If only 1%...

A musician bought a quarter-page ad in a magazine with a circulation of one million copies:

“He had bought a quarter-page advertisement in the back of a magazine with a circulation of one million people.”

He pressed 10,000 copies of his CD, bought 10,000 padded envelopes and mailing labels, turned his garage into a shipping center, and kept repeating that if only one percent of the readers bought it, that would be 10,000 copies. And that was just one percent. The issue came out, the ad was there, everything worked. Over the following weeks he got four orders. Total CDs sold: FOUR.

“He forgot there was a number lower than one percent.”

Taken from And if only 1% of those people, written by Derek Sivers