The Test

Hawaii, Maui and a simple balance test that changed everything. But let me start from the beginning. My wife and I were fulfilling the dream of a perfect windsurf trip. We were young and tanned, living on nothing but wind and waves. In Hookipa, a guy was sitting by the lifeguard tower and showed us something that completely blew us away.

Amused, we followed his instructions, thinking it was a joke: Stand on one leg. Spread your arms. I obediently did as he said and then he pushed my arm down. I tipped over to the side. That made immediate sense and we laughed about it for no reason. We were just in a good mood. Then he pressed a plastic card into my hand and repeated the test. This time I stood there like I was nailed to the ground. He pushed as hard as he could. Nothing moved. That’s when the fun stopped for me.

I was blown away. Not just a little blown away. No, I was properly blown away. You can’t tell the story without it sounding like complete nonsense. But it wasn’t nonsense. My brain was racing, I bought two cards from him for 20 dollars and later on the beach I said to my wife: If this is real, everyone will buy it.

I didn’t know in that moment that I’d be right. I came from e-commerce, had studied marketing and was self-employed. I knew software, online shops and digital marketing, and my view of the world was simple: where there’s demand, you can scale. The test fit this framework because it was such a simple tool you could scale, since anyone can demonstrate this test. The difference between test and demonstration I’ll cover in another essay. Here I want to process this pivotal experience. I essentially had a product that sells itself. Because everyone who buys it wants to show this incredibly tangible test to someone else immediately. All the theoretical literature about viral marketing or word of mouth was compressed into this simple balance test.

The problem wasn’t that we didn’t check whether the test was a lie or the truth. The problem was that it worked so easily. And reliably. It worked with almost everyone. And I knew it would work at trade shows and big events and simply convince everyone. You just stood on one leg, someone pushed and you didn’t fall over anymore. I couldn’t believe it.

Over time, all sorts of explanations came up. The test supposedly works because the body responds to expectation. When someone tells you this will make you stronger, and you believe it, even just a little bit, your body responds. The muscles tense differently. Your posture changes. It’s not a trick but psychology. That’s how it was explained to me.

And I knew what placebo was. But the word is misleading because most people think placebo means nothing happens. Something does happen. It’s just not what’s being claimed. Does the strength come from a frequency in the hologram, which the guy on the beach was trying to make me believe? Or from the mind of the person taking the test, as every rationally thinking Western European explained to me?

We tried every variation. Different positions, different products, blind tests, with band, without band, with a different band, with hologram, without, no idea, just everything. The results varied, if only slightly, and we couldn’t see a causal connection no matter how hard we tried. In the end, everything pointed in the same direction: placebo.

But at a trade show with two hundred people who just felt it work, the word placebo is not a topic. Because what counts is the moment, the feeling and the excitement. The test delivered almost every time.

I did the test at least a thousand times. Most people stared in disbelief, they laughed and pulled their friends in and everyone said: This is unbelievable. Many bought two, three or several bracelets at once, for themselves, as gifts, the price was secondary. In every family there was always more than one person who felt the effect.

What I of course didn’t do: think the question through to the end. If the effect doesn’t come from the product but from the mind, what am I actually selling? The answer could have gotten uncomfortable. So I pushed it off until next time, because things were going too well. The demand was real and the excitement was genuine every time. The few critics we brushed aside as the skeptics.

Looking back, the moment on the beach in Maui was the point where two things collided that are dangerous together: a real experience and a business instinct. I felt both immediately and added them up. I thought about the business. I was uncritical and unreflective and didn’t ask myself what exactly I had felt and why.