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How to Sell Without a Product: 5 Billion Dollar Companies That Sold Before They Built
Ingeniosity Issue #4
Bill McIntosh
October 17, 2023
Hey Ingeniuses,
This Q4, let’s end the year by going big.
And what better way to go big with another dose of Ingeniosity?
Today, you’ll learn how 5 different billion dollar companies started off selling more than they were actually building.
But, before that I want to share some of my favorite Internet finds of the past week:
The key to success, not just in business, but in life, is to JUST GET STARTED!
People wait forever to actually get started because they're afraid of failure.
The truth is: it's actually ok to start off with something that's… a little bad!
It's even okay to SELL something before it's even completely built! They call this “preselling”.
Wanting to launch the perfect product keeps people from ever starting and they never end up pursuing their dreams.
It's actually more important to sell a rough, unfinished product that gets the bare minimum job done.
THEN, you adjust, learn, and gradually build up the perfect product you have in your dreams.
Don't believe me? Let me show you some examples.
The following pictures are of the first versions of websites that are now multibillion dollar empires.
Initially, their site looked like this.
They started off with NO PAYMENTS (payments were made in cash when you got to the place), NO MAP VIEW, and it was funded with personal credit card debt.
The initial Airbnb product offering was broken in a lot of ways.
Now they're worth over 80 billion.
Before Twitch was the multibillion dollar empire that it is now, it was justin.tv.
When it looked like this, it only had two features: an extremely low res 24/7 livestream of the founder, Justin, and chat.
Nothing else.
It now has over 2 million concurrent viewers at any given time across thousands of streamers.
Amazon eventually acquired the site for almost $1 billion - and it all started with this ugly, pixely livestream of a regular guy.
In 1994, this business was famously launched out of a garage.
Bezos decided to leave his well paid job as a Wall Street investment banker to launch a book store.
He saw the writing on the wall with how powerful the Internet was going to be and thought he would be better off betting on an online book store versus his pedigree Wall Street job.
After making a basic website with lots of book listings, they went live.
That was the whole business.
It essentially started off as a dropshipping site!
When someone bought a book, he ordered it from the distributor and shipped it to their address.
Within a month, he was doing $20,000 in sales every week.
With the surge in the order of books online, more books were listed.
Now, years later, Amazon is worth over a trillion...
And it all started off with an ugly website that DROPSHIPPED books to its customers.
Goes to show you how just getting started can get you far.
Also, little known fact:
They almost launched under the brand name of Cadabra inc, but people told him it sounded like cadaver.
They started in 2009 looking like this...
Like the others, Uber started off clunky, ugly, and really unsophisticated.
You actually had to text their address to the company and your Uber would show up.
Famously, people had to email one of the founders to even gain access to the service if you wanted an account.
Uber went public in 2019, reporting over 90 million average monthly users when it filed with the SEC.
When you’re just starting out, less is (always) more.
Take one core feature and focus on testing and validating that concept. Keep it as simple and small as possible.
Today this business is worth over 80 billion.
Back in the day, when they were brand new, Twitter started off as an internal messaging tool for a podcast publishing company named Odeo in 2006.
The tool was a hit with employees, so the founders took it to the public.
This ugly website got 20k tweets a day in its first public month.
And now?
Elon Musk took it over for 44 billion.
These launches are all "minimal viable products" or "MVP"s - a product with the core features needed and NOTHING more.
They're usually ugly, a little buggy, and WORSE than existing competitors. They usually launch FAST.
Michael Seibel, the cofounder of Twitch, says "If it takes more than a month to build, it's not an MVP"
He says the key to an MVP is to "launch something bad quickly" - this is the man that sold twitch for $970 million.
Why launch so fast and release something that feels incomplete?
The key to business growth is quickly responding to REAL LIFE customer feedback in realtime.
If you theoretically engineer a product out for months, you're building something that responds only to theory, not real customer interaction.
You get an MVP out there fast to respond to what real customers do with your product.
From there you can optimize, and adjust, and build out the "perfect" polished product over time.
It will feel WEIRD. Your first version will be BAD so you will receive NEGATIVE FEEDBACK, which can sting.
Though, if you can persist past this, respond to the feedback, and consistently build something better over time, you will be rewarded handsomely.
When launching a product, it's completely acceptable to sell the product before it's even built.
This is how crowdfunding works, and there are entire companies like Kickstarter built around funding these types of MVPs.
CAUTION:
Don't launch a bad product and leave it! THAT will cause problems. As long as you're learning from your first users and responding to problems, then you will win.
Also - don't fall in love with your MVP. People fall in love with a vision they have in their head, but end up having to pivot and do something completely different.