It was really tough to do business overseas and all of a sudden it was just an email away and that I think has had a big impact on the world and then Skype did the same thing in a bigger way , right ? You invented viral marketing . I don't think a lot of people know that you encourage them to put this footer on the bottom of every uh account in an email .
Did you know you were doing something huge at the time which today people take for granted . I mean , I , I don't know what the value of viral marketing is today , but it's in the trillions of dollars . And you invented that Yeah .
And they all love the product . And so there were these Tupperware parties and it spread and it was the cheapest marketing ever . And uh so I did kind of have that in the back of my mind thinking , you know , this is sort of like a Tupperware , you know , but , but thinking three or four moves ahead realizing that it's uh it can grow to the whole world in a pretty fast way .
It was a what if it works because what happened was they came to us with an entirely different idea . And then as they were walking out the door , they said , well , we do have this other idea and it's free web-based email and , and we kind of looked at each other and said , and then , and it was like , how are you gonna make money ? And , uh , and they didn't really know , but they were very straight of them and they just said , we don't know , but we think this is an important thing to do and we backed them and then they were gonna um uh they buy a bunch of advertising so that people knew about web based email .
I think we would have had a more peaceful and loving world if they kept it . But anyway , no P si love you but , but it spread because it had a um it was as though your customer was selling your product for you because it just it was on the bottom of everybody's email and uh it spread to 11 million users in 18 months . And the founder Savier Bao was from India and then he sent one email to his friend in India and there were 100,000 registers hot hotmail users from India in three weeks .
