Evans was telling the origin story of Amazon Prime, which he says began purely as a fast-delivery program with no perks. The idea came through Amazon's internal "idea tool"; the extra benefits were added later.
Well, it wasn't that unique, right? Like Costco, like.
Well, there's multiple things, right? Was the initial thing just, hey, there's a membership with perks or was it two-day? Hey, what if we could do two-day shipping? That'll change everything.
So there were originally, there was supposed to be no perks. It wasn't a perk-based program. It was purely a fast shipping program. That was the initial idea. And I think the biggest thing that would be interesting is Jeff was about to have a shitty quarter and he could see things lining up. It was right after the internet crashed, kind of, and still the bubble. He could see the quarter wasn't going to be what Wall Street wanted. And so he said, we need something. And so Prime was originally called Project 100 because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. It's not a two-day shipping program. It's a two-day delivery program. And you might be like, what's the difference? That's a distinction without a difference. Jeff figured out, we're going to call it two-day delivery. It began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipping, but he knew over time he'd get down to where two days he could do often one day through the post office or one day on his own trucks. And it never told you the shipping method. So the origin anyway was Jeff trying to have good news to tell investors in a rough time. Because back then, he wasn't Jeff Bezos, the inevitable tycoon. He was still Jeff Bezos, the…
Well, even the fast shipping thing, okay, that sounds not controversial, but nobody was doing it. And I think nobody was doing it because it was going to be expensive. You'd lose money. And so there had to be some strategic rationale or some big picture vision or some clever hack to make that…
Yeah, well, Jeff was willing to lose money for a long time, but the big joke at Amazon for a long time was, oh, yeah, we lose money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume. Which, of course, on straight math, you're just going to lose more money. But of course, with economy of scale and…
Can I ask you a question about Amazon's website? I use Amazon as an example about why bad design is better than good design. And I use the example, like good design is used, I think, poorly. Good design means the customer does the desired action. But oftentimes, like a Brooklyn cool kid will think…
