(9/11) “Our visas were set to expire in three months. In order to renew them, we’d have to show prog
(9/11) “Our visas were set to expire in three months. In order to renew them, we’d have to show progress. But our sales were flat. And we’d failed to raise any money. So we thought for sure we were going home. We tried not to despair. We said: ‘Look where we are. We can’t squander this chance.’ We reached out to Pakistani investors, and they wrote us small checks. This bought us a little bit of time. But we had to face some hard truths. From the very beginning, our focus had been making leather dress shoes. But nobody wanted to wear them. Even in the business world, fashion was becoming more casual. So we had to start over. We had to begin from zero and find out what people wanted. So we pretended to be college students working on a project. We went to shoe stores and interviewed the managers. Then we interviewed the customers. We learned that people were looking for shoes they could wear every day, not just on special occasions. We researched the highest quality materials, and we put all of our findings into a document called ‘Ideal, Everyday Shoe.’ Then we gave all our notes to a talented designer. Together we built a prototype, and we called them ’Atoms,’ because we’d gone to the atomic level in search of quality. And to be honest we wanted a five letter name like ‘Apple.’ Our final hurdle was to test the product on customers. We sent out emails to our entire network. We wrote that we’d invented a shoe for ‘Hackers and Painters,’ but that we only had one size. So we were looking for people with size 10.5 feet. Twenty volunteers agreed to meet at our apartment. Everyone got a cup of Pakistani chai, then one by one we took them downstairs to try on a pair of shoes. Our first volunteer was an entrepreneur named Jason. He had a reputation for wearing high quality clothes. When we handed him the shoes, he began to study them carefully. My heart was racing the entire time. Then he put them on slowly, stood up, and began to walk across the room. His eyes got very big. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said. Then he jumped in the air, and he said it again: ‘Oh, my God.’ I looked at Waqas, and he was smiling. I was smiling too. Because both of us knew we were onto something big.” -- source link