Apple is $20 a share away from being the first $1 trillion company
@doener's retrospective from 2017 captures the critical transition from initial concept to the first dollar of customer revenue.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Early traction rarely comes from passive launches; it requires direct manual outreach, personal network activation, and high-touch customer support.
Narrowing down the target audience to a specific niche allows solo founders to out-position generic horizontal competitors.
Underpricing out of fear of rejection is common; founders who set premium pricing often discover higher customer satisfaction and lower churn.
Community Debate Themes:
Discussions analyzed Show HN launch mechanics, cold DM outreach conversion rates, and the psychology of validating customer demand before writing code.
CATEGORY Zero to One →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 22 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 11 comments
Okay, a bit of ill-informed armchair analysis here, so get your grains of salt ready:
Strong stock price yes, and high gross profits, but Apple's P/E ratio is worse than many of the others in the upper echelons of profit. Google's is worse still, but there at least is significant diversification in the tech sector making it a safer "disruption-resistant" bet.
And I don't see much room for growth in Apple. Barring surprises, which have been absent in the last few years, Apple has an uphill battle improving its market share globally. Compare this to the emerging nations of the world that decidedly cannot buy new iPhones in quantity, but can buy commodity-priced Android hardware.
There's still a place for "premium" in the mix too: During the rise of Android, Apple & iOS were looked to as best of breed, head & shoulders above the rest. But in the last 2-3 years, while this is still the case, the gap between Apple and flag-ship competitors on the Android side has narrowed significantly. They lag on somethings too, such as late-to-the-game screen size increases where either aesthetics or inertia give them a blind spot. Or maybe its that the Android ecosystem forces a lot more feature variation because there's so many more handset manufacturers. I don't know.
It just seems like Apple is now competing mostly on market-hyping novelty features, and that's a hard game to win in for very long. I'd be very bear-ish on Apple if 1+ years pass without something a bit more wow.
Isn't Standard Oil considered to be the first $1T company in today's dollars?
Dawn of a new era. The era of mega corporations.