probably the most widely known physicist, maybe not the greatest physicist, but certainly the most known physicist of the 20th century, wrote a letter—not a long letter to Franklin Roosevelt, president of the United States—and he said, "I just want you to know that a new source of energy has been discovered, will be developed and we'll be at war, and it will be used to make a weapon, and a single bomb with his energy source can wipe out a whole city, okay? Just a single bomb dropped by a single plane, can wipe out whole city. And the Japanese already have a program working on this. The Germans already have a program working on this. And the next war, which we all see coming, the country that develops this weapon first and uses it well win the war." And that launched immediately, in today's dollars, a $16-billion government program involving 300,000 people that developed the first atom bomb, and they dropped them. And when they dropped the bomb, they dropped the first one, they got no response. So they dropped his second one. And let the Japanese know that they had 10 more and they had the 10 cities already picked out.
 
Steven: It's a catalyzing statement, you described—less than seven words, no abstract words very specific.
 
Dan: And about the listener, not about the speaker.
 
Steven: About the listener, not the speaker talk about that.
 
Dan: Well, basically, you're talking about a reality that the speaker is facing or is going to face, and if they don't have something new as a solution is going to be a bad experience. But if they have the new solution, it's going to be a good experience.
 
Steven: So let's use my type-one diabetes moonshot as an example, again. How might you look at the next step about making a compelling offer to get involved in it? So the name of it is itself a short, compelling offer: The T1D Moonshot. But there's two different stakeholders to get involved: One that's backing the moonshot, providing the capital for the moonshot. The other are the innovators and the entrepreneurs that are going to power the innovation.
 
Dan: Let me you a question, because you're deep into this experience and I'm not. Do you find that the central motivation for it, both on the part of the entrepreneur and also the funders is that they personally know someone who has this problem?
 
Steven: One hundred percent of the time.
 
Dan: Yeah, so here's the thing. You're not just talking to entrepreneurs in talking to funders, you're talking to people who deeply, deeply feel the pain that comes from this problem not being solved.
 
Steven: Yes. In fact, that explains the previous comment I made a few minutes ago that "cure disease" is like this general moonshot. But people are like, "Oh, yeah, diseases in every family, it's every--" But as soon as you go "Type-one diabetes," somebody says, "My daughter was diagnosed with it." "Sadly, I lost my daughter from it." "Two of my children have it." "My dad passed away from it." "I live with it."
 
And by the way, pancreatic cancer—the moonshot conversation started with a friend of mine with pancreatic cancer. Alzheimer's, lost my father, my grandmother, Alzheimer's or dementia. You all the sudden see a connection, a human connection, to everybody specifically around when you you have a non-abstract definition within the disease into like, as I said, type-one diabetes, Alzheimer's or pancreatic cancer.
 
Dan: Yeah. And I think that that's part of what compels. First of all, it's a personal experience that's now negative, but has the possibility of being transformed into positive.
 
Steven: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Dan: The other aspect about it is in describing the moon shots, is it a home run at the end of nine innings, or there are a whole bunch of hits and runs scored on the way to the ninth inning—using baseball language. In other words, "We're going to be coming up with solutions all along the way."
 
Steven: I think that's a great question. Because one of the most interesting things I've learned is there's a lot of people out there that are looking at it very black and white: Happened or not-happened.
 
Not many people are looking at it and saying, every quarter, we're making progress. And there are steps by the way to getting there, right? There's some cases where it happens that you have to run clinical trials and make sure it works or what doesn't work and get data. And in other cases, it's time, and in another ca-- There's so many things, but they don't seem to be measuring their progress. It's very black and white—either, "Hey, we're making progress. Nobody can name it," or "We haven't made enough progress." Or "It hasn't happened yet." Very amorphous kinds of things.
 
We've looked at it and said, "We're going to measure—and, by the way, celebrate the progress every quarter, on our way there." And not just like the Apollo missions, right? Yeah, how many different Apollo missions did you have to get under wraps to get to the one that was the one that would land successfully on the moon and come back?
 
Dan: Yeah, yeah. And I can remember, eleven was the moon landing, but it might have been eight or nine. And that was a couple of years previously. But it was the first time that a rocket had been sent up. And it circled the moon. It actually came within the vicinity of the moon. And there was the moment when they were able to look back and take a picture of the earth. And nobody had seen that picture before. No human had ever seen what the earth actually looked like. And they did. And I think it was a-- That picture was a game-changer. Because nobody had seen the earth before. They actually were within 100 miles of the moon, but they didn't land on the moon. So it was really close. They proved that they could go to the moon, but they hadn't proven yet that-- So that was progress. You know, those were progress steps.
 
Steven: Yeah, stories of progress. You know, we built this whole media engine to document the journey, and to document every innovator and entrepreneurs steps every quarter, every half year, every year that they're making towards achieving the moonshot. And it's fascinating to look at.
 
There's a lack of coverage of any of that in traditional media. I think there's a lack of access to a lot of that. If you Google a disease or an illness to really see what's there, it seems like it's either under wraps, or there's an element of secrecy or privacy that people try to keep around that progress. We have found when you share the progress—by the way, good and bad, you know, setbacks and learning. And, you know, there was the Apollo mission where people, you know, sadly died. And there was lots of different things along the way that led to the achievement. But it was documented for a decade.
 
And I think that is what we're trying to do with the media storytelling that we do and the event storytelling that we do to make sure that the entrepreneur at the very early stages and as they progress through are important milestones to get to the cure. Why did you ask that question? I think it's an interesting question about "Is it a zero-sum game?"
 
Dan: Well, I take the thing is that people are excited. So for example, someone that you know from New York—Babs and I have been involved with the creation of a Broadway musical that's based on the life of Floyd Price, who arguably is the first crossover singer and composer from what was called rhythm and blues to rock'n'roll. He's really kind of like the first rock and roll singer. And he changed the entire music world.
 
In 1951, he had a two-minute song called "Lawdy Miss Claudie", and it went big. But the biggest thing about it was it was the first time that you had a national, white teenage audience for a Black musician. Okay? And the record companies just suddenly realized there was a whole new market here, and a whole new kind of music that would draw teenager-- And this is the first time that teenagers bought records, and they were 45s. All the records up until then had been long-playing records. And this was a 45. And they had cheap record players who are coming out, but they didn't really care. And it was the start of rock'n'roll.
 
So everybody zeroes in on Elvis Presley and, you know—but that's, that's a half a decade later. And there was this huge growth of Black musicians in the United States, who created the entire foundation and Lloyd Price was the original pioneer who did this. And up until the spring of last year, he was still alive. You know, so he died in the spring of 2021. And it was based on a documentary that my friend in New York, Jeff Madoff did.
 
Steven: Yeah. He lives a few blocks from me.
 
Dan: Yeah, you're right around the corner from each other. So I was just interested, and we got involved about three years ago. And he told us what it was, and we were up in your area having lunch at a restaurant. And he said, "Just a minute, I have to take a visit to the loo." Babs and I looked at each other, and we said, "Why don't we invest?"
 
And he came back, and we said, "Jeff, we're really supportive of what you're doing." And he said, "That's very kind." And we said, "We'll invest," and it was a knockout to him. And so he said, "Well, you know, this is not a safe investment, you know. There's no guarantee on return." And I said, "Well, we're not doing it for that reason, we're doing it because you're our friend. And both of us think that it would just be a neat thing to be involved in the creation of a Broadway musical."
 
And right now, it's a full play that's been created. It opened on the road in Philadelphia, got rave reviews, it was a big hit. And they've just signed a contract. It's opening in Chicago now for right on in the theater section, the big theater section of Chicago, for I think it's a 10-week engagement. And if it gets rave reviews here, next step is Broadway.
 
So it's been three or four years, and there's been setbacks and everything. But we're involved in something that's just really neat, and really exciting. So my sense is that when you have a compelling offer, people want to be involved in the compelling offer, regardless if its success is in tomorrow, or maybe a success is five years from now, or 10 years from-- They want to be involved in something, one is that they just think is really neat. But the other thing is they think is really important.
 
Steven: So he didn't even make an offer to you. He just talked about being involved.
 
Dan: Well, he made an offer that it sounded like an exciting-- I mean, we're both from northern Ohio, we're both in our 70s. And the term rock'n'roll was created in Cleveland. So...
 
Steven: So he created a magnet for you. Yeah. Which is what a good compelling--
 
Dan: But he wasn't trying to. He never expected that we would... Y'know?
 
Steven: Yeah.
 
Dan: First of all, we're not big investors. So he didn't need big investors. And we weren't big investors. But we've done two rounds. There was a first round that got it to the point where the whole point could be put together, you could have a cast, you could have music. Then there was a second round where you have a production that can go on the road. And now there's a third that you can do a really substantial-- Chicago's the number two theater city in the United States. Now you got Chicago, and there'll be a fourth. And that's when you take it to Broadway, you know. We're along for all four rounds.
 
Steven: Love it, love it. So bringing it back to the moonshot metaphor of you could be a backer to a moonshot, you could be a contributor, an innovator in a moonshot. The moonshot itself is the hook. But how literal does a compelling offer go to the entrepreneur or to the investor?
 
Dan: Well, I think you expressed it up-front that it was a single-focus project. And I think a single-focus project is compelling. Because everybody knows that general-focus projects are very bureaucratic, they're very boring. And they don't really accomplish very, very much. You know, it's like diabetes, the truth is more people are living of diabetes than dying of it.
 
Steven: You know, and one of the reasons there's no rush to cure it by a lot of the big companies—there's a $17,000 a year revenue stream coming from everybody with it.
 
Dan: Yeah, there's a lot of money to be made by not solving the--
 
Steven: Yes. Yeah. So can you push on that a little bit?
 
Dan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Steven: So let's come back. There's backers, and there's innovators, who either don't have hope, lost hope, or want to have hope that that's not going to be a reason why it doesn't get done.
 
Dan: The other thing is that you've introduced a factor that this is not corporate labs that you're talking about, or secret government labs that you're talking about. These are out in the open, out in the market, taking a risk entrepreneurs, but it's a network. It's a network of entrepreneurs. You know, and I suggested to you when we had our first Free Zone Summit in Chicago—you and your sister were there. And, you know, we talked on and off throughout the day and I said, "You know what I think you're doing? I think you're creating the first totally entrepreneurial R&D network in the world." I said, "I think that's what you're doing. I think you're creating something that hasn't existed before." You found that worth writing down.
 
Steven: Well, I did in that I think there is—and it's even grown significantly since that time—an underlying realization that everything's siloed, everybody is siloed in their own little world. The entrepreneurs are siloed in working on their innovation. They're not part of a bigger collaboration and entrepreneur R&D lab. The investors are working on their own.
 
Interestingly enough, you know, you mentioned government and corporate, but even within the private world, you know, like you said, there's a lot of money being made by a lot of these diseases and illnesses. And if it affects you, or your family, or somebody you care about, you realize that something has to change, or there's going to be another generation of people dealing with the same thing you dealt with.
 
But I feel like there is a—I want to see if I can get it out of you here. I think there is a compelling offer to make to an entrepreneur, to get involved with this moonshot, not that we have to make a compelling offer, but, like, to really go for the investor side of the equation. There's entrepreneurs coming out of the woodwork to be a part of it, that-- We have a really interesting network of investors and philanthropists that are coming out of the woodwork to be a part of it, because it, symbolically, is the first cross-disciplinary entrepreneur-led initiative like it.
 
Dan: Yep.
 
Steven: But what do you think that compelling offer to the investor, or backer of this is?
 
Dan: Well, I think the big thing is, I mean, all investment is based on "If the money is put in now, when do I get a return?" I mean, "What is the basis for a return?" If I understand, it's the ROI. And not only the amount of return on investment, but the timing of the ROI.
 
And the general bureaucratic way is not of interest to investors, you know, because, one, is there's no excitement to it. One, it's generally secret. The other thing is, there is no excitement to it. And the other thing is, your experience with those type of ventures is they waste a lot of money and produce no results. So what I think you've done is you've countered a general narrative about how this stuff has been done in the past. And it's not of interest to someone who is a venture-minded capitalist. That's not what we do. It's like watching grass grow: It's not of interest. But we can have a bare field tomorrow and we can bring in sod, and you got a lawn... A sod lawn is interesting; growing grass is not interesting.
 
Steven: Yeah. What I find interesting, and, going back to the compelling offer versus convincing argument framework, is when you talk to a philanthropist who has been giving their money away, and not getting any ROI and not being happy with the progress, and tell them they can actually put money to work in diabetes, and also get a return on investment on top of what they're giving towards the cause. That's a compelling offer.
 
Because now you're saying "Right now you're just giving it away, you're not getting any return on investment, you're hoping and wishing it goes towards, you know, a cure. But it's a shrug. Might be a tax write-off, but that's about it." I think on the convincing argument is trying to tell an investor they can also make an impact with their money. And I think I have found that those individuals and organizations and families are already giving money to type-one diabetes are finding being involved in the moonshot much more exciting of a value proposition, than trying to convince investors they should also care about type-one diabetes,
 
Dan: One of the think, as a general condition in society, but it's harder to find meaning today. People have meaning, they've got comfort, they've got convenience. You know, they've got all sorts of neat benefits that have been taken care of, you know? Maslow's pyramid, you know?
 
Here in North America, here in the United States, do we have survival problems? No, not really. Do we have safety issues? Yeah, it's a possibility, but not really. Not like Ukraine or not like the Golan Heights. We don't live in that type of world. Do we have belonging issues? And now you start to get some issues. What do you belong to that has meaning? And the normal organizations that, you know, you belong to a neighborhood and there's nice restaurants, and you're in a condo and yeah, and they say it's a vital, intelligent community? Yes, but I never see them. You know? We never see those people.
 
So the big thing is—I think that one of the things that you're hitting is a belonging issue, that they're bonding to something. And the next, Maslow's pyramid, you know, there's survival, safety, belonging, but the next one is achievement where you're esteemed. In other words, what you're belong to is creating achievements that give you a sense of esteem, and makes you proud to be part of it. And the next one up, which I've never really gotten, because I think it's a dated word, but self-actualization. And that is that you've participated and you've contributed, and you've been important within a social setting, business setting that really, really created something that had a big impact. So I think you're hitting, you know, that you're providing something that gives people a specific set of meaning in 2022, that ordinary life just doesn't create for them.
 
Steven: Interesting. Yeah. That's another compelling offer. Right? Yeah. [unintelligible] Convincing argument.
 
Dan: Joe Polish quotes this a lot, that Napoleon Bonaparte said, "My whole life, my whole career changed when I realized that man would die for a blue ribbon." Yeah. I just ordered a lot of blue ribbons. Yeah, and gave them a chance to die.
 
Steven: Wow. Love it. Yeah, it's interesting. I hadn't dissected the shift we've made so much in the last year around these specific single-mission moonshots. But I think you're talking about—I found a very hungry community. Yep. I've assembled an incredible impact board of the leading entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, industry execs, academics, who care deeply about that meaning and about coming together to do something—have a chance to do something—that's finally going to make such a big impact. And if there could be an ROI on top of it, that's just gravy, but we're gonna get this done. It's interesting, because what I think you're doing is helping me accelerate even my thinking around transforming our general moonshots into specific moonshots, and enabling more and more of them to create that meaning for people.
 
Dan: Yeah, and I think the other thing is, it's what you call the project, you know, the diabetes one, but you have a dozen other projects that are specifically targeted like that. So you have a compelling offer as the name. But then there are stages in every one of the moonshots that you could break it down into—they're kind of like algorithms: "First, we do this, and we do this, and we do this and do this. And if we do all of those correctly, we get a, you know, an end result at the end." Then you take each of the stages, and you communicate them as a compelling offer. So the big compelling offer has eight little compelling offers.
 
And I'll give you an idea that some of the biggest breakthroughs that we saw on the trip that we took with Peter Diamandis in Boston and New York last year were actually ways of getting things done. It wasn't specifically the cure to anything, but it was the way that scientists and researchers in entrepreneurs could now get projects like this done. And one of them is gene sequencing. And gene sequencing was a phenomenal breakthrough, because with gene sequencing, and also artificial intelligence applied to these testing, you could do 10,000 separate tests and the time it used to take one manual test.
 
And that's the progress that you could report back, "By the way, the way we used to test where it would take all day to do one test, we can now do 10,000 tests." And that's also part of the progress of the compelling offer, we're using the greatest capabilities. And we've kind of driven these capabilities. These capabilities have been created because we had a compelling reason for having this type of breakthrough.
 
Steven: That's the unlocking the network effects of these capabilities within a network like this. So if you're now tying all of those entrepreneurs together, that capability now becomes available to the entire community.
 
Dan: Yeah.
 
Steven: That's different than the last episode. We talked about the new capability on the IP protection becomes available instantly to hundreds of entrepreneurs. In this case you just described, we're seeing this across our existing community of companies because we're we're building an ecosystem of health moonshots. And when you start to have an ecosystem of moonshots, they each can leverage the capabilities of the other and the learnings, and so you speed up through gene sequencing, AI, etc, the ability to accelerate innovation, all of a sudden now others can benefit from that at the same time.
 
Dan: Yeah, and you know, you may have a procedural breakthrough, or what I would say a development breakthrough in Alzheimer's, but you extract it, and immediately it can go to all other 11 moonshots.
 
Steven: Yeah, yeah. A compelling offer nested within a series or a Unique Process of other compelling offers. So I'm seeing a compelling offer umbrella, but then compelling offers. Yeah, as Unique Process.
 
Dan: There's a quality control aspect about this, that if you are calling a stage something and it sounds like government cheese, you have something that could be valuable in your overall compelling offer, and it's being wasted, because you're not giving enough significance. You're not giving enough zip to what's happening here.
 
Steven: Love it, make sure you put the compelling offer lens at your different stages, so that you're bringing people along for the journey, and not starting to argue in the middle of your compelling offer.
 
Dan: Yeah, and I think that there's a tendency, because it is connected a lot to the, what I would say, the academic world or the bureaucratic world, I mean, necessarily, almost everything we do in an advanced society, is that we're going to come into contact with ecosystems which are bureaucratic, and they're about arguments. They're about arguments, you know? They're about proving things right. They're about people are trying to avoid being seen as failures, you know? But that's not the entrepreneurial world, you know? So the way you protect your entrepreneurial venture is through the language that you use.
 
Steven: Love it. Well, this is great, Dan, I know we're way over time, but I thought this was a very interesting discussion around how often-- I think, by the way, a lot of entrepreneurs do what you described not to do around the convincing argument thing, which is, armed with data and armed with proof and armed with that, and how often we get-- Either we start in the trap, or we get pushed by other people into that trap: An investor asks about your company, or you are asked to pitch it, and all of a sudden you're starting to get into the convincing argument.
 
The other thing, by the way, that I've learned about the compelling offer is it's very black and white to see if you're talking to the ideal customer client or partner. Like, T1D, and I'll just use you know, I keep using it, it's type-one diabetes, but in the world of type-one diabetics, after you're in that for a minute, you call it T1D. And it's literally like, it's a dog whistle. And if you say the words "T1D", it attracts everybody involved, caring, etc. And then everyone else hears it.
 
And it's interesting, but I'm finding the same thing about youth mental health with parents or other family who've been affected by, sadly, you know, either within their own family or you see a lot of the violence around the country right now, kids are struggling. And youth mental health is a real issue for many, many, many, many, many families. And other dog whistles. Same thing with, we're finding, Alzheimer's. So I like the framework of now having a name for what the overarching strategy is to get through to you, which is this compelling offer is definitely a very different way of talking to the market.
 
Dan: I've known you long enough, Steve going back 25 years. And I know how your mind works. And I do know that if something bores you, it's not a compelling offer.
 
Steven: [laughs]
 
Dan: Yeah, I mean, if somebody says something and you say, "You know, I don't know what you just said. What did you say?" It's not a compelling offer, because compelling offers are instant-reads, you know? Like Lior Weinstein, he's a new Free Zone guy, and he's a, he's a digital communicator and manager, but he's really zeroed in on the investment community. And he's Israeli and he did his IDF, and then he did another four or five years in IDF intelligence. And the one thing he says, when you grow up in Israel, by the time you're three, before you can read, you can read people. He said, the biggest thing that Israelis learn how to do is read people. But he said that, you know, he's got a company and he says, "My job is to create an environment where growth is inevitable." That's a compelling offer. Who wouldn't want that, you know?
 
Steven: Can you repeat that again, Dan, I love it?
 
Dan: Yeah, he says, "I grow environments where growth is inevitable."
 
Steven: Yeah. I love it. Love it.
 
Dan: Yeah. You know, somebody says, "Well, what kind of research do you have to back that--?" [makes gameshow buzzer noise] Wrong person! [laughs] You know, it's like, press a button, they drop into the shark tank. Anyway, so...
 
Steven: Yeah. Let's wrap up.
 
Dan: Yeah. So a question for you: What changes now? I mean, I see you Friday of next week, I think.
 
Steven: Thursday and Friday of next week.
 
Dan: Thursday and Friday of next week. What changes, you know, like some actions that you'll take, as a result of compelling offer discussion between now and then?
 
Steven: The compelling offer stages: Within a compelling offer there are stages of more compelling offers. And I think the filter that I'm going to put on my stages-- You know, we have these six stages to a moonshot that are designed around a moonshot gets an impact board of experts led by an entrepreneur, but an experts to start their single-mission micro-funds that we build that are kind of open-ended and able to attract, continually attract, investors and backers forever. We standardize funding to invest in startups at the seed and pre-seed stage and follow them up.
 
We have a community platform to connect all the entrepreneurs together to really unlock the power of the network effect. We have this branded storytelling engine to help tell the story of progress and hope and setbacks and struggles and-- And then finally, we've really leveraged the shared services and platform that we built. But what I've realized about each one of those things I just mentioned is, while the start of the headline is the T1D moonshot, the type one diabetes moonshot, as soon as we get into the belly of the beast, it doesn't sound like a bunch more compelling offers, it sounds like a bunch of other-- I don't want to say convincing arguments, but it's somewhere not as crisp as a compelling offer. So I'm going to turn each one of those six stages of a moonshot bet into a compelling offer. That's my big take-away.
 
Dan: And I think when you do that, all the entrepreneurs that are involved in that particular moonshot will get a jolt of energy. Yeah. I mean, quite apart from the investor community and everything.
 
Steven: Yeah.
 
Dan: I think the players themselves will get a boost of energy.
 
Steven: Yeah. And I think what's interesting about the different stakeholders here, Dan, is that I've often just spoken to the entrepreneur, because that's really where I anchored my "Who I want to be hero to": the entrepreneurs and innovators transforming healthcare and working on these moonshots. But what you realize is that same content gets read by, absorbed by, and appreciated by a lot of other people. The question is, can you make a compelling offer that talks to either audience, versus one or the other?
 
Dan: Yeah, well, because you're creating a community. And you want the same mindset coming in from all directions.
 
Steven: Exactly. shared mindset. What's your big takeaway from the conversation around compelling offers today?
 
Dan: Well, I know at least one of my participants next Thursday is going to be really prepared for this exercise. [laughs] I expect you to be a co-coach, and maybe demonstrate—I mean, if you could get some thing where you took, and you showed how you change things as a result of this, that would be a--
 
Steven: Challenge accepted, Dan. I got my "Before" and my "After." Interestingly enough, the before-and-after on the on the moonshot itself, "cure disease" versus type-one diabetes is a shift, right? I think within each of these six I've got some good homework in, and probably today we'll end up transforming each of them into compelling offers.
 
Dan:Good.
 
Steven: Dan, always great seeing you.
 
Dan: Thank you a lot, Steve. Talk next week.
 
Steven: All right.