Four days

Jon Benson invented the video sales letter. In 2025 he was picking a vendor to build the software version of a process his team ran in spreadsheets. The finalist wanted about fifty thousand dollars.

I’d been introduced to Jon a few weeks earlier. I asked to see the spreadsheets. Then, instead of writing a proposal, I built the interface. It took three or four days. It wasn’t finished. It worked.

Jon looked at it and stopped talking to the vendor. When he asked what I wanted to charge, I said I trusted him to be fair. He paid about five times what I would have asked. Then he asked me to lead the next version of the product. I spent the following five weeks committing to his company’s repository.

I think about this one a lot, because nothing clever happened. The spreadsheets already described the product. Someone just had to believe that and build it before the meeting instead of after.