Valley PR Blog

5 Questions for Pat Sullivan of Jigsaw Health

By Linda VandeVrede on November 27th, 2007 In Marketing

Pat Sullivan is founder & CEO of Jigsaw Health, which provides products for people with chronic health conditions. This is an unusual, intriguing change from his previous fame as creater of the Act! software package and founder & CEO of Saleslogix (which is now owned by Sage).

He spoke at the recent AZ Entrepreneurship Conference about his experiences starting up Jigsaw Health. He was such an entertaining speaker that I followed up with him separately to get his insights about PR, social media, and Arizona.

1) Tell me your definition of what Jigsaw Health does.

Jigsaw Health is devoted to helping people with chronic health conditions understand the underlying possible causes of their illness. Quite literally, we’re trying to help them find the piece to their health puzzle. This springs from my own experiences suffering with recurrent bouts of chronic conditions for 30 years of my life.
We also sell premium nutritional products specifically designed for people like me. The most targeted one is Magnesium w/SRT (sustained release technology)

Magnesium depletion is very common in most chronic conditions. In fact, most research indicates that up to 80% of Americans are deficient in this key nutrient, and so few remain aware of its vital importance. Our Jigsaw Magnesium is different from most other magnesium supplements because it’s designed to dramatically reduce the laxative effect common to nearly all other magnesium products. The secret is in combining a patented form of highly bioavailable magnesium with a patented sustained release technology so that we slow down the absorbtion. As I found when dealing with my own chronic conditions, tests showed I was severely deficient, and replenishing magnesium was a big help to me.

2) How are you using social media as part of your overall PR & marketing strategy? How does this compare with the PR and marketing strategies you used at previous companies?

A 2005 Harris Interactive Poll found an estimated 117 million Americans go online for health information. And that was at the very beginning of the Web 2.0 / Social Media revolution that we are awash in.
At Jigsaw Health, we’re using tons of blogs, Digg, product videos, MySpace - the list goes on. We also have employees (and willing spouses) scouring forums and message boards like Yahoo! Answers in an attempt to answer questions by pointing to content we’ve created, such as our Magnesium Deficiency Assessment tool. And by the way, the secret to not being a forum troll is to answer questions with helpful information, but don’t plant the question yourself. And if your website doesn’t have beneficial content that’s worth pointing to, why not?!?

When we launched our tasty gluten-free Jigsaw Bars at the beginning of 2007 (approximately 1 million years ago), we reached out to various bloggers and asked them to candidly review the product.

With my previous two companies, Act and Saleslogix, you had to use the power of the press because they were the gatekeepers for influencing the market. But now the power of WordPress allows so many new influencers to come out out of the woodwork, and Google allows them to be found in seconds.

In addition, With ACT! and SalesLogix, we used traditional press releases with the intent of reaching the press. Now we use tools like PRweb to put out a press release, the true value of which is in being at the top of Yahoo! News and Google News for a few days, and then create a long term “anchor page” to increase the link value of the pages we link to in the press release for future searchers of the keyword phrases.

3) I noticed you have a downloadable e-book from your site. Can you tell me a little bit more about this book ?

Wellness Piece by Piece (Health Press, 2005) is the story of how I found the pieces to my own health puzzle over a 17-year journey. As opposed to being a medical textbook written by a doctor, it uses my personal health odyssey to give hints and hope to the millions of others like me who suffer from fatigue, insomnia, irritable bowels, anxiety, etc. I hope it can be the 17-year shortcut that I never had.

I had lots of help from family members in the editing and proofreading process, especially my son Patrick Sullivan Jr. (who is the co-founder and president of Jigsaw Health).

The book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but you can download the entire ebook for free when you sign up for monthly Jigsaw Health enewsletter.

We decided to make the ebook available for free to try and help as many people as possible. Many people with chronic conditions have spent their entire savings on trying to get well. It seemed the right thing to do to make it free to anyone who needed it.

4) At the AZ entrepreneurship conference, in your keynote you included some great tips for startup companies who want to eventually work with venture capitalists. What role do you see public relations playing within startups who are seeking outside investment help from VCs or angel investors?

PR is the method to bring a new product to market. Old world advertising is just that — Old World. We’re all bombarded by ads and we constantly tune 99.9% of them out. Advertising is very expensive and is the least effective method for bringing new brands to the marketplace.

PR is the centerpiece for a launch where you need exposure and to hopefully start a viral campaign for a new product or service.

The only advertising you should do, if you do any, is to target a small group of market influencers in very specific media like trade magazines, niche blogs, etc.

5) Arizona isn’t always the first state that comes to mind when people think of places to start up companies. Yet you have been successful multiple times here. In your opinion, what’s the best and perhaps littlest known part about being headquartered in Arizona?

First of all, you don’t have to compete with all the Silicon Valley companies for talent. Silicon Valley VCs will come to Arizona to invest in great people and great companies.

The cost of living in Arizona for employees is much lower than that Silicon Valley, making it far easier to recruit talent from outside AZ when needed. There is already a good pool of talent here, especially in engineering. It’s a wonderful place to live and start a company!

Comments

Jigsaws claims regarding their magnesium supplement are mostly nonsense. I have been studying magnesium for over thirty years and even spoken on the subject at international medical meetings. All magnesium supplements produce a laxative effect based on dose. milk of magnesia (magnesium hydroxide) uses this effect to produce its particular effect.

Magnesium is inherently long acting, as it is absorbed down the whole length of the bowel. Delayed release or long-acting tablet forms only add to the cost. If jigsaw’s product lives up to their claim of not producing diarrhea, it is only because the dose is small (125 milligrams of magnesium /tablet).

No matter which form of magnesium you put in your mouth, only about 30-35% will be absorbed into the blood. The recommended intake of magnesium is 325-425 milligrams/day so supplementing with a 125 milligram magnesium malate tablet becomes a great deal more expensive than, say a 200 milligram tablet of magnesium oxide WITH NO IMPROVEMENT IN EFFECT OR REDUCTION IN SIDE EFFECTS.

James,

I agree, it is dose dependent, as all forms of magnesium will draw water into the bowels. But tolerability and absorbability of each form is different. The amount the tissues can absorb and use is based on solubility, and the stability constant. Mg hydroxide and Mg citrate have different stability constants. (0 for Mg hydroxide and 2.8 for Mg citrate.) Dr. Carolyn Dean covers this in depth in Chapter 18 of her book “The Magnesium Miracle”.

Regarding dose, our recommendation is 4 tablets per day, which is 500mg of elemental magnesium (from dimagnesium malate, a chelated form of magnesium.)

Dr. Russell Blaylock (retired neurosurgeon and author) recommends 1000mg of magnesium per day, namely because of the protective effects on the brain. Jigsaw Magnesium is one of the brands he recommends, primarily because of the form of Mg used and because the sustained release slows down absorption, increasing tolerability, and decreasing the likelihood of diarrhea.

Over the last 2.5 years, we have thousands of customers taking 500-1000mg per day, and to my knowledge, less than 50 customers — if even that many — have ever called us to complain about diarrhea as an adverse effect. (Becoming more “regular” using a magnesium product is of course, not an adverse event.)

Personally I cannot take 200mg’s elemental of ANY non-sustained release Mg supplement without having bad diarrhea. I take between 500mg and 1000mg Jigsaw Magnesium every day without diarrhea. This varies from person to person though.

I am aware of anecdotal data of customers who were able to stop getting Mg Sulfate injections using our product. I have also been able to recover from a severe Mg deficiency based a number of medical tests. Again this is purely anecdotal, but we’re always delighted to hear from happy customers.

We recently gave 70 bottles of Jigsaw Magnesium to naturopathic doctors at a conference in what we called the “$100 No Diarrhea Challenge”. We asked docs to take the recommended dosage of 500mg per day and if they got diarrhea, we would give them $100. (We joked about how they would prove it, but we promised each and everyone of the participants that we would just take their word.) The result? After 30 days, not a single doctor had diarrhea.

I appreciate and respect your long study of magnesium. We are embarking on some clinical studies to dig deeper into the biology of how Jigsaw Magnesium functions in vitro. Maybe we could even work together? Contact my son Patrick Sullivan Jr. if you’re interested. (Patrick AT jigsawhealth DOT com)

I hope this answers, at least in part, some of your comments.

-Pat

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