The State Matchmaker Stopped at Full Marks. The Eleventh Rung Is Where the Whole Thing Lives.
By Atiba de Souza
The state matchmaker gets full marks
Take a state-run matchmaking service. Set aside who runs it and who pays for it, because neither is the interesting part. What is left is a shape: events people sign up for, introductions, a calendar, a registration form, staff whose actual job is to help you meet somebody and pair up.
That shape shows up. It runs on time. It is affordable. It is open to anyone. Ask the people who built it whether they did their job and they will have evidence on their side.
They hit five stars. Five stars is meeting the expectation: do the thing well, take full marks, move on.
Which is exactly why the version you can picture looks like every other version. You do not find the moves nobody else makes by improving the thing you already run, because improvement travels along the one axis the whole market is standing on. Improve matchmaking and you land on slightly better matchmaking. That is where every other matchmaking service already lives, and it is not a bad address. It is a crowded one.
Five stars is full marks. Full marks is the axis. Eleven is the only number that leaves it.
The 11-Star Program
11-Star: the version of your experience that would be ridiculous to attempt, which is the only version that shows you what to actually build when you walk back.
Eleven, not ten. Ten still sounds achievable, and achievable drags you straight back onto the axis, because achievable is what five already is with a bigger budget. Five is meeting the expectation, so five is the axis. Eleven is the first number you cannot reach by improving anything, and that is the entire reason for it. Eleven makes you laugh. When you laugh, you have left the reservation.
The method started as an escalation exercise Brian Chesky ran at Airbnb, grown out of Paul Graham's line about building something a hundred people love. What I do with it is turn it into a repeatable pass with a walk-back and a funding test, because an exercise that stays an exercise is a hobby.
You escalate your experience to eleven, past the point of absurdity. Then you walk back down, one star at a time. The ideas you pass on the way down are the ones nobody has considered, and half of them turn out to be buildable. The output is not a fantasy. The output is a ranked list of funded, repeatable changes, each tagged with what it costs, whether you can do it every time, and which part of the value equation it moves.
This is step five of the Offer Strategy build. If you have already run that build, this is the pass you have been missing. If you have not, run this anyway, because the ranked list you produce will tell you what your offer should have been.
The pass, and where the fear actually lands on it
Four moves. I am putting the resistance next to each one, because a clean process handed to you as if you would just adopt it is a lie about how this goes.
Escalate. Write the eleven down, out loud, where another human can see it. This is where the embarrassment lands, and it lands on rung one, not rung nine. You are about to produce something that looks unserious in a room where serious is the currency. In front of a board. In front of a client. In front of the person who signs the budget. Most people quit right there and call it realism. It is not realism. It is the fear of being seen wanting something that sounds stupid.
Walk back down. One star at a time, without flinching. The good ideas live in the descent. The summit is only there to make the descent possible.
Rank what survives, out loud. This is where the precedent lands. Ranked means something is last. Someone in the room wanted the last thing, and you have to say in front of them that it is worth less than the named human who remembers your name in month nine. Calling the branded lanyard at the mixer nothing is the work. If your list has nine items and they all matter equally, you have not done the pass. If you take one thing from this entire article, take the ranking.
Tag it, then fund it. Cost, repeatability, which part of the value equation it moves. This is where the rewiring lands. You have spent your whole career removing variance, and that is how you got good. Raving is variance. Somebody receives a rung nobody else got, and you have to defend the difference between two people who are not that different. Old habit: same for everyone, provably. New habit: chosen on purpose, defensibly. Nobody hands you that habit. You buy it in years, with wrong calls in it, defending a choice you cannot yet prove, because the proof is what you are buying.
When not to run this at all: when your five stars are leaking. If you do not show up on time, if the basics break, escalation is decoration. The absurd rung sits on top of the ordinary one. Fix the ordinary one first. Then climb.
The room that already knew everything
Singapore, the week before. I was in front of a group of marketing agencies who had come together into a consortium, and my job was to take them through arriving at their own core values. The exact exercise those agencies run for their own clients.
I was braced. I thought I would finish and they would call it a waste. I thought one of them would call me a charlatan for teaching marketers their own subject.
Instead, the leader of the group stands up and says: we all teach this to our clients, all of us help our clients do this in some way, but I have never experienced it like this before. And this was so great for us to go through. We needed this.
He had just admitted, out loud, that this is exactly what he does for other people. And he could still be moved by it.
That is the whole thing right there. We do not see the brand of our own expertise. We assume the room already knows, so we teach beneath them, so we hold back the good part, so nothing lands. The people who design a state matchmaking service are the most expert people in the country on the mechanics of pairing people up. That expertise is not why they cannot move anybody. It is why they cannot see what would.
And here is what it hands you: you do not have to out-teach the room. You have to be the one who does the thing in the room. That is where eleven lives.
Run the pass on the matchmaker
I am not describing what any country does. I am showing you the machine.
Escalate. What does eleven look like?
- A civil servant assigned to you personally, on call, for as long as it takes, whose entire post is your love life.
- Someone who shows up at your door the night it falls apart and sits with you.
- A couple the state pays to take you in for six months and introduce you to everyone they know.
- A matchmaker who tells you the truth about yourself, out loud, on the record, before matching you with anyone.
Absurd. Keep going until it is absurd. Then turn around and walk down.
- A named human instead of a profile. One person who remembers you, whose job is your search, still there in month nine.
- A call that is not a sale. Somebody asks how the first date went and does not try to book the second one.
- A refusal. Before matching you, the service tells you what you are doing wrong. In person. Once. Kindly.
- A failure ritual. When it does not work, somebody sits with you and nobody invoices you for it.
Now rank them, out loud, in front of your team. The named human is the star. The branded lanyard at the mixer is nothing. Then tag every survivor with cost, repeatability, and which part of the value equation it moves. What clears all three gets funded. The rest goes back on the list. The list is the deliverable. Not the laughter.
Consistent versus inconsistent on purpose
| Consistent, the way you were taught | Inconsistent on purpose, the way eleven demands | |
|---|---|---|
| The question you start with | How do we do this well, every time? | What would this look like at eleven? |
| Who writes the standard | Everyone else in the market | You, and then the walk back down |
| What you optimise | Identical, correct, defensible | Chosen, uneven, memorable |
| Where the ideas come from | Improvement along the axis you are already on | The rungs you pass on the way down |
| What it costs | Time and money | Time, money, and your willingness to look unserious in a room that pays for serious |
| Where the variance goes | Designed out | Placed on purpose, on the people who will talk about it |
| What the person on the other end does | Comes back | Tells somebody |
The eleventh star is a bet you cannot justify yet
A pharmacy-industry founder sent me a cold LinkedIn message in 2023. He had seen me on a stage, he had questions, he wanted help. Nothing about him at that moment made him a good bet. I helped him anyway. And I kept helping him.
His clients are now IBM, Google and Facebook. His standing is a large part of why a network in Singapore keeps inviting me back and is sending me a contract.
Now watch what the funding test would have said if I had run it honestly on day one. The cost was real and it was invisible: answering him took time out of a schedule that was already full, and it returned nothing anybody could put on a ledger for years. Repeatable? Yes. Which part of the value equation? None of them yet. A clean filter would have screened that message, and screening it would have cost me nothing visible. It also would have closed the door on the return entirely, and I would never have known, because the loss was in the shape of something that never happened.
So here is the honest tag on the eleventh star: it is a bet you cannot justify at the moment you place it. That is not a flaw in the method. That is the method. If you could justify it in advance, somebody else would already be doing it.
What you do Monday
Pick one experience you own. Not the whole business. One experience.
Write the eleven. Write it where somebody else can see it, and let the embarrassment land on rung one and pass. Walk back down and keep the rungs you pass. Rank them out loud, even though ranking means one item dies in front of the person who wanted it. Tag each survivor with cost, repeatability, and the value it moves. Fund one. Just one. Then defend the difference it creates between two people who look the same on paper, because that defense is the habit you are actually buying.
And answer the message from the person who has nothing to give you yet. Keep answering it.
The accounting on that only closes years later, which is exactly why almost nobody runs it. Five stars closes today. Eleven closes whenever the story finally turns.
<!-- cluster-links:begin -->Related reading
<!-- cluster-links:end -->Questions