
Viaweb's First Business Plan (1995) - chuhnk
http://paulgraham.com/vwplan.html
======
gist
> 2\. Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute
> necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your
> credit card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of
> the numbers being stolen. But catalog companies may _believe_ that a secure
> link is necessary, and spending this $5000 would give Webgen a much more
> professional look.

For those who were not around then yes you had to buy at the time for roughly
that amount software to do SSL it was not like just installing openssl as is
done now.

This part I found interesting in it's naivete even back then for one thing 'no
reports of' does not equate to 'not happening': [1]

> and to date there have been no reports of the numbers being stolen.

> But catalog companies may _believe_ that a secure link is necessary

This sounds even more like 'younger person willing to take chances older
experienced person to risk adverse'.

[1] Even today I can say 'no reports of houses in my neighborhood being broken
into' but I don't really have an accurate source for things going on in my
area only ad hoc.

~~~
brudgers
The size of the internet in 1995 was such that typical path for a web based
credit card purchases used a toll-free call with a landline phone over POTS.
Long distance was still charged per minute and so was cell service. So was
most internet access. If people were online, it was probably through AOL or
Compuserve.

There weren't older people experienced with internet sales. It was all brand
new.

Looking back, unencrypted credit card information was probably less risky than
it sounds twenty five years later. The technical risks are the same for sure,
but in 1995 the vast majority of credit card transactions used carbon paper,
the physical card, and an imprinter. To be really useful, a stolen credit card
number would need to be made into a physical card. There weren't a lot of
places to use a credit card online...that's why Viaweb grew. And there wasn't
widespread internet access in the places where credit card fraud at scale
became a black market industry.

------
Animats
I was a customer of Viaweb back then. It worked fine. They charged a fixed fee
each month. Then they sold out to Yahoo and became Yahoo Store. Yahoo demanded
a cut of the merchant's revenue. Dropped Yahoo Store.

It was written in LISP, incidentally. Only language back then that could
represent an HTML tree easily.

~~~
iamwil
How did you find Viaweb as a customer? Google wasn't around in 1995, so I
imagine it was hard to find anything.

~~~
matco11
Before Google was created (and for a few years after) you would have used
other search engines/portals. In my experience, the most common back then were
(in no particular order): Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek, Excite, Altavista,
Webcrawler.

Also, internet service providers usually provided their own portal, to support
less-experienced users.

As a company/site, you depended on - adding yourself - to the lists on these
portals to be discovered by customers.

As a user, you depended on the listings on these portals/search engines to
discover sites/companies you were interested in.

~~~
adventured
To add to the list you also had some modest Web advertising, trade show
promotion and limited journal / newspaper / magazine ads & write-ups for
websites circa 1995.

------
danielpal
So ahead of their time:

 _For security, the commit command will use one-time passwords. This way, even
if someone gets the ordinary password of a user, they can 't modify the
catalog that actually appears at the site._

Yet, it was another era....:

 _Secure server software ($5000). This does not seem to be an absolute
necessity; there are a lot of sites on the web where you can send your credit
card number unencrypted, and to date there have been no reports of the numbers
being stolen._

~~~
keiferski
It makes me wonder what practices we consider normal today will be considered
horribly insecure in the future.

~~~
doublerabbit
Well, username and passwords for one

~~~
new2628
I'll bite: what's wrong with username and password?

~~~
lisper
Because in order to prove that you know the secret you have to reveal the
secret. That makes it unavoidably vulnerable to phishing.

~~~
nine_k
Not necessarily.

To prove that I have a secret key, I encrypt something of your choosing, and
you decrypt it with a public key. This is enough proof, and private parts
remain unexposed.

~~~
lisper
Re-read the question to which I was responding: "what's wrong with username
and password?"

------
krm01
It’s interesting to see that what ever worked in the early days of the web,
still works today. Viaweb —> Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, etc.

Myspace -> FB

IRC -> Slack

Aim -> WhatsApp

It seems that, to come up with a good startup idea, one can look at the early
days of the internet and replicate it for today. Preferably for a specific
niche audience first, then grow from there.

~~~
rodw
> Myspace -> FB

Some of you may be surprised how far back this chain goes. Back in the (pre-
www) day we used the `finger` command and `.plan` / `.project` files as
rudimentary versions of social profiles.

I'm not able to find anything that gives a decent sense of how these were used
in practice but if you have no idea what I'm talking about there's an animated
.plan demo at
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMFzspwuQZw).

I've always assumed that the MySpace (and later, Facebook) verb "poke" was
inspired by `finger` but I have no evidence for that.

~~~
fnord77
"webrings" were primitive social networks, too

~~~
rodw
Were they though? In my experience webrings were more like rudimentary, off-
white-to-gray-hat link-farms.

Were webrings ever used like a friend-list or is that not what you meant by
"primitive social networks"?

~~~
v64
I can't give an exact year, but my memory from the mid 90s was that webrings
were generally formed around themed content, like beanie baby webrings or coin
collecting webrings, mostly run by individual fans/enthusiasts, and were used
as a means for discovering others interested in the subject.

~~~
rodw
Ok. That's fair. That's basically the way I remember them too. I just see that
more like a distributed "web directory" used for cross promotion than a social
network, but I guess it kinda sits in between.

It was self-promotional but not in cynical or necessarily commercial way,
kinda like social media before "influencer" became a job title.

------
rodw
This is super fascinating in so many ways.

E.g. the list of features that made webgen "the most sophisticated web catalog
generator available" includes:

> 2\. Webgen generates all the buttons [as images] in a site automatically.

> 3\. Webgen creates all the thumbnail images itself.

> 4\. Webgen has a wide variety of page styles. Our default [...] puts three
> thumbnails horizontally across each page. But there are already six other
> possible section styles.

I'm not saying they are wrong (this was only a year or two after browsers -
actually probably _browser_ - supported inline images after all), but it's
funny that "generates thumbnails" and similar were seen as killer features.

------
wakatime
> We thought we only needed $15,000 in startup capital; this proved to be an
> underestimate.

When did you find out that wasn't enough money, and how much did you end up
needing at that time?

~~~
EGreg
I don’t think Paul Graham will read your comment these days

He is rarely on HN, especially if someone else posted his article at a random
time.

~~~
neonate
[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg)

------
bluedino
Computer, server, internet connection were huge costs back then. As was the
web server software.

You could use a $200 refurbished Dell, internet at Starbucks, $5/month VPS
these days.

Heck, it was hard to get a 5MB web hosting account back then for $10/month!

~~~
ken
5MB went a _lot_ further back then. Viaweb is older than Javascript or CSS --
not to mention custom fonts, video, or high-resolution bitmaps.

In 1995, 5MB was hundreds of pageloads. Today, it's one.

------
dustingetz
Viaweb could have been Amazon

~~~
throwaway1777
Paul Graham isn’t Jeff Bezos

------
statictype
>Smaller clients will have orders forwarded to them by fax---an attractive
alternative, because it is secure and uses familiar technology.

Wow.

