Bizarre First Products from Famous Tech Brands
The companies that now define how the world communicates, works, and plays all had to start somewhere. For most of them, that starting point had nothing to do with the products that made them famous.
Some began in industries so far removed from technology that the connection seems impossible. Others tried something reasonable and failed completely before accidentally landing on what actually worked.
Either way, the origin stories are stranger than the polished company histories tend to admit.
Nintendo Spent Nearly a Century Selling Playing Cards
Before Nintendo made video games, it made playing cards. The company was founded in Kyoto in 1889 — almost a hundred years before the NES — specifically to manufacture hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards used for gambling games.
The founder, Fusajiro Yamauchi, made them by hand from the bark of mulberry trees. Nintendo stayed in the playing card business for decades.
It later licensed Disney characters to put on its cards, tried launching a taxi company and a love hotel chain, and generally struggled to find a direction. Video games didn’t come until the 1970s.
The company that created Mario spent its first eighty years selling cards.
Samsung Sold Dried Fish and Noodles
Samsung is now one of the largest electronics conglomerates on the planet. In 1938, when Lee Byung-chul founded it in Daegu, South Korea, it was a small trading company dealing in dried fish, vegetables, and noodles.
The name Samsung means “three stars” in Korean, chosen to represent something large and powerful. For the first decade of its existence, the company’s most notable product was groceries.
Electronics didn’t arrive until the 1960s. Semiconductors came even later. The path from dried squid to OLED displays was longer than most people imagine.
Sony’s First Product Was a Rice Cooker That Didn’t Work
Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita founded what became Sony in 1946 in a bombed-out department store in Tokyo. Their first attempt at a consumer product was an electric rice cooker — essential for any Japanese household, and seemingly a practical choice.
The cooker was a failure. It cooked rice unevenly and inconsistently, and they couldn’t get it to work reliably. The company moved on to tape recorders, which the Japanese education ministry bought in large numbers, and the direction changed.
The rice cooker that didn’t cook rice properly was the starting point for a company that eventually defined consumer electronics.
Nokia Made Rubber Boots and Toilet Paper
Nokia’s name comes from the town of Nokia in Finland, where the company began in 1865 as a wood pulp mill. Over the following century, the company expanded into rubber products — including boots, tyres, and raincoats — and eventually into cable and electronics manufacturing.
By the 1970s, Nokia had interests across paper, rubber, cables, televisions, and military communications equipment. The idea of focusing on mobile phones didn’t emerge until the late 1980s.
The company that once dominated the global phone market started out making rubber boots and selling toilet paper. It took more than a hundred years to find its most famous product.
Toshiba Made Telegraph Equipment
Toshiba traces its origins to 1875, when Hisashige Tanaka founded a telegraph equipment manufacturer in Tokyo. Tanaka was already famous in Japan as an inventor of mechanical dolls and other devices before he turned to industrial manufacturing.
The telegraph business evolved into electrical equipment, then into consumer appliances, and eventually into computers and semiconductors. Toshiba was making laptops before most of the world knew what a laptop was.
But the first product that left its factory was a telegraph machine — technology that was itself cutting edge at the time, just not in the way anyone now associates with the brand.
LG Sold Cosmetics and Soap
— Photo by BGStock72
LG, the Korean company known for televisions, phones, and home appliances, started life in 1947 as Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Corp. Its first product was a face cream.
It followed that with soap, toothpaste, and other household chemical products. The electronics division came much later, after the company merged with GoldStar in 1983 and eventually rebranded as LG — standing for both the merged companies and the slogan “Life’s Good.”
The company that makes OLED televisions and washing machines started out as a cosmetics manufacturer. The face cream came before the fridge.
YouTube Was Built as a Dating Site
YouTube launched in 2005. The three founders — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — originally conceived it as a video-based dating platform where users could upload clips of themselves describing the kind of partner they were looking for.
The dating concept got no traction at all. Users ignored the intended purpose and uploaded whatever videos they wanted.
The founders noticed, stopped pushing the dating angle, and let people upload freely. Within months, the site had more traffic than they knew what to do with.
Google acquired it in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars. The failed dating site became the second-most-visited website on earth.
Slack Grew Out of a Failed Video Game
Stewart Butterfield co-founded Slack, now one of the most widely used workplace communication tools in the world. Before Slack, he tried to build a massively multiplayer online game called Glitch.
The game launched in 2011 and shut down in 2012 after failing to attract enough players. During the development of Glitch, the team built an internal messaging tool to keep themselves coordinated across different locations.
When the game closed, Butterfield looked at what they had left and decided the internal tool was worth more than the game had been. Slack launched in 2013.
The game nobody played produced the software that millions of offices now depend on.
Instagram Started as a Whisky Check-in App
Before Instagram, there was Burbn. Kevin Systrom built a location check-in app with a focus on whisky — users could check in at locations, make plans with friends, and post about what they were drinking.
It was a fairly crowded market and the app was complicated to use. Systrom and his co-founder Mike Krieger looked at their usage data and noticed that the one feature people actually used was photo sharing.
Everything else got stripped away. The result was Instagram, launched in 2010.
It reached a million users in three months and was sold to Facebook two years later for a billion dollars. The photo app that changed how people present their lives started as a drinks tracker.
HP’s First Product Was Built in a Garage for a Disney Film
Hewlett-Packard’s first product was an audio oscillator — a device that generates precise audio frequencies for testing and calibration. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built it in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, and their first customer was Walt Disney Studios, which bought eight units for use in producing Fantasia.
The garage has since become a landmark, often called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. But HP itself went on to become one of the largest personal computer and printer companies in the world — a long way from a frequency-testing device built for a cartoon film about dancing hippos.
Apple’s First Product Was a Circuit Board
Apple’s origin story usually centres on Steve Jobs, the garage, and the idea of a computer for everyone. What Apple actually sold first was considerably more limited.
The Apple I, released in 1976, was a bare circuit board. It had no case, no keyboard, no monitor, and no power supply.
Buyers had to source all of those components themselves and assemble the machine. Steve Wozniak designed it as a project he was proud of technically.
Jobs was the one who thought they should sell it. They made two hundred of them and sold them mostly to hobbyists and computer enthusiasts.
The computer for everyone started as a board for people who already knew exactly what computers were.
Twitter Came from a Podcasting Company
Twitter emerged from a company called Odeo, which was building a platform for finding and subscribing to podcasts. Then Apple launched iTunes with podcast support in 2005, and Odeo’s entire business model became irrelevant almost overnight.
The company held a series of internal hackathons to find a new direction. Jack Dorsey presented the idea of a short-message status update service during one of those sessions.
The team built a prototype in two weeks. Odeo’s investors were bought out, a new company was formed around the idea, and Twitter launched publicly in 2006.
A company that had just watched its product become obsolete accidentally produced one of the most consequential communication platforms of the next two decades.
The Distance Between the First Product and the Famous One
One thing these stories have in common is not failure exactly but rather getting the wrong direction. Most of these companies were not producing bad products.
They simply created products that were suitable for their specific environment at the time. Playing cards would have been a logical thing to buy and play with in 1889 Kyoto.
Dried fish might have been a typical Korean food in 1938. And a rubber factory would be a logical business in 19th century Finland.
The difference between being originally those businesses and becoming the companies they are was never made by a single brilliant decision. It has been made through a long time of changing direction, trying out things, failing in one thing, getting to know something unexpected, and following that instead.
Usually, the famous product was not the intention. It was the outcome when the plan did not work out.
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