This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "Bill Gross: Weekend Warriors Discover the Pivot" (created 2011-03-01). The excerpt is a first-person narrative by Bill Gross describing the early-1990s consumer-educational software company Knowledge Adventure, its in-store "Weekend Warriors" demo campaign, and how direct customer observation led to the strategic pivot of creating narrowly age-targeted JumpStart products (e.g., Kindergarten, Preschool through 6th grade). He recounts sales tactics, investor/background context, the internal debate and risk to produce single-year-age products, the resulting commercial success (roughly 20 million copies sold), and the broader lesson about learning from customers and the later power of internet-enabled real-time feedback. (Metadata: YouTube content; title as above; createdtime 2011-03-01; lastedited_time 2025-12-31.)
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So, I started this company called Knowledge Adventure. And our first product, we came out with Dinosaur Adventure, Knowledge Adventure, Space Adventure. We worked with Buzz Aldrin to make a product called Space Adventure. These were all CD-ROM products, multimedia products in the early '90s. And the company made an amazing pivot and there's an important story in the pivot that the company made. We were selling a lot of products, thousands, tens of thousands. We were making a little bit of money. We had got a Silicon Valley investor, Moore Davidow, really, really great person on our board. John Fiber joined our company and really, really helped us and then from Mayfield, Mike Leventhal, so those were our two partners to help us grow the company. But we were really challenged to try and explain to people who the product was for. One Christmas, we really wanted to make our sales numbers and my brother, who was in the company with me as well, said we should do this thing where we go into stores and really try and move the products ourselves. We had 65 people in the company at the time. Each one of us took a laptop and a stack of products and would go to a CompUSA or Egghead Software or Fry's or whatever in like a 100-mile radius of Pasadena where we were based. We would go in on a Saturday morning and set up, bring in a box of donuts to bribe the salespeople to let us set up at the end of the aisle. We called it Weekend Warriors. Everybody in the company had to volunteer to take 2 weekend days. They get a day off during the week to make up for it. This was really to try and make our numbers at Christmas time. We went in and demoed all day at the end of the aisle showing parents the product with their kids in the software aisle. We sold a lot of products. The great thing about it was we would boost the sales in the stores we were at by so much that someone at headquarters like in Texas at CompUSA would say this big thing happening in California, they couldn't figure out what they didn't know what it was because we hadn't told them. But then they would order more for all of their stores. That really, really boosted our sales. Eventually, we got Walmart to carry our product because our numbers were going up so much from CompUSA. But one thing that we learned after doing this for about 4 weeks, every Monday morning after the Weekend Warriors, we'd sit down at the company and we'd have everybody tell stories, war stories about what happened in their stores and funny stories about parents with their children, what people liked. We really had great sessions where we would learn more about the customer. That's what's so powerful about companies that can be developed today with the internet. We had to go go out and meet the customer firsthand on the pavement and then come back and tell stories about it. But now you can be in contact with all of your customers. It's obviously so incredible today. Let me tell you one of the things we learned. We found one of the people who went out to one of the stores saw that in the aisle, parents were confused about which product to buy for their particular child. They would look at their child, they'd pick up boxes, we'd see them turn the boxes over, they'd read the back, they'd try and figure out. They were so confused because the products had a wide age range. We were competing against EA and Broderbund and other companies who had products as well. And there was Dr. Seuss products and others. It was very hard to figure out, is this one going to be age-appropriate for my child? And everybody to try and make their product more broad, us included, would put the widest age range we could on the box. In fact, I think one of our products, Knowledge Adventure, said fun for ages 8 to 108, kind of trying to say this would be good for everybody. Well, it turned out by saying that, it wasn't good for everybody. People couldn't figure out if it would be good enough for their particular child. What the idea we came up with was, what about if we make a product that was just for one year age range? What if we made something called JumpStart Kindergarten that was just for kindergarten? So just parents who had preschoolers or people in kindergarten or just before kindergarten would know this would give their kids a head start in kindergarten. We had a big argument at the company about this. We had an argument with the sales team because they thought, I can't convince a store to take a product that's for only one year age range. It's not going to move enough. I can't convince distributors to take it. But we talked about it more. We really felt this was going to be a worthwhile experiment. We should make JumpStart Preschool and JumpStart Kindergarten put them in the stores, we'll take the risk, it will cost us $250 grand each to make them and let's just find out. It was a pretty big risk, but we did it. The thing sold probably 20 to 50x our other products just because parents would come in, pick up the box, there was an aspirational aspect to it where people would say, hey, I have a 3-year-old, I want him to do really well in kindergarten, I want her to do really well in preschool and they would buy up even. When we eventually came out with JumpStart First Grade, parents with preschoolers were buying that because they wanted their kids to have it. We eventually made all the way from toddler to 6th grade. We had JumpStart Toddler, preschool, kindergarten, and then 1 through 6. We sold 20 million copies of that. It was a wild, wild success for it. We would have never, ever discovered it had we not been in the stores seeing the confusion of parents in the aisle. It was an enormous risk for our company. Maybe not that big of a risk because the expense wasn't that great, but it was a big— we would have probably gotten a pretty big ding had the product not worked out. But if we hadn't heard from the parents so directly what they were looking for and what they were needing to make a decision, we would have never come up with that. I've tried to reuse that lesson as much as I can in other companies going forward. It's what got me so excited excited about the internet a number of years later, about how you could have the real-time interaction from a web browser. Now, without apps, you have unbelievable real-time interaction with customers to find out what they like, to iterate, and really deliver what they want.
