How to Sell 100 PCs in 29 Days | The APPLE Start

We had absolutely no idea what people were going to do with these things when we started out. Matter of fact, the two people it was designed for was Woz and myself, because we couldn't afford to buy a computer kit on the market. So we liberated some parts from Hewlett-Packard and Atari and worked on a design for about 6 months and decided that we would build our own computer. So we built one, and, uh, Woz was up till 4 in the morning for many moons, and we got it working. We showed some of our friends. Immediately everybody wanted one, and it turned out that it took about 40 hours to build one of these things and about another 20, 30, 40 to debug it. And we had a lot of friends that worked at similar companies who could liberate the parts also, and we found ourselves spending every spare moment of our time helping our friends to build computers. And it was just getting to be a tremendous drain on our lives. So we got the idea one day that we could make a printed circuit board without the parts in it and sell these blank printed circuit boards to our friends and probably cut the assembly and debug time down to, you know, 5, 10 hours. So Woz sold his HP-65 calculator and I sold my van and we got $1,300 together and we paid our friend of ours who was this PC board layout person $1,300 to do us a layout and decided we'd sell printed circuit boards at $20 twice what it cost to build them and hopefully recoup our calculator and transportation at some later date. So that's what we did, and I was out trying to peddle PC boards one day and walked into a bike shop, the first bike shop in Mountain View, and Paul Terrell, the then owner of the bike shop, said he would like to take 50 of these computers, and I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes. And, but he had one catch, which was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested, ready to go, which is a new twist. So we spent the next 5 days on the phone to distributors and convinced the electronics parts distributors around here to give us about $10,000 worth of parts on thin air, just on enthusiasm. So we got the parts and we built 100 computers and we sold 50 of them for cash and in 29 days paid off the distributors. And that's how we got started. So we had 50 computers left over. Well, that meant we had to sell them. So then we started worrying about marketing, worrying about distribution, got on the phone to the other computer stores around the country. And gradually the whole thing began to build momentum. And at that point in time, we had some feeling that we were on to something. But the feeling is so different than the experience of actually seeing it happen right now. It's entirely different. And sometimes a lot of people ask, "Well, did you know it was going to mushroom into this phenomenon?" And you could say, "Yeah, you know, we planned it out." lead on a piece of paper. But it's different than the experience of seeing 500 people working at Apple Computer. It's very different than the experience of seeing a 5-year-old kid who really understands what he's— the tool that he's got in front of him.