“So wait. You outsourced these interviews?”
“I haven’t outsourced anything, Sam. I told Stephanie the overall idea of what I was looking for, and then I sent her some specific questions to ask. We talked a long time. She’s the heart of the ReBicycle brand. She cares that we’re successful just as much as I do.”
“Okay, outsourcing is a bad word. But Stephanie isn’t the founder of the company. You are. Rule number 9 of customer interviews, Owen: The founder of the company should be the one making the calls, doing the research. Otherwise it’s meaningless.” Owen put another olive in his mouth. Sam sure liked things done her way.
“It’s got to be the founder asking these questions. It’s not that I don’t think Stephanie is as smart as you or isn’t part of the team. But your staff wants to get you the answers you are looking for, and they certainly don’t want to deliver bad news. Best-case scenario is that she inadvertently messes with the results by leading the interviews into one direction or another. At worst, she won’t tell you the truth about the calls. And she isn’t as invested as you, Owen. She might be listening to answers on a superficial level instead of probing deeper and trying to discover true problems. Only the person that’s going to be making decisions about the life and death of this company should be conducting these interviews.”
“So what do you want me to do?” She had a point, and Owen didn’t want to spend the entire lunch bickering back and forth.
“I want you to make these calls, Owen. The goal of the exercise is not for someone to get just any answers to these questions, it’s for you to hear the answers and be able to make decisions. If you hadn’t heard those bike store customers talk about how price wasn’t a big issue yourself, you never would have admitted that the original idea was flawed. You’ll just be a lot more likely to act on this information if you gather it yourself.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll make the calls.” He knew she wouldn’t stop until he relented. And it made sense to him. He definitely wouldn’t have believed Stephanie if she had done the initial research and told him bike store shoppers didn’t care about price.
“Good. Now I’m feeling more and more confident about your new venture.” She lifted up her glass in his honor.
Owen clinked his glass with hers. He did feel like he was finally making progress for the first time in a year. “So then what?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, say I prove that these bike shares have a real migraine problem.”
“By making the calls yourself.” She pointed at him with her glass.
“By making the calls myself, Sam. Say I figure that out. What’s next? You said that finding a problem worth solving was only half of the equation. So can we spend some time talking about the second half?”
“Right! Thanks for bringing it up. Once you prove there’s a migraine problem out there, you still need to prove that customers want your solution. It’s not just assumed. For instance, even if price had been an issue for your customers—a huge issue for them—ReBicycle still would probably have failed because your solution was an online platform, and we learned from talking to people that they aren’t really comfortable buying bicycles online. So just finding a problem worth solving alone won’t guarantee success—you have to prove that customers want your solution.”
“And how would you like for me to prove that?”
“Every business has a specific action it wants from its customers. Remember the journey you took with the ReBicycle 1.0. You came up with an idea and you did all this stuff. You built the web site, created test bikes, made marketing materials, went after PR, hired salespeople, bought schwag, wrote a blog . . . all this stuff.”
“Okay.”
“But at the end of the day, all of this stuff was created to elicit a very specific action from your customers. For ReBicycle, you wanted them to buy something. Some other company might want users to sign up and use its product in some way or make a referral or whatever. So our goal is to find the shortest path from your idea to this ultimate customer action.”
“Okay. But I think we did that already when we were talking to Shawn and I asked him if he would buy these bikes from us if he was happy with the quality.”
“Ehhh.” She made a loud buzzer sound. “Rule number 7, Owen: Never ask ‘would you?’ It’s the worst question you could ask because you won’t learn anything. First, it’s leading. Second, people will lie to you. By the time you are pitching your solution and they know what you are looking for, they will tell you that something sounds great, just so they won’t hurt your feelings. The only way to tell if they want it, that it actually relieves their migraine, is to get them to actually perform the ultimate action. They need to give you money, or some kind of currency.”
“So, you want me to create some bike share bikes and try to sell them? Or redesign our web site to say that this is our new line of business?”
“That’s probably too much work, Owen. You want to find the shortest path possible to the ultimate action. What’s the smallest bet you could make, in terms of time and money, to get your customers to give you a preorder or their credit card number, or a letter of intent or something? It can be a sketch, a PowerPoint. Literally, your goal should be the least amount of time and money spent on creating something that can simulate the behavior you will eventually seek in your customers.”
“Seriously?”
She smiled. “Yes! Seriously. You want to prove they want it, don’t you? Before you spend another year and hundreds of thousands of dollars going in the wrong direction?”
Owen was skeptical. “And you think people will pay me money without having the actual bikes?”
“Yes! That’s the modern age in which we live! If they really have a migraine problem and if!, if they think your product actually solves that problem, or they believe it might. If that’s the case, they’ll be hungry to try whatever it is you are selling. You should have seen me trying to sell Flybaby products to people at the airport out of a large duffle bag. I would seriously just go around and ask people with babies if there were any baby items they needed right then.”
“You’re joking.”
“No! I told them I was trying out a new business concept and I wanted to see if they would actually buy anything. Did I get some weird looks? Sure. Did I get lectured by security a few times for trying to sell things at the airport? Once or twice. But did I get people to hand me their credit card in exchange for some baby products I carried in my duffle? Yes! That’s how I knew it was going to work. Imagine spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the infrastructure and the equipment you would need to set up the vending machines. I couldn’t imagine spending that kind of time or money without first having proof that people were going to buy.”
“It’s that easy, huh?”
“That’s the fun part, Owen. If you can get people to buy something without building it and branding it, you’ll know you have something. You’ll know you have the beginning of a real, sustainable, scalable company! Like if you were creating a software product, you could just create a landing page that described some core benefits and see how many people you can get to download the product or give you their credit card. You don’t need to have a single line of code written. Or with ReBicycle, you don’t actually need to build any bikes to get an order placed. You can probably just sell it with a phone call or a pamphlet.”
She never ceased to surprise him. This was definitely a different approach. But it oddly made sense. Especially after the initial interviews trying to diagnose a problem. Sam definitely knew what she was talking about.
“You excited to try it?”
“Definitely easier said than done, Sam. I thought sales were hard when I had actual bikes to sell.”
She raised her glass again.
“Easier with all the poker money you’re about to get. You know you’re quite a celebrity in this town now. I’m glad I invested in you when your personal stock was still affordable. Now, just as I’m leaving town, you’re becoming this big deal.”
“Yep. You’re practically eating with royalty.” He sat straight up in mock arrogance.
Owen didn’t want her to leave. He thought about how much fun it was to hang out with Sam over these past few days. It’s like the tournament had created some sort of bubble. Everything in his life outside the bubble was crumbling. He couldn’t get hold of his wife. His business was falling apart. He had no idea what he was going to do with the rest of his life. But inside the bubble, things were magical. He was having an incredible time hanging out with Sam, excelling at this tournament, and figuring out this secret formula for building successful startups. It had become a little hard to tell which was the real world. He wanted to ask Sam to stay just a bit longer, but he knew that was a bad idea. He just didn’t want this to be their last meal together, likely to never see each other again. He didn’t want to say good-bye to this magic world. But he reminded himself that continuing to hang out with this beautiful woman could only lead to difficult decisions.
“I swear. Some guy was saying how cool you were at the tables, and there was this tiny brunette chick that kept staring at you the entire time. It’s like you have groupies.”
“Yeah, one brunette and a bunch of poker onlookers. What a bunch of groupies.”
“Hey, come on. The brunette was cute.”
“Oh yeah? How cute?”
“Cute enough that I told her to back off. That you prefer blondes.”
“Well, actually Sam, I hate to break this to you but I pref—”
“Oh my God! I think I see her at the bar!”
“What?” Owen started to look back to see who Sam was talking about.
“Wait . . . wait . . . don’t look!”
Owen turned back to the table before getting a good look at the woman.
“That’s only going to encourage her. She’s like a stalker or something.”
“I’ve never had one of those.” Owen was trying to think about how to take a look at the bar without seeming obvious.
His thoughts were quickly interrupted by Sam’s putting her hand on top of his. “You know what I like about you, Owen?”
Uhhh, this was weird. He slowly pulled his hand away. “What?”
Sam leaned in, and started combing Owen’s bangs with her fingers. “You are a perfect gentleman who really cares about all this entrepreneurship stuff. Most guys would have tried to make a pass at me or taken advantage of me when I was at my most inebriated. But you are a good guy, Owen.”
Owen leaned back in his seat so that her fingers could no longer reach him. Was she trying to make one last move?
“You knew that I was just trying to help you with your business, and I just think your wife is such a lucky woman to have you.”
The tournament PA interrupted by announcing that the dinner break would be over in 10 minutes. Players were encouraged to head back to the tables.
“Sam, I’m a little confused.”
She smiled and started running her index finger around the rim of her wine glass. She leaned into the table as if she was sharing an important secret. “Women in Vegas are really forward, Owen, and if she thinks we’re together, she won’t bother making a move. I’m just trying to keep the stalker from thinking she’s got a shot.”
“Oh. Well, thank you, but I can . . .”
Sam suddenly sat back in her seat and was staring toward the direction of the bar. She spoke through her teeth, trying not to move her lips, “Uh-oh. I think I made her mad.”
Owen turned around to see a woman quickly making her way to their table.
Sam, continuing to speak through her teeth, said, “She looks angry.”
Owen knew that angry gait all too well. He’d seen it a lot over the past few months. Oh, shit.
And just like that, he felt his magic bubble burst. Owen’s real life was now barreling into his oasis. He jumped up from his seat, knowing full well that he had little time to react before Lisa made a scene. “Honey, this isn’t what you think! This is my friend, Sam. She’s a poker player here, and she thought you were a stranger at the bar . . .”
“SAM?!? This is SAM?!?”
Owen quickly realized what he had just done. He didn’t even have an opportunity to take a breath and regroup before Lisa threw her entire glass of Coke in his face.
“Asshole!” She slammed her empty glass on the table, grabbed Sam’s bottle of wine by the neck, and stormed off.
Owen grabbed a napkin from the table to wipe off his face and just take a second to regroup. Then, without another word to Sam, he took off after Lisa. He caught up to her in the main hotel pathway, where dozens of people were walking in all different directions.
“Honey!”
Lisa wasn’t slowing down, “Don’t ‘honey’ me! I can’t believe you did this!”
Owen grabbed Lisa’s arm, the one holding the bottle of wine. “Lisa, please. Just give me one minute. Just one minute.”
Lisa stopped in the middle of the path, turned to Owen, and crossed her arms. Her eyes were already streaming tears.
“Look. It’s not what it looks like. That woman is a friend of mine. Absolutely nothing happened with us. She thought you were a stranger interested in me at the bar and wanted to make you think that I was taken because she thought I was a good guy who was faithful to his wife.”
Lisa didn’t look like she was buying it . . . but she was still standing there, wiping the tears every few seconds.
“Because I am a good guy, who is very faithful to his wife.”
They both stood there in silence, just staring at each other. Lisa sniffled. Owen could hear the tournament announcer come back over the speaker to announce that the dinner break was now over and play had resumed. He was sure that Lisa wouldn’t understand the implications of the announcement, nor that she would care, even if she knew what it meant.
“Honey, I love you. I promise you. Promise you that I haven’t done anything you wouldn’t approve of. I have to go back to the tournament. If I make it through today, we are guaranteed at least $300,000.”
Lisa didn’t reply. She was just standing there, fuming mad. Owen had no idea what to do next. He pulled out his wallet and took out his room key. He put it in her hands and helped her clasp around it. “Look, I’m staying in room 623 upstairs. Here’s the key. Please come watch me play or just wait for me in the room. I promise to answer all of your questions as soon as this is over tonight.”
Lisa finally looked like she was ready to speak. She stepped a little closer to Owen and spoke to him in a very calm and determined tone, “You told me Sam was a man.” She paused. “Not a hot 20-something blonde whose paws were all over you.”
Not good. “Lees, I swear to you, nothing happened! She was just giving me business advice, which I can’t wait to tell you about. But I have to go back to the tournament. The blinds are so high right now that I can’t afford to miss too many hands.” He briefly considered assuring Lisa that he thought Sam was well beyond 20-something, but quickly realized that was an atrocious idea.
Lisa was back to mute mode. Owen felt himself incredibly torn. He didn’t know what else he could say or do right at this moment, but he had to go back to the table. He was already risking his tournament life by not only missing the blinds and antes that he’d be forced to pitch into every hand, but by missing good cards, which were becoming more and more valuable with every hand dealt. This was his only chance to save his company, to get out of debt. He took hold of Lisa’s hand again and cupped it with both of his, “I have to go.”
He was looking for any kind of approval from her. Anything to make him feel like she’d heard what he said and that he was okay to go back. But she wasn’t giving him anything. Just sporadic tears. It was like she knew the stakes and wouldn’t give him the slightest indication of what he was looking for.
“I have to go, honey. Please meet me in the room. Room 623.”
He got down on his knees in front of her, still holding her hand. “Please be in the room.”
Lisa stood there, staring at him, clutching the room key in her hand.
Owen finally got up. “I have to go.” He slowly turned around, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do. Every inch of his body was telling him to stay. But his mind was saying “get to the tables, Owen!” He knew that somehow Lisa would soon know the truth—believe the truth—that he wasn’t lying about Sam. And, knowing Lisa, that’s when the real argument would start, if she found out that he stuck around trying the impossible task of consoling her for hours while simultaneously blowing his chances in the tournament. Rational Lisa—if he ever got to see her again—would agree with this decision. At least that was the assumption Owen had decided to put to the test.
“I love you, baby. So so much.” Still no reaction. Feeling like he had no other options, Owen turned and ran back to the tables. It would be two hours until the next 15-minute break.