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What was the leading cause of death among sailors for hundreds of years?
Not shipwrecks. Not pirate attacks.
It was scurvy.
For centuries, this word struck terror in the hearts of the most hardened sailors. The symptoms were horrific: old wounds would reopen, teeth would fall out, and sailors would essentially start falling apart while still alive.
In 1601, Captain James Lancaster conducted one of the first recorded clinical trials in history. He gave lemon juice to the crew of one of his four ships - that crew stayed healthy while the other three ships had devastating scurvy outbreaks.
The British Navy, though, ignored these results, as well as the results of another such trial in 1747 by ship's surgeon James Lind.
Why?
The best British doctors were looking for complex explanations involving things like "bad air" or "humoral imbalances." They couldn't fathom that the answer was as simple as the body needing a single nutrient - vitamin C - that citrus fruits provided.
It wasn't until 1795 that the British Navy finally made lemon juice a required part of sailors' diets. When they did, their naval power increased dramatically simply because their sailors could now survive long voyages.
And lo and behold- the 19th century saw the tremendous expansion of the British empire. (Of course there was more at play. But the ability to maintain longer blockades and undertake longer ocean voyages without losing crews to disease definitely had a big role.)
Here's how we know.
Who were the big players in exploration before the 1800s? The Spanish and the Portuguese.
And guess what?
Much of their trade routes to the Americas included regular stops at islands where they could get fresh fruits and vegetables. They also learned from indigenous peoples in the Americas about local plants that could prevent and treat scurvy-like symptoms.
This inadvertently helped protect them from scurvy, while longer-distance sailors like the British and Dutch suffered more severely from it.
Imagine. The addition of a bit of lemon juice to British sailor diets saved thousands of sailor's lives, and changed the course of history. And if British doctors hadn't dismissed the "simple" solution, imagine how much MORE of the world they might have conquered (uh, no thanks?)
Sometimes, when we are trying to increase sales, we act like those British doctors. It feels so hard that we can't wrap our minds around simple solutions - even if it's staring us in the face.
We start thinking about ad campaigns, and A/B testing, and improving the package design.
But sometimes, maybe all you really need is an easy way to communicate exactly what your product is, and what benefit it brings to people's lives.
Dave Bailey, founder of multiple tech businesses, wondered what made some one sentence elevator pitches succeed - while others flopped.
After examining tens of the pitches of the most successful tech founders, here's what he realized. They all followed this simple formula:
You do X and Y happens
That's it.
How did Mark Zuckerberg describe Facebook in the early years? "Something where you can type someone’s name and find out a bunch of information about them."
How did Travis Kalanick describe Uber? ‘You push a button and in five minutes a Mercedes picks you up and takes you where you want to go.’ Later, it was simplified even further to 'Tap a button, get a ride.'
Dave Bailey focuses on tech products, but the truth is that most physical products can be described using the same formula.
Watch:
So that's it. Take a look at the product you're selling. And think about how to whittle down to fit this formula - you do x, and y happens. Use the fewest words possible.
Once you have that basic pitch fleshed out, you might find that it's a lot easier to convince people to buy the product. Because in five seconds, they understand exactly what it does for them, and how.
This email took a journey (no scurvy involved),
Chavy