Guthy Renker's Infomercial Evolution
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A story about how Guthy Renker started their infomercial empire from a simple cassette duplication business.
"One of the guys, Guthy, had started a company that just does audio cassette production - copying. If you have a cassette and want more copies, send me the original recording and I'll make you copies. They were basically like Kinko's for audio cassettes.
He gets this order where a guy wanted almost 100,000 cassettes made. He asked what they were making, and it turned out to be 50,000 copies of a cassette about real estate investments. The guy was selling through infomercials.
So Guthy goes to his buddy Renker, who at the time had a family that owned a tennis resort, and says 'Hey dude, this guy ordered 50,000 copies of this cassette. Forget making cassettes - let's do this infomercial thing.'
They needed a product, so they looked at something they both loved - the book Think and Grow Rich. They bought the rights for $100,000, hired football player Frank Tarkenton to do the infomercial, and ended up making $10 million in the next 3 years just from sales of Think and Grow Rich.
They now do between $1.5-2 billion in sales a year and own brands like Proactiv and Tony Robbins' personal power audiobooks."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.