Company Founding and Marketing
The company was an outgrowth of Data Link Research Services (DLRS), a seller of PC clones founded in Colorado in 1987 by John W. Scherer. In 1987, DLRS produced its first VHS tutorial primarily for its own customers, Introduction to DOS. Scherer says that he quickly realized that the tutorials were more profitable than the PC clones, and in 1988 the company switched to focusing solely on the tutorials, and changed its name to Video Professor.
The company was perhaps best known in the U.S. for its frequent late-night commercials and infomercials, most of which featured Scherer. The company's first infomercial was aired in 1991, and since then all but one of the commercials and infomercials had been produced by an in-house production team. The production values of the commercials were intentionally kept minimal. The company started with VHS lessons, but began offering its lessons on CD-ROM in 1996, and online in 2003. Lesson sets were primarily sold through TV offers and online, and in later years, Scherer reached his target audience by repeatedly using the redundant phrase "learning lessons."
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