The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living (21 page)

So, here we are again, déjà vu. As usual, the Konditorei had quieted down by midmorning; except for a young couple with a baby in a designer carrier and an occasional takeout customer, we had the sunny place to ourselves. A bootleg tape of the Dead's “Friend of the Devil” played in the background. Connie was kibitzing with the staff, taking a breather. She had welcomed Lenny like an old friend, forgetting for now the putrefying bacteria. She had a natural way with people, and she knew more about business than most of the young bucks who come around here looking for me. I really should discuss a partnership with her.

Lenny's “fun” remark had caught my attention because it was at least the third echo of my first encounter with him, some three weeks earlier. In his corporate uniform again this morning, he had greeted me at the door (without the arm-lock) and guided me to the table where he and Allison had set up shop.

There the similarities, thankfully, ended. Lenny was just as intense, but his energy was leavened with warmth and a sense of humor. Allison, too, seemed to have settled into her own skin, no longer ambivalent or hesitant. She and Lenny were in sync now.

After I sent her my reply, Allison explained, she had spent the weekend strategizing with Lenny. He had been ready to throw in the towel, but she had persuaded him to try another approach.

“So Circle-of-Life.com came out of that weekend?” I asked.

They both nodded.

“What we first described to you in Funerals.com,” Lenny said, “is still here. But it's only one part of a much bigger idea.”

“Does your family all live around here, Randy?” Allison asked.

“No,” I replied. “Upstate New York, New England. And my wife's family is from Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina. Everywhere but here.”

“It's the same with Allison and me,” Lenny said. “My family is strong in Boston, but two brothers live in the Midwest, and my sister lives in Florida. My father had seven brothers and sisters, spread all over the East and South, and one out here. Allison's family is scattered around New England and the Southwest.”

“In this day and age, families and friends have to work hard to stay in touch. No one writes letters anymore,” Allison added.

“When my father died,” Lenny explained, “I paid a neighborhood kid who knows HTML to make the site you saw. I wanted a place where the family could gather, post messages, and remember. Not only did it shrink the distance between us, but it made it easier to share feelings. You saw some of the postings. A couple of my aunts and uncles told stories about growing up with Dad, and some of my relatives posted old photographs that we'd never seen before, pictures of Dad as a kid and of the entire family through the years. It was a comfort to all of us to remember Dad and commemorate his life.”

“It was a good thing,” Lenny went on. “Many of my friends who have visited the site said they'd like to set up a place for their families, too.”

“Anyway,” Allison chimed in, “when Lenny and I looked at everything fresh we returned to a simple premise. The business should make it possible for people to come together and cope with death and dying. That's our mission.”

“And we'll sell caskets,” Lenny interjected.

“And we'll sell caskets,” Allison concurred. “Absolutely. That's an expensive decision people have to make at a difficult time. The more information you have, the better the choice.”

“Wherever we can find reputable funeral homes who provide good service and take reasonable margins,” Lenny said, “we'll work through them. There still needs to be someone local to make the final arrangements. We can steer people to the best facilities and protect them from gouging.”

“Not just caskets and liners, but other services too,” Allison quickly added. “Counseling, burial sites, gravestones, options for final disposal.”

I raised my hand.

“Whoa,” I said. “Let's start with the plan.” I generally prefer to get off the pat presentation and into the passion, but too much was tumbling out at once for me to absorb.

Lenny and Allison's original idea, the one buried beneath Funerals.com, was to create Internet communities in which family and friends could honor and remember someone who had died. In returning to that idea, Lenny and Allison had expanded it to include people in the process of dying, the terminally ill, and those who care for them.

“We'll make it easy for communities to form around someone's dying and death,” Lenny said. “We'll bring together family members and friends, wherever they are in the world, and give them an opportunity to grieve, remember, mourn, and show their support in ways not possible until the Web. At the same time we'll help the dying cope with their own deaths and give them the resources to make plans — financial arrangements and estate planning, for instance—for the families they leave behind. We need to deal with death and dying much better as a society. This business can help.”

“We want to make one's last moments as meaningful as possible,” Allison continued, “by providing people with the opportunity to connect to those who have given their lives meaning and purpose and, in the end, to make sense of their lives, in an intimate and caring community.”

It was about closing the circle of life, I thought.

“This lets us tap into the huge market we talked about before,” Allison pointed out, “but in ways much more caring and comprehensive.”

“The basic service,” Lenny went on, “would be free.”

It would include templates and guidelines, he explained, making it easy for anyone to create a community site with photographs and writings. The framework for this basic service would be built with the help of experts in grief counseling and terminal illness, as well as doctors. Those who set up or joined a community could simply visit the site, sign in, and choose from what's available there. Then, if they wished, they could participate more actively by communicating with other members. A simple site would be free, and there would be a charge only if the site exceeded a certain reasonable size or if the activity exceeded a specified time limit, say six months.

Clever, I thought. This way people would be encouraged to use the service for free and pay only when they found it valuable to maintain in the long run. Easy adoption, an Internet version of “trying before buying.” Of course, the site would ultimately have to provide real value to convince people to homestead it, but even casual traffic could bring in revenues from advertisers and sponsors.

“Our plan,” Allison said, “is to provide targeted information about care, drugs, therapies, and support services for everyone involved in that final stage of life.”

Community members wouldn't be bothered by advertising; they would see information on specific services only after they had registered their interest in them. As a result Lenny and Allison wouldn't merely be selling eyeballs, they would be providing qualified leads to their commerce partners. Users could request information and receive answers and referrals to all kinds of resources, some local and some on the Internet. Circle-of-Life.com would charge a fee to merchants in exchange for qualified leads, those people who indicated their interest in finding help. Nonprofits would have free access.

It would be a better arrangement for everyone than simply selling gross demographics to advertisers. Qualified leads were far more valuable to merchants than bulk traffic, and the process would be more consistent with the experience Allison and Lenny wanted to create for community members, less crass and commercial. They also planned to host various events and forums, for which individuals might pay a small participation fee, and which could feature special guest experts or the opportunity to exchange information with members from other related on-line communities that share similar problems or needs. The ability to link separate communities, so members could help each other, would be a particularly useful feature.

For example, they explained, family caregivers, the ones supporting a dying person, often face special burdens, suffering alone in their grief as they continue to care for their loved ones. Circle-of-Life.com would give them a place to communicate with others in similar situations.

“They can turn to each other for support, and especially to express the feelings — their anger, for instance — they can't express to family and friends,” Allison said.

Their plan was still to sell the funerary goods they'd identified in the original business. Where there were reputable local sources for those goods, Circle-of-Life.com would refer members to those sources. And where those vendors were commercial businesses, such as funeral homes, Circle-of-Life.com would receive a percentage of the sale, like an affiliate. With this approach, Lenny explained, revenue would come from a larger number of sources.

“One of the weaknesses in the original Funerals.com,” I pointed out, “was the issue of finding or being found by those in need. You still have to generate traffic to make this work.”

“Yes, of course,” Lenny said. “But this approach is more inclusive and less in conflict with the local brick-and-mortar businesses.”

He went on to explain that they planned to form alliances with reputable local funeral homes, for which they could be both a source of business through referrals and a Web presence to supplement the funeral home's physical locations. They also planned to form partnerships with those whose daily work brought them in contact with death and dying, including, for example, social workers in hospitals, hospice personnel, and visiting nurses, as well as related membership organizations. They planned to seek endorsements and referrals from national religious organizations of all denominations, which would inform their member churches of the benefits Circle-of-Life.com offered.

In short, their plan was to form a vast web of those whose aims were congruent with their own—to ease the passage of those terminally ill and the grief of the survivors. If they could establish Circle-of-Life.com as the preeminent place to build communities addressing those needs, particularly for far-flung families and friends, that network would provide a competitive advantage. The more people who gravitated to the site, the more valuable it would become to others as they shared information and attracted more local providers of goods and services. Competitors could try to duplicate this model, but once Circle-of-Life.com established itself at the center of the network, competitors would find it difficult to dislodge. This scenario is referred to as the much-coveted “network effect,” an increasing return on the benefits of growing scale on the Internet with little or no marginal cost.

What Lenny and Allison proposed to do required an enormous amount of work, and success was far from guaranteed. But here the risk was in the right place — in the execution of the big idea. Their idea embraced fundamental life needs and would employ the proven strengths of the Net, making it hard to believe someone, somewhere, couldn't make it work. If it were to succeed, they would have to execute quickly and with great discipline. They would need to build a vast network of relationships as well. No small challenge.

“Have you made any progress on hiring a team?” I asked.

“We've only had a week or so,” Lenny said, “but with our raising some seed money …”

“We forgot to tell Randy,” Allison said.

Once they had formulated the new idea for Circle-of-Life.com and put together the rudiments of a new business plan, they'd gone back to a small group of angels Lenny had approached months ago. The angels had turned Funerals.com down, but a few were now intrigued enough with the new plan that they had invested $500,000 in seed money.

With that, Lenny and Allison had quit their day jobs to work full-time on the business.

“I thought very hard before turning down that HMO job offer,” Allison admitted. “There was a lot I liked about it, the opportunity to build a community of people struggling with serious illness, but once Lenny and I agreed on the basic premise underlying Circle-of-Life.com, I didn't hesitate. This is what I want to accomplish, and if I didn't at least try to do this … well, here is my chance. The Internet seems to offer the potential now to do something important in a way never possible before.”

I looked through the plan. They had made assumption after assumption about the services offered, sources of revenue, their ability to enter alliances with traditional brick-and-mortar businesses and organizations to form the crucial referral networks, the potential fees and charges. Lenny must have been uncomfortable with those leaps of faith, but the plan also laid out a timetable that identified both the crucial steps and what they hoped and expected to learn at each stage. They were candid and detailed about what they didn't and couldn't know at this point, and they identified how they would refine and reshape the plan as they continued to educate themselves about the market. The plan was a reliable compass, as it should be, not a road map.

They had indeed already made some progress in putting together a team, identifying a strong candidate with a technical background and some startup experience to bring the site up and beginning conversations with a small group of counselors and doctors who were amenable to serving on an advisory board. Someone with accounting experience had expressed interest in joining them part-time in the beginning, expanding to full-time if the thing took off. The team wasn't locked up, but they had apparently found some good candidates who would join as soon as more financing was secured.

They had created simple, pro forma financial statements based on the segments of the existing market they expected to migrate to their service and form the core communities in their network. Then, for each community, they had identified the various potential sources of revenue and the estimated total revenue. It added up to a number that would probably be large enough to get Frank's attention.

“What do you think?” Lenny asked.

Less tidy and tightly wrapped than the Funerals.com presentation, this plan was a bit raw. All in all, though, not a bad job for ten days' work. Most important, the plan communicated a stronger vision, an idea with a wider horizon focused on meeting a critical need. For all its loose ends, it had real potential.