Okay, back to that first meeting. I almost lost my job the very first day. So we're sitting at the meeting at the ad agency, and they bring out the first ad that Spinnaker Software is going to run. And a debate opens up because it's two parents and their kid, their 11-year-old kid. And the debate is, should the kid be a boy or a girl? And this guy's going, boy, boy, boy. This guys go, girl, girl, girl, back and forth and back and forth. And I stupidly said, well, why don't we just hire an actor who we can't tell if they're a boy or a girl? And they looked at me like I was an idiot. And they were correct. Not because gender assigned at birth is critical to any of this, but because the opportunity is to find not the biggest possible audience, but the smallest viable audience.
How few people would you need to delight or thrill? How few people would need to benefit from your network effect for your project to work? because what it means to pick that number, 100, 1,000, let's be clear, the iPhone only sold 100,000 units its first month. How many people would you need? Because that puts you on the hook. It's interesting to realize that before the iPhone, Apple made a product called a Newton. A Newton felt a lot like a Kindle, but it recognized handwriting. It's generally accepted that this is the worst mistake, the biggest failure in Apple's history until the recent virtual headset. They sold a hundred thousand of them in the first month at a thousand dollars each.
That's a hundred million dollars. It was a huge success. And then it wasn't because they had a group of people, but they weren't a group. They were just a bunch. They weren't connected. They weren't in it for the same reason. They weren't responding to the same story. So what we're seeking is the smallest viable audience. We want to give them something that they want to talk about. Their group of people wants to hear. And then we want to create a ratchet where more connection and more action leads to more status and more affiliation. Do I have an example, you might ask? In fact, I do right here. So 20 years ago, I had been kicked out of the book publishing industry because I had done a big book and it had failed.
So I had no publisher. And I met a baker in France named Lionel Poilâne, and we became good friends. He died in a tragic helicopter crash, and I wanted to dedicate a book to his memory. So I wrote a book called Purple Cow. You may recognize the title. it came in a milk carton. I self-published this book, and getting a book into a milk carton is a lot harder than it looks. I self-published this book, and I only made 10,000 of them. I went to the people I had permission to talk to, my readers in Fast Company Magazine. My column there was pretty popular, and in the column I wrote, hey, I wrote this book. You can get a copy for free if you send me $5 for postage and handling.
So selling 5,000 of them to people who were already connected with each other, who already gave me the benefit of the doubt, who already trusted me for $5, that wasn't very hard. And I mailed it in the milk carton so that we just put a label on here and mailed it to people. What happened next? Well, first I let people know that if they wanted a 12-pack, I had a few 12-packs, 400 of them. So I sold every book I had printed in the form of 5,000 individuals and 412 packs. But if you get a 12-pack, what are you going to do with it? You have to give them away. Why would you give them away? You would give them away because your life would get better if your friends saw you as this generous leader.
And what about the milk carton? Putting the milk carton on your desk sent a message to your boss. And that message was, let's talk about this. It wasn't because they wanted to help Seth Godin. They didn't know Seth Godin. It was because if their boss got excited about this idea of making remarkable products and services, their lives would get better. They would enjoy work more. They might get promoted. So I created a network effect with paper, and it spread. The book went on to sell more than a million copies, again, because having the book, talking about the book, invited you to be part of something, something you wanted to be part of. It begins, always begins, not with the biggest possible audience, but with the smallest viable audience, the one you can live with.