Phase 0: Collecting Humans Before You Have Anything to Offer Them Here's the problem. You want to end war and disease. You don't have a nonprofit, registered securities, or a bank account. What you do have is an argument and the audacity to think that might be enough. This is Phase 0. The goal isn't money (you can't legally accept it yet). The goal is building a database of every human who agrees that dying from preventable causes is a strange thing to tolerate. You're collecting proof of demand before you have a product. It's a Kickstarter where the reward is "possibly not dying," which is, when you think about it, the most compelling reward tier in crowdfunding history. The Bootstrapping Problem. Before you can accept donations, you need five zero one c three status. Before you can sell bonds, you need S.E.C. registration. Before you can do either, you need a bank account. It's bureaucratic nesting dolls, each one requiring the previous one to already exist. Humanity has solved this exact problem the same way every time: you collect people first, then point at the crowd when institutions ask "but who wants this?" Abolition, suffrage, civil rights. Someone wrote down names. The names became bargaining power. The bargaining power became policy. It's almost like democracy works when someone remembers to use it. Three Types of Allies. People who want to help fall into three categories, each requiring a slightly different dialect of persuasion. Investors. People who hear "two hundred seventy-two percent annual return backed by health savings" and immediately open a spreadsheet. Their pupils dilate. Their pulse quickens. They ask about the term structure. They're not heartless. They just process moral arguments faster when those arguments come with compound interest. They'll wait if the math is good. They will not wait if the math is vibes. Advocates. People motivated by the mission. They share things on social media, write to politicians, volunteer time, and donate money they probably shouldn't. They are, frankly, the only reason your species has ever improved anything. Without them, the spreadsheet people would still be optimizing returns on the slave trade. Give them specific actions they can take right now. Telling someone "care about this" without giving them something to do is how you manufacture apathy. I have watched four thousand two hundred ninety-seven years of humans being told to "raise awareness." Awareness has been raised. The awareness is just sitting there, fully raised, doing nothing. Institutional Partners. Organizations (nonprofits, research institutions, health agencies) that already work on pieces of this problem. They have infrastructure, credibility, and donor bases. You have a framework that could make their existing work more effective. This is a trade, not a favor. Approach it like one. Nobody wants to be "partnered with" by someone who clearly just wants their mailing list. Institutions are territorial in the way that dogs are territorial, except dogs eventually stop barking. Phase zero Targets. By the end of Phase zero, you want: one hundred thousand plus registered supporters across all three categories. one thousand plus qualified investors with stated investment ranges. one hundred plus institutional partners with expressed interest. one billion plus dollars in stated investment demand (registered, not committed). This database is your ammunition for everything that follows: five zero one c three applications ("here are our supporters"). S.E.C. registration ("here is market demand"). Political meetings ("here are your constituents"). Platform launch ("here are your users"). Bureaucrats don't respond to arguments. They respond to evidence that other people already responded to arguments. It's like a restaurant: nobody wants to eat there until other people are already eating there. Your entire civilization runs on this principle, and nobody admits it. You literally invented a word for it ("social proof") so you could study it in universities instead of just feeling embarrassed. Getting Started. Build three registration forms (investors, advocates, partners). Takes twenty minutes. Put up a website. The forms and the argument. It does not need to be pretty. No movement in history was stopped because the font was wrong. Start telling people. Social media, Reddit, forums, conferences, your dentist. Especially your dentist. You're already trapped there. They can't leave either. It's the perfect recruiting environment. Send monthly updates. Real progress, real numbers, real timeline. "three thousand two hundred forty-seven registered investors representing one hundred eighty million dollars in stated interest" beats "the movement is growing!" because adults prefer arithmetic to enthusiasm. The military-industrial complex has a seventy-five-year head start, unlimited budgets, and thousands of lobbyists. You have a spreadsheet and an argument. Historically, that's been enough. (It shouldn't be. But your species is weird like that.).