The magic moment of acupuncture

I talk a lot about ‘the magic moment’ with founders. That’s the ‘aha’ someone feels when they understand your value proposition. Finding a way to get your user to the magic moment as quickly as possible is important. But sometimes your magic moment isn’t quite incredible enough to hook your user.

For example, I’ve been having some leg pain and friends convinced me to try an acupuncturist. I’m pretty much willing to try anything once, so I went. They stuck a bunch of pins in me and sure enough it spread out and eliminated a lot of the pain in my leg. The acupuncturist asked me how I felt, and I said ‘good, it did a great job on my lower leg, but the upper part of my leg still hurts.’ To this, she replied ‘oh, that might take a few sessions.’

For all I know, this is totally correct and would have worked. The problem is that the magic moment for me would have been if all of my leg pain had gone away. Some of it going away was cool, but not really a solution to my problem. So I thanked her nicely, paid a ridiculously high price for this one session, and refused to buy additional sessions.

This relates directly to users experiencing your product for the first time. The activation energy you have to provide to fight all of the alternatives for that user is large. Inertia is a big one. But in my case for example, there are medications, physical therapy, chiropractors, mris, and many other things I can try. If acupuncture had solved my pain, I definitely would have bought more sessions, especially if the pain had decreased for a couple of days. But a partial solution just wasn’t magic enough, so without a lot of deep thought, I moved on.

If you want to hook someone, you have to understand their pain well and solve it completely. That is the magic. Then you should be able to charge whatever is reasonable and have them pay it.