Effortless Business Growth with Danny Iny

Welcome to Brainfluence, where author and international keynote speaker Roger Dooley has weekly conversations with thought leaders and world class experts. Every episode shows you how to improve your business with advice based on science or data.

Roger’s new book, Friction, is published by McGraw Hill and is now available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and bookstores everywhere. Dr Robert Cialdini described the book as, “Blinding insight,” and Nobel winner Dr. Richard Claimer said, “Reading Friction will arm any manager with a mental can of WD40.”

To learn more, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction, or just visit the book seller of your choice.

Now, here’s Roger.

Roger Dooley:     Welcome to Brainfluence. I’m Roger Dooley.

Danny Iny is the founder and CEO of Mirasee and is an expert in the creation and marketing of online courses. He’s been featured in the Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur, contributes regularly to Inc., Forbes, Business Insider and others. He’s the author of multiple best-selling books about online education and business, including Leveraged Learning, Teach Your Gift and most recently, Effortless. Welcome to the show, Danny.

Danny Iny:          Roger, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Roger Dooley:     I have to tell you that just the title, not to mention the content, of Effortless really struck a chord with me because of my recent focus for the last several years, at least, on Friction, which is basically the unnecessary effort. So eliminating friction is all about making things easier, eliminating that unnecessary effort and that’s really a key to the ideas in there. But before we get into that book, I’m curious here, we are, hopefully, approaching the end of the pandemic as we know it although, I think we’re going to be living with it for quite a while longer and it’s follow-on effects. How has the learning field been affected by the last year, what’s gone on with COVID and so on?

Danny Iny:          Well, so first of all, I second your hope that we’re almost through this. It’s been really interesting because what the pandemic has done has, essentially, it’s accelerated trends that were already happening, right? We were right on the cusp of a lot of things changing and then what would have taken five or 10 years got compressed into less than a year. I am sure a lot of people listening to this or watching this video will be familiar with Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Curve, any new innovation comes to first the innovators and the early adopters and the mainstream buyers. We’ve all seen that bell curve. Coming into 2020, online courses were just beginning to tip into the mainstream, right? So that if you’re someone who, “Yeah, online courses, I’ve been seeing that around forever,” then you live inside this bubble that’s not the experience that most of the rest of the world has had.

It’s a little bit like you’re in a nightclub and you’re 10 feet away from the speaker and it’s so loud you can’t imagine that there’s anyone who can’t hear this; but two blocks down, nobody knows this is going on. So that’s kind of where we were with online courses going into 2020. But if you would ask a random person on the street, “Where can I take a course?” They would say, “A college, university, a community center,” where online wouldn’t have entered their frame of reference. But we were just getting into that tipping point thanks to the efforts of companies like Coursera and Masterclass and Udemy and lynda.com, which is now LinkedIn Learning, et cetera. So we’re getting into this mainstream, now all of a sudden, everything is forced online, right? Zoom’s user base grows by 2000% in a matter of weeks. LinkedIn Learning sees 30% week-over-week growth, crazy, crazy numbers as everyone is rushing online. A lot of that is going to stick because what prevents the adoption of a new innovation?

There are two categories of factors, two categories of frictions, right? One of the legitimate frictions of, “This is not as good for my needs.” So case in point, my daughter had her fifth birthday shortly after the pandemic began, so we had a Zoom birthday party, right? It wasn’t as good as an in-person birthday party. We’re not going to stick with Zoom birthday parties once in-person parties can happen again. She wants to play with her friends in person, so there are some things that online is just not as good for, but then there’s the other category of reasons why people don’t adopt new things, which is inertia, right? “This is not how I’ve always done it. I don’t want to get onto the Zoom.” It’s that kind of attitude. With everyone being pushed into the deep end by the pandemic and not having any other choice, all of that inertia reasoning got swept away. So some things will go back to, “Yeah, I really prefer to do it in person,” but a lot of things, people are going to say, “Well, actually, this was really good. We can keep doing this.”

So we’ve seen this massive acceleration in the adoption of online courses and that has really leaned into the stratification that we’ve seen with the types of online courses that are out there. So online courses, in general, they fall into two buckets. There is the information online courses where you’ve got a bunch of videos and a membership site. It’s 30 to 60 to 90 minutes of video content. Maybe it’s nicely produced. It’s entertaining. It’s interesting. It’s fun to watch. Maybe you’re buying it from a one-on-one provider. Maybe it’s on a platform like LinkedIn Learning or Masterclass or one of these, but it’s essentially informational or Edutainment. It’s for learning about something. It’s not for learning to do something, right? If we go with the example of Masterclass, so they have a course there with Aaron Sorkin about screenwriting. Aaron Sorkin wrote The West Wing. He wrote A Few Good Men.

I’m interested in writing so I went through the course and it was interesting. It gave me some ideas. I didn’t come out of that course a better screenwriter, right? That’s not what they do, because information is good at broadening your horizons. It’s good at showing you what’s possible. It’s good at integrating new knowledge into existing expertise. Information does not empower you to do things. Then, the other bucket is real transformative experiences and that’s where you don’t just learn about something; you have the opportunity to apply it. You have the opportunity to get feedback. That’s how we actually get good at things and that’s where the opportunity is really existing right now. The information-only courses have become very competitive, very saturated. It’s very much a race to the bottom. Now the big area of opportunity, that this is where I work with a lot of expert entrepreneurs, is creating something that doesn’t just tell people about something, but teaches people how to do something and supports them to gain that competence. Sorry. I’m realizing now that was a little long-winded.

Roger Dooley:     Well, no, that’s really an interesting thing. I’d like to explore that just a little bit more. How do you create this more, perhaps, engaging or immersive experience online, because what you’re saying is just somebody watching a few videos and emerging a master of whatever that craft is, probably isn’t going to happen? How do you create that deeper level of learning, Danny?

Danny Iny:          Well, we start by getting clear on what is it that we want to create? Learning developers call this ‘backward integrated design.’ So you want to start by asking yourself at the end of this process, “What do I want them to know? What do I want them to be able to do? What do I want them to feel and remember?” But particularly, “What are the competencies they should be able to do? What behaviors do I want them to exhibit?” We can go a level deeper, “In what context?” If I were to say, “Well, I’m going to teach a course that teaches you how to use a handgun,” are we talking about at a shooting range or in combat in Afghanistan, because that’s a very different level of skill and competence, right?

So, “What behaviors do I want them to exhibit, under what context and what circumstances and to what level of ability?” From there, you engineer, “What is the learning path?” An effective learning path has three chunks to it. The first chunk is consumption. That’s where people get exposed to new ideas. It’s where they watch the video, listen to the audio, read the text, attend the lecture, et cetera. That’s important, but that’s just the beginning. The second chunk is application. It’s where they take what they’ve learned and they do something with it that can be theoretical; worksheets, assignments, thought exercises, or it can be practical, “I’m doing things in real life, in real business,” whatever it is.

Then the third chunk is the feedback loop that helps them refine, “Am I doing it right?” And integrate the lessons and the learning and that feedback can be very brute-force. If I’m learning about skateboarding, then feedback can come from some gravity and concrete, or, it can be more nuanced. It can be from a coach, from a mentor, from a teacher, from a peer. So you want to think about, “Well, what are the things that they need to learn? What information do I need to expose them to, but then, what opportunities do I need to give them to practice? Then, how do I give them the feedback for the learning to really gel and solidify?”

Roger Dooley:     Great. Well, I’d love to dig into that maybe in a separate episode or maybe we’ll get into it as we go forward here. But I do want to do a lot of talk about the ideas in Effortless. Explain a little bit about the idea behind Effortless, because there is so much of a hustle culture today like, “Wow, I’ve got to double down on my efforts if I want to be successful. I’ve got to find ways to be more productive, cram more work into the hours I’m working and maybe cram more working hours into my day.” It seems like the antithesis of effortless.

Danny Iny:          Well, so here’s how I frame it. The answers that we find are a function of the questions that we ask. So if you ask the wrong question, you’re going to get great answers to the wrong question. I came to the ideas in this book myself, by asking the wrong question for a long period of time. I had this view of business business as being this complex game of strategy and you have to be super clever and execute super well. I’m sure some of that is my own baggage of, as a kid, you want to be the smartest kid in the class and it’s like, “I’m taking on this hard thing. I’m solving problems. No one else can solve.” That was the hubris leading to that being the question I was asking. Business got really hard and we experienced a lot of growth in the early years of my business.

We went from zero to multiple millions in a matter of years and then we plateaued and things got harder and harder. It’s like you feel like you’re treading water in molasses. Any entrepreneur who’s watching this, you know the feeling of like, “Okay, I pulled a rabbit out of my hat. I found something that’s going to bring in a bunch of cash and let us live to fight another day, but I’m treading water,” I kept looking for, “What is the brilliant strategic move that will solve this problem, that will take us to the next level?” I kept coming up empty. Finally, in frankly, a moment of desperation, I asked myself, “Does it really have to be so hard?” Sometimes when you’re in just the right frame of mind and you ask yourself a question in just the right way, it prompts you stop and think.

I was like, “Well, what if it didn’t? What if it didn’t have to be hard? What if, instead of asking myself, ‘what is the clever, intricate elaborate approach to make things work?’ What if the question was, ‘What would it take for this not to require a clever or elaborate or intricate solution?'” What I came to, in one way, it’s a savvy experienced marketers should listen to. Everything I know I’m about to say and be like, “Well, duh. This took you how long to figure out?” Because there’s nothing revolutionary in the book in terms of basic ideas of marketing, but sometimes, the wrapper for those ideas, the metaphor, the framework for helping you think about them and internalize them, makes all the difference. This did for me and it seems to have helped for my students. So what it brought me to is what would it take for it to be easy for me to grow the business, for it to be easy for me to make sales, for it to be easy for people to want to buy so I’m not chasing after them, I’m not selling, right?

I love the line from Jeffrey Gitomer, “People don’t like being sold, but they love to buy.” So what’s the difference? As you’ve written about, it’s eliminating the friction and you eliminate that friction by coming into alignment with the needs and desires of your ideal customer. So you figure out who your ideal customer is. You want to align what you have with what they want and you want to do it on three dimensions. What it is that they want? Who they want it from? And how they want to get it? I call these the obvious offer, the resonant identity and the intuitive path, because, you need fancy labeling for any idea that you come up with, and I’m happy to dig into any of this.

But at core, the idea is pretty simple. Instead of working hard to sell what you’re selling, make it so that what you’re selling is what they are desperately eager to buy. Make it so that you are embodying being the person or the brand, if they’re a larger organization, that they really want to buy from and make the path from stranger to purchase, make it full of steps that are the obvious next step that they intuitively want to take. The more you can align what you’re selling, who it is that is doing the selling and how you’re doing it with what it is that they want, the easier it gets, the more effortless it gets. Again, to all those who are saying, “Congratulations on figuring out this thing that I’ve known for decades,” sorry. But for everyone who finds the metaphor useful, it really has been transformative, not just for me, but for a lot of people that I’ve shared it with over the last few years.

Roger Dooley:     Danny, I think that sometimes even things that appear to be obvious may be somewhat obvious, but often don’t make it into real-world practice very well. I’ve had so many people tell me, “Oh, friction. Everybody knows about friction. Boy, they’ve been talking about that in Silicon Valley for the last 20 years and too simple, too obvious. But if you look around, even in 2021, there’s a lot of friction everywhere simply because people, they don’t see it or they ignore it or they just figure, “Well, that’s why it has to be.” So even though they may theoretically understand it, sometimes the implementation is lacking. Looking at defining your ideal customer, you talk about customer caricature, which I might be a little bit like an avatar or an archetype or something or for use other terms, but a caricature is something that is exaggerated. Explain your caricature concept.

Danny Iny:          So I’ve actually refined this a little bit since writing the book into something I’ve come to call ‘the casting method,’ but here’s the basic idea. You don’t want a perfectly-detailed, elaborate picture of an ideal customer avatar because unless you’re picking a real person that you know, you’re going to get some of those details wrong. Then, you’re going to be going after this fictional, super detailed person that doesn’t really exist and it’s going to just confuse you because a lot of the information that you’re cooking up there, it’s really red hearings. What you really need are the five or 10 traits that are emblematic of the type of person, right? You don’t want one person. You want a person that represents a category, that that’s who you’re going after. So the process, I wrote about it a little bit and I’ve refined it since the book came out, is find a character from a popular TV show, who is the standard avatar for your target customer.

This is an effective approach because the reason that they’re hit TV shows is that the characters are relatable, right? They’ve done a lot of work to create characters that are relatable and representative and, frankly, caricaturized because they’re oversimplified and easy to relate to them that way. But they work very hard to create these relatable characters that speak to an architect. That’s the reason why it’s an effective shorthand when someone’s like, “Oh, you’re such a, fill in the blank, character from a TV show that everybody watches.” We know what that means. So if you can pick a character from a show that you like that you watch and you’re like, “Okay, that’s the kind of customer I’m going after,” that’s all the clarity that you need because you don’t want to create an elaborate customer avatar just as an exercise in creating an elaborate customer avatar.

The whole point is to give you clarity as you make decisions in your business. What would they like? What they respond to? What would they engage with? What would repel them? So you want answers to those questions and when you have that clear character in mind that’s slightly exaggerated, “I know exactly where they are and where they stand,” because that’s the thing about TV characters. They’re usually not nuanced, right? If you ask, here’s a situation, how would this TV character versus that TV character versus that other one, how would they respond? Usually have a pretty clear idea because they’re caricaturized and that’s exactly the clarity that we want in our business decision-making.

Roger Dooley:     Who would your TV character be for your business, Danny, if you’ve got that one character?

Danny Iny:          That’s a really, really great question. I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t gone through the exercise myself because we have that clarity and we have the avatar that’s over simplified, but let’s do this off the top of my head. So my avatar is 40 to 60, skews female, skews educated. What’s a good show that I watch that someone would fit that bill? I’m on the spot, so I’m drawing a blank right now.

Roger Dooley:     Yeah. I know. So-

Danny Iny:          I can go back to you-

Roger Dooley:     I was trying to go through that mental process myself as we were chatting and thinking, “Well, that’s kind of tough because you watch comedies and those kinds of characters. You watch police shows and probably not too many of those have your ideal customer in them so on in these genre shows. There aren’t as many general shows as there used to be ranging Seinfeld or Friends where you had these broad generalizations, so maybe I’m just not watching them. They’re there, but it is a bit of a challenge.

Danny Iny:          It’s a fair point. It’s worth noting that, first of all, you sometimes have to go looking for the shows. If my target avatar is on Desperate Housewives, then I don’t know her because I’ve never watched that show. But the other thing is that, again, you want a caricature of the personality as opposed to, “Oh, this is the character’s job.” Maybe it’s a Marvel superhero, that is, the job description not withstanding, is the right personality, the right age bracket, that this tells you something, “Oh, I know how they would respond to this situation.”

Roger Dooley:     That’s interesting. Can you have more than one or should you really try, at least initially, focusing on one, because I could visualize if you are, say, selling training. You might say, “Well, this is a product that could appeal both to recent college grads who are trying to achieve the next skill level, maybe, to qualify for a new job, as well as a mid-career person who is interested in a total career change,” or is it better just to say, “Well, we’ll leave the second one for later. We’ll focus on one or the other right now?”

Danny Iny:          Well, you can have, in theory, as many as you want and sometimes circumstances force you to have more than one. If you’re in a business to business or any situation where you’re selling in a complex sales cycle of multiple stakeholders. So businesses often like this, but if you’re selling something for kids that the parents are buying, it’s going to have the same dynamic. Then you have to have more than one, so you have to speak to all of them. That said, every customer avatar that is in the mix is another set of factors you have to consider when you’re creating all your stuff, “Is this an alignment for this person?” So it exponentially increases the complexity. So I would say rule of thumb, as few as you possibly can have, because start with one, you can add another one. You can add a second one, third one, but in some ways, that’s like building another whole part of the business, so I would minimize the complexity if you can.

Roger Dooley:     Right. I suppose, depending on how different those are, you might have completely different funnels for them and so on, different marketing and-

Danny Iny:          To that point, if they’re not very different, it’s redundant to have them, because if they’re almost the same, then you just need one.

Roger Dooley:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. I guess the danger would be if you say, “Well, I’m going to appeal to this person, this person, this person,” then your offer gets too general and not sufficiently specific so that it’s not a perfect match for any one of them. So let-

Danny Iny:          Why, if you look at books like the Seven Habits and other books like that, or lean in, there’s, for college grounds, for MBAs, for veterinarians, they have those versions, but they don’t have it for everyone. They have specific segments, so you want to make it specific and never try out something that’s like, “Oh, this is for everyone.” The offer might be the same, but the path is probably going to be different.

Roger Dooley:     Right, much like the adhesives they sell at your Home Depot or other hardware store where you’ve got Marine Adhesive and windshield adhesive and 47 varieties when there’s probably three basic formulas, but each one is packaged so that as soon as the customer sees it’s, “Oh, wow. I need to secure my windshield. So that’s the one I need. I don’t need any of these other ones.” I am all about obvious offers. I think that too often people complicate their marketing and they make it either difficult to buy or even difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on. Explain your path to being more obvious.

Danny Iny:          We can distinguish obvious in terms of clear, as in it’s obvious what it is, which is important. If you don’t know what it is then you never get to step two, but we can distinguish obvious in terms of clear about what it is from obvious in terms of clear that it’s for me; clear that it’s exactly what I want. Fundamentally, this is about, again, aligning what it is that you’re selling with what people are looking for. A good thought exercise is to explore what is the wishlist that people have for what the product will do, how it will look, how it will function? There are two sides to that wishlist. There would be the explicit things that they want, the things that they will ask for in so many words and the implicit things that they want so that they would never ask for, either because they’re not aware of it or because they don’t think it’s reasonable or because they’re embarrassed to ask.

So I’ll give you a couple of examples. So for the longest time, I’d get up in the morning early. I’d go for my morning walk. I’d stop into Starbucks and they asked me, “What would you like?” I would give them an answer that was not true. I would tell them not what I wanted. I would say, “I want an Earl Grey Tea with coconut milk on the side.” Now I don’t usually drink Earl Grey Tea because I try to avoid caffeine and I don’t love the flavor of coconut milk. What I want is an African rooibos tea, which is thick and rich and can take milk, has that consistency, but no caffeine. I want it with oat milk or macadamia milk, but I know that Starbucks doesn’t have either of those things.

So when they say, “What would you like?” They actually mean, “What would you like that is on our menu?” So I would ask for something that is not what I want and I would do this day after day after day until one day, I stood outside of Starbucks. I was like, “You know what? I just don’t want to,” and I stopped going inside. They never knew that any of that was going on. Another great example is what Tesla has done in building an obvious offer with their cars. So if I’m speaking to a room of hundreds of people, I say, “Raise your hands if parallel parking is not your favorite thing to do in the world.”

About 70% of the hands in the room go up. I’ll say, “Keep your hands up if you would feel comfortable to walk into a car dealership and say, ‘I don’t love parallel parking. Do you have a car that can do that for me?'” All the hands would go down because while I would like that, it’s like I feel embarrassed asking for that. I don’t even know if that’s a real thing. So you want to figure out your wishlist. What are the things that people are asking for and want, in so many words? What are the things that they would want but they would never ask for whatever reason? Then you align your offer as much as you can with those requests.

An obvious offer is an offer where you, as few times as possible, ever have to use the words, “I’m sorry, we can’t do that.” Then, of course, you continue with it, “But here’s what we can do and it’s just as good.” Those words, “I’m sorry, we can’t do that,” that’s the difference between people buying and people who love to buy and people being sold, which is not nearly as fun.

Roger Dooley:     That depends on your ideal potential buyer or your ideal customer, because clearly, you cannot create a product that is suitable for everything and everybody, but you’ve got to make sure that that match is maximized?

Danny Iny:          Absolutely. Obviousness, yes, these are in the eye of the beholder, right? So it’s like saying, “Which of Leonardo Da Vinci’s pieces of artwork is the best?” It’s like that’s not an answerable question unless we’re asking a specific person for their subjective perspective, for their subjective opinion. It’s same thing, there’s no such thing as an objectively obvious offer to everyone. There’s just an offer that is obvious to the customer that you’re looking to serve.

Roger Dooley:     So talk a little bit about resonant identity and how that affects both the customer side of things and how you, as a marketer, respond.

Danny Iny:          Yeah, sure. So all things being equal, we want to buy from people that we trust and appreciate and respect. There is a charismatic leadership quality to certainly the people I work with who are coaches, consultants, speakers, authors, experts, that kind of audience. But to any brand, there’s this charismatic leadership. Apple has a very resonant identity to people who buy from Apple. Their entire book’s about effective brand identity, et cetera, but in my experience, it comes down to these two factors that are both important and exist in dynamic tension with each other. So the first is relatability, right? People have to look at the brand and say, “You’re my people. You’re just like me. We have stuff in common.” My friend, Jason Gaynard likes to use the words, ‘uncommon commonalities,’ “What do we have in common that we don’t have in common with anybody else? It’s just us.”

So relatability is that first factor. You want to buy from a brand that you can relate to. But if it’s just relatability, there’s a ceiling on that because if you’re super relatable to me and that’s it, but you’re someone I want to have a drink with, but you’re not necessarily someone I want to follow or learn something or buy from. The other quality is aspiration. You embody something that is aspirational to me. “This is where I want to go. This is what I want to achieve.” There’s a tension between those two things because essentially, “You’re just like me and you’re who I want to be when I grow up.” When you strike that balance, when you find that perfect tension between those two things, that is where you have raving fans who are just following you and eager to buy from you, because you’re just like them, but you’re who they want to be when they grow up. Really, it’s not easy at all, but it is that simple.

Roger Dooley:     Right. I can see that the more aspirational somebody is, the greater risk there is of not being relatable. I might want to be Steve Jobs, but can I really relate to him? I’m not so sure.

Danny Iny:          I would argue that Steve Jobs was a great example of relatability and aspiration, aspiration, because look how brilliant he is, right Look how much he accomplished, so uncompromising, so successful, et cetera, but there’s a relatability. “Look, he’s a creative, he’s a maverick just like me. I’m his people. He’s my people.” I’m speaking hypothetically. I’m not a Mac person at all, but there is that energy to it, as opposed to someone that would be completely unrelatable. There aren’t a lot of examples of those, because, I should rephrase. There are a ton of examples of those; we just don’t know them.

Roger Dooley:     Because they’re not residents. They’re not successful, typically.

Danny Iny:          Exactly.

Roger Dooley:     Right. Well, that makes sense. In that case, it wasn’t you could find that element of commonality just being different that even though we might not have much in common from a background standpoint or personality standpoint or the other sort of obvious things that you might find in common with some other random human being, by finding that characteristic or those characteristics, that makes a lot of sense. Now, when you talk about an intuitive path, to me, that’s been something that marketers have talked about for years, not necessarily in those terms. I think that Eisenberg Brothers talked about following the center or something like that, where you’ve got to lead somebody through the process. How does that fit into your framework, Danny?

Danny Iny:          Sure. So, and this is basically what the whole field of marketing is about. When we’re talking about engineering and customer journey, there are a lot of metaphors and one of the most common metaphors is the metaphor of a funnel, right? Lots of people come in the top, they go from general interest to more qualified. They come at the bottom and they’re customers. I’ve never loved that metaphor because it makes the customer passive, right? They go in the funnel and then gravity does its thing. They slide their way down if they don’t fall out the sides and they come out as customers. Whereas, in practice, most customer journeys require active engagement and effort on the part of the customer. They have to take actions that they’re choosing to take. They have to make investments, whether it’s actual money, eventually, or investments of time, energy, resources, trust, et cetera, in the relationship with you.

So I prefer the metaphor of a ladder, right? Let’s call it ‘the ladder of engagement.’ They get to the ladder. They’re standing at the bottom and at the very top is, ring the bell on your customer now. I make the biggest purchase, I’m all in. What you want to do is entice them to take steps up that ladder, which they have to choose to take. It requires effort and action on their part. The way you do that is you give them a reason to take a step on that ladder, right? Maybe the first step is, “Give me your name and email address.” So you see an ad, you click a button, you land on a page, “Give me your name and email address and I’ll give you, fill in the blank, my free PDF on blahbity, blah,” whatever it is.

So you entice them to take that step and then before they’re willing to take that next step, they’re standing on that step for a moment. You then deliver on whatever you promise them, you’ve got to show them that, “Hey, taking steps in this relationship that we’re exploring is worthwhile.” So you’ve got to exceed their expectations. You’ve got to say, “Wow, that was totally worth it. Let me say, by the way, here’s the next step. Do you want to take that step too?” Obviously, the specifics of what this looks like will vary from industry to industry, from context to context, whatever it is that you’re selling, whatever modality is that you’re delivering through. But fundamentally, that metaphor of having that ladder that people are climbing, giving them a reason and then exceeding their expectations, once they take a step, that’s what it all comes down to.

Roger Dooley:     It makes such a huge amount of sense and often ignored, and I do think that the ladder or perhaps a stairway is a much better analogy to the customer journey than a funnel, because each of those steps requires effort and the more you can minimize that effort, the more successful you’ll likely be. Danny, how can people find you and your ideas?

Danny Iny:          Well, so first of all, thank you, again, for having me on. People can check out our website. It’s, Mirasee, M-I-R-A-S-E-E.com. You can go on Amazon search my name, Danny Iny. I’ve written a whole bunch of books, including Effortless. For listeners or viewers, because this is a video podcast as well, there’s actually something I can offer. So this is the book Effortless and for people who buy the book, on the inside cover, there’s a special thing. If you want to get our Effortless business Growth Toolkit, we’ve got worksheets and resources and the audio MP3 of the books, so you get the whole book in audio form. There’s a link and usually, you have to buy the book, but since you’re here watching and listening to this whole thing, if you go to effortless.rocks/toolkit, you can get the audio book copy for free just put in your name and name and email address and you’ll get it. If you love it, I’d love for you to buy the book as well. I’d love for you to experience it. If it helps you in any way, then that would be wonderful.

Roger Dooley:     Well, great. We will link to all those places, including the free audio book offer on the show notes page at rogerdooley.com/podcast. We will have text, audio and video versions of this conversation there as well. Danny, thanks so much for being on the show.

Danny Iny:          It has absolutely been my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Brainfluence. To find more episodes like this one, and to access all of Roger’s online writing and resources, the best starting point is RogerDooley.com.

And remember, Roger’s new book, Friction, is now available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and book sellers everywhere. Bestselling author Dan Pink calls it, “An important read,” and Wharton Professor Dr. Joana Berger said, “You’ll understand Friction’s power and how to harness it.”

For more information or for links to Amazon and other sellers, go to RogerDooley.com/Friction.