Deborah Small paid people five dollars for an unrelated experiment, then handed each of them an envelope and a chance to give some of it back to Save the Children.
One group read about Rokia. Seven years old, from Mali, desperately poor. They gave $2.38.
A second group got the actual scale. Three million children short of food in Malawi. Eleven million Ethiopians needing aid. All true, all worse than one girl. They gave $1.14.
Then came the condition that made the study famous. A third group got both, Rokia and the statistics, in one appeal.
That group gave $1.43.
Adding true facts about a bigger tragedy cut giving by 40%. The statistics were supposed to help. They buried her. Once your brain starts counting it stops feeling, and whoever was about to give has already left the room. Paul Slovic calls this psychic numbing, and it's why every cause with real scale behind it still leads with one face.
Which is the whole problem with outbound to small businesses. "We can improve your Google presence" is a statistic.
Today's featured idea turns it into a Rokia.
You find one roofer whose mobile site buries the estimate button under three screens of hero image. You rebuild that page yourself, which is twenty minutes of prompting now and used to be a week of billable design work. You print a screenshot on a postcard, add a QR code that opens the working preview, and mail it for 65 cents. One line on the back: your mobile visitors have no obvious way to request an estimate.
He's holding the demo before you've asked him for anything.
Roofers pay $235 and up for a single Google lead, and the average roof replacement runs $9,607, so the math conversation is short. Activation is $1,500, the care plan is $299 a month, and forty contractors on that plan is $11,960 in monthly recurring revenue.
The postcard is the easy part. Working out which ten roofers out of fifty deserve one is the actual business.
Read the full playbook here:
AI collapsed the cost of a custom web page while roofing leads climbed past $235. Direct mail is the underpriced channel sitting between them.
From the Vault:
Hobby subreddits run recurring challenges on sticky threads and spreadsheets. Reddit's Devvit platform pays $3,500 in install milestones to whoever automates that ritual first.
FMCSA has parked 26,000 drivers over English proficiency, and states now fine carriers directly. The agency named the duty and skipped the procedure, leaving 580,000 small fleets exposed.
