Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: So what did happen?
Paul Graham 209
Graham: We wrote a lot of software. We thought, “That’s what we’re good at.
That’s what we’ll do.” We just tried to put as much distance between any potential
competitor and us as we could.
By that fall, we probably had a better online store builder than any of our
competitors ever had, even 3 years later. In October or November I went down
to New York and did demos for some angel investors and we got $100,000
more, which seemed to us more money than we could ever possibly spend. (We
were wrong.)
Livingston: So what happened next?
Graham: We were very encouraged that the angel investors wanted to invest.
We gave demos to two investors. We only wanted to raise $50,000, but both of
the investors who saw the demos said yes. So we thought, “All right, we’ll raise
$100,000 then, since they both said yes.”
Then we wrote more software. It didn’t look then like we had an awful lot of
competitors, so we took a risk and rewrote most of the code. Even though it was
pretty good, we thought, “If we’re ever going to rewrite this thing, now’s the
time to do it.” Finally in December we started trying to get users.
Livingston: Who were your first customers and what did they think when you
first showed them Viaweb?
Graham: Our first customers were a pair of technical bookstores. Robert actually
went with me on the sales call to the first one. He just sat there absolutely
silent through the whole thing. I think both of these bookstores were frightened
of Amazon. Most people back then, you had to kind of twist their arm to get
them to sell online, but not people in the technical book business.
Livingston: Tell me a little about your relationships with your first customers.
Graham: We felt like we had to have five or six customers to launch. And for
these first customers, we basically would do whatever they said in order to get
them as customers. We gave them the software for free for as long as they
wanted. We built their sites ourselves. If they needed to have images in them,
we would scan the images. We were basically web consultants, because we
needed users; you can’t launch a thing like this without having any users.
That’s one of the problems with web-based software. If you’re making desktop
software and you launch the thing, no one can tell how many other users
there are, right? But if you’re making web-based software and you’re hosting
the websites that these guys build, then if you don’t have any users, the entire
world can see that.
Livingston: Were most people that you tried to pitch your software to online
retailers? Were there things that they misunderstood?
Graham: One of the big things we got wrong was that we thought our users
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