On a windsurfing trip to Maui with my wife, years ago, young and with time to spare, I watched a man at Hookipa run a demonstration by the lifeguard tower. He asked people to stand on one leg, arms out, while he pushed down on an arm to test their balance.
I went first without any prop. I toppled straight away. Everyone laughed. It looked like a party trick.
Then he handed me a plastic card and asked me to try again. I stood as if nailed to the sand. He pushed with his full weight and nothing moved. That was where it stopped being funny for me.
I bought two of the cards for 20 dollars on the spot. Later, on the beach, I said to my wife: “If this is real, everyone will buy it.”
At the time I worked in e-commerce. I had studied marketing, ran my own business and knew software, online shops and digital marketing from the inside. My view of the world was simple: find demand, then scale it.
The test fit that view exactly: a demonstration that anyone could run, that sold itself because every buyer wanted to show it to somebody else immediately. Viral marketing and word of mouth, compressed into a single balance test.
I never checked whether the test was true. It worked, on almost everyone, at trade fairs and large events, over and over, and that was what mattered to me.
What people told me
Over the years I heard the same explanation from different people. Believing the card made you stronger changed your muscle tone and your posture. That was psychology, according to everyone who explained it to me.
The word placebo misled people, in my experience. Most hear it as meaning nothing happens. What happens is a shift in the tester’s own muscle tension and posture, driven by belief. The open question was where that belief came from: a frequency in the card, as the man on the beach had claimed, or the head of the person being tested, as every rational person I knew would explain it.
I ran my own informal tests over time. Different positions, different products, blind tests, with the band, without the band, with a different band, with a hologram, without one. Results varied slightly each time. I found no causal link to the object itself. Everything pointed to placebo.
None of that mattered on a trade fair floor. In front of two hundred people who simply felt it, the word placebo never came up. What counted was the excitement in the room. The test delivered almost every time.
A thousand demonstrations
I ran the test at least a thousand times. Most people reacted with disbelief, then laughter. They called friends over. Everyone said the same thing: this is unbelievable. Many bought two, three or more bands in one sitting, for themselves and as gifts. Price barely mattered to them. In most families, more than one person felt the effect.
I never finished the question that mattered. If the effect came from the tester’s head and not from the card, what was I actually selling? The answer could have been uncomfortable, so I put it off, because the business worked too well to stop and check. The demand and the excitement were real every single time. The few people who doubted it, I dismissed as sceptics.
The difference between a test and a demonstration is a question for another essay.
That afternoon in Maui, a real physical experience and a business instinct arrived in the same instant. I felt both and added them together without separating them. That combination was dangerous. I thought about the business. I did not ask what I had actually felt, or why.