Michael Dell discusses early business tactics (Part 4)

Was to call random people on the phone and try to sell them a subscription to the Houston Post newspaper. Right. And I observed three things. The first thing I observed is that if you sounded like the people you were talking to, they were much more likely to buy the newspaper from you. Like. Like you. You put on a text, like a heavy Texas accent. Yeah, I'm not going to do it for you here, but I think you can. You can use your imagination. Okay. So second thing I observed was that people that were getting married were much more likely to buy the newspaper. And then the third thing I observed is that people that were moving into a new house or residence were also far more likely to buy the newspaper. Well, how did you know who was getting married and who was moving in? Well, you talk to them. You strike up a conversation. Do you just call people and say. And ask them about themselves? I guess this was like, at that time, people were perfectly happy to tell strangers personal details, Right? Yeah. And so I observed this, and what I figured out is that in Texas, when you. As this is true in many states, when you want to get a marriage license, you have to go to the county courthouse. It turns out this is public information. Right. And among the information that you give to the county court is the address that you want the license sent to. So with this information, I devised a direct mail program where I sent letters to all of the people that had applied for marriage licenses in a 16 county area surrounding Harris county, which is where Houston, Texas is. And I hired a bunch of my high school pals to go out to all these county courthouses and type the names into small Apple II computers. And I sent a massive direct mail campaign to all those people that were applying to get marriage licenses. And there were also, at that time in Houston, there was a building boom, and there were these very large apartment and condominium complexes that were going up. And so I would go to these buildings under construction and sort of figure out who was in charge and say, hey, I'm from the Houston police.