Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This would never happen today. They launched it and people came. People loved it. It freaking worked immediately. Yeah, and it went very quickly from a thing that obscure nerds wanted, to this has a good enough user experience where regular people are using it quickly and deriving real value. It's not just like it had growth rates of a bunch of bots interacting with each other, and therefore the volume looks high. These are very real people who are one or two clicks out from the early adopters, solving real problems that they had before, and everybody telling their friends. In fact, I think there's a stat. The entire first year after the public launch, they spent zero marketing dollars. It was all word of mouth and inbound media inquiries, because what they were doing was so novel and so useful to the mass market consumer. Oh, inbound media inquiries. Okay, so they launched it. In the first two weeks, they do $25,000 in revenue. They're just people telling their friends. You can't do that today, $25,000 in revenue in two weeks. If you launch something today, nobody's going to use it. They get an inbound media inquiry two weeks after they launch it from David Filo and Jerry Yang, saying, hey, we heard about your site, Amazon, it looks pretty cool. Do you mind if we feature it on our homepage?…

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