content of Cosmo magazine or their relationship with Fabio, but if you build
some Perl scripts for them to do server administration, it doesn’t occur to them
that that’s something that they have to own and prevent other publishers from
getting hold of.
So Levi’s was a great client and it was a big turning point because it gave us
the money to build whatever we needed to build.
Another turning point was in 1998 when I published Database Backed Web
Sites.We were working on a site and the client said, “You have to finish this site
for us, because as soon as the book comes out, your phone is going to be ringing
off the hook.” I didn’t believe him, but he was right, and that was a huge turning
point. It was on my website for free, but having a hard copy in the stores
gave it a bit more credibility and more readers.
That was pretty much always how we built the business—tutorial publications
on our website, books in bookstores, and public lectures. Edward Tufte
gave us this idea of having a one-day seminar that people would come to and
learn. We would get 400 people to come to a free, one-day course, and then
maybe 1 or 2 would become customers and maybe 10 of them would adopt the
software.
Almost all of our marketing and sales was educational. We just thought,
“We’ll teach people stuff, and some tiny fraction of those people will become
our customers.” It seemed to work just as well as running ads, which were a
hard sell and kind of empty and a waste of people’s time. In this case, nobody
could ever say that we wasted their time. I think the same percentage of people
that read an ad in ComputerWorld magazine and bought something would read
one of our tutorials and buy something from us.
Philip Greenspun 321
Livingston: Did a lot of people not have resources to implement your ideas at
the time, because the Web was still emerging?
Greenspun: People used to say, “Why should we pay you guys $30,000 to
$50,000 a month to do this thing, when we can just hire our own programmer?”
What I would tell them is, “Each company has one class of stars. In some companies
maybe it’s the salespeople, and in some companies maybe it’s the
mechanical engineers. There’s going to be one class of people for whom it’s
really easy to hire more people like that.” Hospitals are a good example. If it’s a
good hospital, the doctors will be good, and it’s very easy for them to hire good
doctors. But it’s hard for them to hire any other kind of person. Hospitals don’t
have really good advertising people; those people want to work on Madison

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