The Offer Levers: 15 Settings That Turn One Idea Into Many Offers

Three people teach founders how to sell. Same problem, same market, more or less the same knowledge.

The first one gets on Zoom with you every week, 1:1, and charges $400 an hour. The second sells a $49 course you watch at 2x on your commute. The third runs a 12-week cohort for 20 people, $3,000 each, with a live call every Tuesday.

Same seed. Three completely different businesses. Three completely different lives for the person running them.

For years I kept asking myself why. Why do businesses solving the exact same problem look so different from each other? And I didn't want a nice answer. I wanted a scientific one. A way to map those differences with precision, so I could stop guessing and start designing.

That's where the Offer Levers came from.

I'm more of a guitar guy

You can keep the Lambo. I'd rather have a room full of guitars, an amp and a mixing console. So bear with me, because this is how I see business now.

A mixing console has inputs: the guitar, the vocals, the drums, whatever the band is playing. It has a board full of knobs, faders and switches. And it has an output: the final mix.

Move one fader and the mix changes. Same band, same song, different sound.

A business works exactly the same way. The inputs are your audience, your core idea (I call it the Seed, and I wrote a whole post on it), and the outcome you want to create for your customers. The levers are the controls. The output is your offer: one specific version of your idea, shaped by how every lever is set.

The part that blew my mind is what's inside the console. Call it the generator. Give it any configuration and it spits out variations of your idea. Take "learning how to code" and set delivery to do-it-yourself. Out come courses, guides, documentation, a YouTube channel, a book. One setting, many outputs.

Credit where it's due: Alex Hormozi's $100M Offers lit the fuse. He talks about do-it-yourself, done-with-you and done-for-you. And about divergent thinking, the brick exercise: in how many ways can you use a brick? If you read the one-page business plan post, you know I stole the bricks too. Put those two ideas together and something clicked. If you lay out every lever, you can take one idea and generate variations of it systematically. Not by inspiration. By turning knobs.

The 15 levers

Every lever answers one question. That's it. Fifteen sounds like a lot. It's not. You already set all of them, you just did it by default.

Who does the work, and what they're paying for

• Delivery model: who is responsible for producing the outcome? Done for you, done with you, or do it yourself.
• Source of value: what is the client really paying for? You (human), your process (system), or something you own (asset).
• Authority dynamic: who makes the important decisions? You execute (provider), you guide (coach), or they defer to you (expert).

How the value reaches them

• Interaction timing: when does value happen? Live, on their own schedule, or a mix.
• Participation format: how many people benefit from one unit of your effort? 1:1, 1:group, 1:community or 1:n.
• Touch intensity: how much direct human attention does each client get?
• Delivery medium: what does the client actually interact with? You, an asset like a course or a template, or a tool.

How much of the problem you take on

• Scope breadth: how much of the client's journey are you responsible for? One outcome, a whole domain, or end to end.
• Scope depth: how far into the problem do you go?
• System impact: how much does their business actually change once you're gone?
• Buyer participation intensity: how much does the client have to do for this to work?

How they commit and pay

• Effort duration: one-time, time-bound, or ongoing?
• Commitment reversibility: how easy is it to walk away after saying yes?
• Pricing model: what logic decides the number on the invoice? Fixed, variable, time-based or recurring.
• Price framing: do they see money leaving their pocket, or money deployed to make more money?

Each lever has its own page in the full guide: when each setting is convenient, common examples, the traps, and which settings play well together. Nothing hidden. It's long. It's free.

Watch what happens when you move one

Let me introduce you to Steve, from the book I'm writing. Two decades running a software company, exited, and now staring at a blank notepad. He lands on an idea: help busy, high-achieving people get off the productivity roller coaster and follow through on what matters. Be the pain-in-the-ass accountability guy he always wished he'd had.

His first offer: "Unlock the F*cking Results." Weekly coaching, calm structure, light accountability. One payment of $2,499, money back in 30 days if you're not happy. (Spoiler: it fails. But that's meat for another bbq.)

Read it through the levers and you get, more or less: done with you, human, live, 1:1, high touch, coach, time-bound, highly reversible, fixed price.

Now let's play with the console.

• Move participation format from 1:1 to 1:group. Same coaching, eight executives on one call. Each one pays less, Steve's hour pays eight times more, and they get something 1:1 can't give them: peers in the same mess.
• Move delivery model to do-it-yourself and source of value to system. Steve's weekly method becomes a planner and a 20-minute Monday ritual. $49. Zero calendar.
• Move effort duration to ongoing and pricing model to recurring. A monthly accountability membership. Lumpy revenue becomes predictable revenue.
• Move authority dynamic from coach to expert and scope breadth from one person to the whole leadership team. Now he's not helping one exec plan their week, he's installing an operating rhythm in a company. Different buyer, different price, a lot more system impact.

Four businesses. Same Steve, same bricks, same seed. Nobody had to come up with a "better idea." That's divergent thinking, with a method.

The levers decide your effort

Here's why I care so much about this, and it goes back to the formula I keep repeating: income over effort.

Most founders treat their offer as copy. A headline, a price, a nice paragraph. Then they wonder why they're at a 7 on income and a 9 on effort.

The levers are where effort actually lives. Touch intensity is your calendar. Participation format is your ceiling. Interaction timing decides whether your calendar runs your business or your business runs your calendar. Every one of these settings either adds hours to your week or takes them away. You choose. Or you don't, and the default chooses for you.

And most people set them by default. Annual contract because that's what the competitor does. Cancel-anytime because they're scared of the commitment objection. 1:1 because it's what they know. None of that is a strategy. That's inheriting somebody else's mix.

If you're working hard and not making money, the answer is very often sitting on the console. Not in a new idea.

Start where you can, then move the faders

Don't jump straight to the $49 product, by the way. I see this all the time, and I've done it too.

A DIY product needs trust. People need to believe that following your system will actually get them somewhere. And trust isn't something you declare on a landing page. It's built through track record.

So most founders start done for you: you do the work, you charge a premium, you collect success stories. That's where you learn the most. Then, as the patterns become obvious and your authority grows, you move toward done with you, then 1:group, then do it yourself. One fader at a time.

That's the second way to use the levers. The first one is to generate options when you don't know where to start. The second is to plan your evolution: see where your offer sits today and chart a deliberate path to where you want it to be. A business rarely stays in one configuration. Yours won't either.

A map, not the territory

Two honest disclaimers.

First, this is a work in progress. It's shaped by the way I think and by the businesses I've actually studied. I haven't studied every business in the world. Nobody has. The values under each lever are the most common ones I've seen, not a menu. Find settings in between, combine them, invent new ones.

Second, and this one matters more: the levers aren't the point. The point is that there's a method to building a business. You take a seed and explore the whole space of what it could become, instead of falling in love with the first version and defending it for three years.

Oh, and please don't force ROI framing onto an offer that can't prove a return. It's easy to claim and very hard to walk back. Honest beats clever.

Your turn

Take the offer you sell today. The real one, not the one on your vision board.

Go through the fifteen questions and write down where every lever sits. You'll realize you never chose most of them.

Then pick one. Just one. The one that would bring your effort down the most without killing your income. Move it, put the new version in front of real people, and see if they pay. Validation is out there, with real money changing hands. Not in your notepad.

Once you get it, you can use AI as the generator. The guide is written so you can hand it to one. But learn how the knobs work yourself first. It's your mix.

The full Offer Levers guide is right here. Take what resonates with you and try it—or not!