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Comment by nadam | Hacker News Reader

Did Sony, Intel, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google have 10 people who said they will buy their first product? (I am asking because I am not completely sure. Maybe it is a bit more complicated in case of very technology-heavy/research-based/very innovative startups?)

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Some did:

  Sony: started in 1945 as an electronics repair shop.  Built-in audience
  Microsoft: in 1975, MITS requested Bill Gates and Paul Allen sell their BASIC interpreter for the Altair before it was even written
  Amazon: started in 1994.  Everyone buys books, they just needed people to do it online

Intel, Apple, and Google were much riskier. Google wanted to sell its search technology to giants like Yahoo, but Yahoo refused. Apple built products no one knew they needed, but now we can't live without (hackable PC). They continue this today (iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc.).

According to Founders at Work, Steve Wozniak designed the original Apple I for fun (and as a challenge), and later when he showed it to Steve Jobs and other people at the Homebrew Computer Club they realized that lots of people (well, members of the computer club) wanted something similar.

Don't get too literal.

Each launch is different, and the environment for each business differs.

For some prospective projects, you might well get a launch with just one (good) customer to start with.

And from your list of businesses, you're also looking back at companies that launched years or decades ago, and into vastly different environments and markets than exist now.

Microsoft and Apple did, at the very least. Apple started out with a bunch of people trying to buy more of Steve Wozniak's hand built computers than he could keep up with, and Bill Gates sold IBM an operating system well before he had an actual product to show them.

Bill Gates and Microsoft started selling BASIC interpreters for the Altair computer. The IBM and DOS thing was several years later.

DOS had one customer with at least thousands of units sold before MS even started on it. Apple and Google were projects-turned-businesses, but the original Apple computer had more orders than inventory at the very beginning. (Funny, their latest iPhone still has more orders than inventory.)

No, but they were "fat startups" aka startups that weren't founded on lean startup principles, like customer validation and customer development. Fat startups definitely can be successful, but it's more of a crap shoot. Lean startup advocates would claim that the probability of a lean startup succeeding is much higher.

Apple wasn't fat. They got money up front to build the first machines, and the parts on credit. No initial order -> no machines.

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