Aside from my usual training/consulting business at that time,I also had a business in what was called “premiums or “custom publishing”. You have likely gotten a mailing from a magazine, offering you a subscription with a free gift – a gadget, a diary, or a book of tips or ideas.

I’d come up with an idea for one of the magazines in the Time-Life group. First, they would test it by send out a mailing offering my idea as well as two other ideas to a test audience. Whichever of the 3 ideas got more responses was the winner, and that idea was then “rolled out” for a much larger project, sometimes to a million or more potential customers. Usually, they got about 5,000 affirmative responses.

What this meant, to a small vendor like me, was that I’d have to create the actual 5,000 booklets (at enormous cost, usually a loss) to fulfill the first 5,000 customers.