It's hard to believe that the show almost never made it given the incredible 30-year history of the program. Sesame Street created by the Children’s Television Workshop (recently renamed to Sesame Workshop) is a non-profit organization producing programming in 148 countries. The company's revenue in 2000 almost reached 150 million with the bulk of sales coming from licensing and royalties. Popularity of Elmo and other products has created a strong brand for Sesame Workshop.

Sesame Street has always been dedicated to enriching the educational lives of children through programming and other media avenues. As stated by the organization's website, their mission is "to create innovative, engaging content that maximizes the educational power of all media to help children reach their highest potential." This inspiring mission was almost unattainable back in the sixties.

In the beginning, the folks at the Children's Television Workshop saw the potential of how T.V. could help educate kids. They had a firm belief on utilizing research to best determine how the television could benefit children. Working with scientists, the show was conceived with a research foundation to produce educational shows that would hold the attention span of a young child and aid in the retention of learned materials.

Several 30-minute shows were produced and shown to a select audience of children before the actual airing. The research results return from the pre-screening revealed that the program did not hold children's attention. This was a disaster. What was wrong?

Originally, psychologists believed that the program should not mix fantasy with reality so all scenes were of the Muppets alone or human characters interacting among themselves. The people of Sesame Street were not interesting to children and they tuned out many of these adult scenes. The Muppets were the draw.

To hold the show's format, the change was made to include the Muppets interacting with the humans on Sesame Street. This one vital change made the difference between a flop and the successful first airing of Sesame Street.

Many successful business and products were like Sesame Street during their introduction, just requiring the right changes for success. The key moral for all business start-ups is to listen to the marketplace and make the necessary changes to succeed.