The Year's Laziest Marketing Email
The year 1998 saw the launch of a very different type of search engine. Apart from its funky name, the new website approached the problem from an entirely different perspective. Within months, it blew up and left AskJeeves, AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and their ilk in the dust.
Google grew rapidly and organically from its inception. (The Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 added google as a verb.) In its early days, the company spent exactly zero dollars on marketing. Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were software engineers who dismissed marketing as a legitimate business function. If you built a kick-ass product, they reasoned, then you didn't need to tell people about it.
John Batelle's 2005 book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is well worth reading, even today.
What would have happened if Yahoo! had ponied up a mere $1 millionβyes, millionβfor Google in 1998? It's not like the company lacked the cheddar. Its market cap was roughly $30 billion back then.
In 1999, Larry and Sergey relented and dubiously hired someone to spearhead Google's nascent marketing efforts: Douglas Edwards. Eventually, he wrote a book about his experience. I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 is fascinating.
It'll only take a moment.
