were going to...
were going to be catalog companies. Now all the catalog companies are online,
but back then, they just didn’t want to hear about the Web. This was late ’95,
early ’96. A lot of people didn’t even have web access yet. So these middle
Paul Graham 209
managers at the catalog companies we called up, at that point they just wished
the Web would go away. It was just making their lives more complicated. We
would call them up and tell them how we could solve all their problems and
make an online store for them, and it was kind of like the dentist calling up
and saying, “Why don’t you come in for that root canal?”
The people, it turned out, that really wanted our software were individual
merchants—guys who had some kind of specialty store selling antique chess
pieces or something like that, and up till now had relied on people coming to
their shop to buy stuff, or maybe occasionally they would mail out a xeroxed
price sheet. For these guys, the Web was huge, because it allowed them to have
what the catalog companies had. Those users loved us.
Livingston: Why did users like Viaweb?
Graham: I think the main thing was that it was easy. Practically all the software
in the world is either broken or very difficult to use. So users dread software.
They’ve been trained that whenever they try to install something, or even fill
out a form online, it’s not going to work. I dread installing stuff, and I have a
PhD in computer science.
So if you’re writing applications for end users, you have to remember that
you’re writing for an audience that has been traumatized by bad experiences.
We worked hard to make Viaweb as easy as it could possibly be, and we had this
confidence-building online demo where we walked people through using the
software. That was what got us all the users.
The other thing was, we had good graphic design. Our secret weapon was
that we knew that e-commerce was really about graphic design, not transaction
processing. Unless you had a site that could convince people to buy, you didn’t
have a transaction to process, and what convinced people to buy was how good
the site looked. So we made sure that our software made great-looking sites—
not just better than our competitors, but better than most of the sites that big
companies paid web consultants half a million dollars to make for them.
We didn’t even process credit card transactions till about 2 years in. We
would just forward the order to the merchant, and they’d process it like a phone
order.
Livingston: Who were your competitors? Were there any that you worried
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