“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.”