Each person was given a cash bonus of $200 for every thousand messages he or she could answer. When she told him they couldn't work any harder, he came up with a solution: They dedicated one weekend to competing with each other to see who could get through the most unanswered emails.ĭuring that 48-hour period, everyone worked at least 10 hours beyond their regular shifts. One customer-service manager recalled that, when the staff got a week and a half behind in answering emails-despite putting in 12-hour days, seven days a week-Mr. Those who dropped below seven were often fired. The best of them could answer a dozen emails a minute. They were paid about $10 to $13 an hour, but with the possibility of promotions and stock options dangled before their glazed eyes. Disaffected academics were popular because they were well-read and could supposedly help find books on a huge variety of topics. The people handling these emails were generally overqualified and underpaid, with no experience in bookselling. By 1999 it was manned by 500 representatives packed into cubicles and answering customers' questions. Bezos later called "the cornerstone of "-started with the founder himself answering emails. Bezos hired mobile billboards to cruise by Barnes & Noble stores displaying the question, "Can't find that book you wanted?" along with Amazon's website address. Word kept spreading, despite the fact that the company did virtually no advertising its first year. In less than a year, it had its first hour with an order of 100 books. By October, the company had its first day logging in 100 book sales. "I thought that was the most brilliant idea I had ever heard in my life," he said.ĭespite what seemed to be a pathetically amateurish operation, Amazon grew up very quickly once it was launched. Lovejoy suggested the obvious: Buy some tables. The employee, Nicholas Lovejoy, "looked at me like I was a Martian," Mr. He later recalled in a speech that, after hours of doing this, he commented to one of the employees that they had to get knee pads. Bezos had neglected to order packing tables, so people ended up on their knees on the concrete floor to package the books. Bezos: "We found that customers could order a negative quantity of books! And we would credit their credit card with the price and, I assume, wait around for them to ship the books."ĭuring the first few weeks, everyone at the company was working until two or three in the morning to get the books packed, addressed and shipped. Among the early mistakes, according to Mr. Bezos's philosophy was to get to market quickly, in order to get a jump on the competition, and to fix problems and improve the site as people started using it. The following week brought in nearly $15,000 worth of orders, and the team was able to ship just over $7,000 worth of them.Īt launch, the site wasn't even truly finished. That week, the company shipped just $846 worth of books. "We thought about it some, and we realized it might be like taking a sip from a fire hose, but we decided to go ahead and go for it." Yahoo put the site on the list, and orders soared.īy the end of the week, Amazon took in over $12,000 worth of orders. "Jerry said, 'We think your site is pretty cool would you like us to put it on the What's Cool page?' " Mr. A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off. One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in. At first, there were a half-dozen orders per day. Thanks to discounts of 10% to 30%, orders started coming in as soon as the site launched. The warehouse could store just a few hundred books on their way from the distributor to customers. The desks were made from cheap doors, with sawed-off two-by-fours for legs. He had 1,100 square feet of office space on the second floor and 400 square feet in the basement to use as a warehouse. Bezos moved the company to an industrial neighborhood that it shared with a needle-exchange program and a shuttered pawnshop. The site was launched on July 16, 1995-just as masses of people started moving onto the Internet and before many competitors had created strong commercial sites. The garage had actually been converted into a recreation room, but Mr. Bezos chose it in part because it had one crucial requirement-a garage, so that he could boast of having a garage start-up like Silicon Valley legends from Hewlett-Packard on.
Their first rental, a three-bedroom house in the suburb of Bellevue, cost $890 a month. When the site first launched in 1995, everyone at the company was working until 2 or 3 in the morning, kneeling on a concrete floor, to get the books packed, addressed and shipped.