Founders of Google, Amazon, Facebook and others say that starting a business should start small

“All the most famous and beloved things started small.” — Joel Gascoigne

Joel, CEO of Buffer, wrote an article not long ago specifically describing the importance of starting small with new projects. In the article, he made a very important point that while people are amazed by other people's new products, they often ignore the long and arduous journey that others have gone through to get their products to this point.

“It’s hard for people to understand the contribution and crucial role that a product or brand has gone through in its evolution to get to where it is today.”

Joel went on to mention that it is easier to succeed if you start with a small project. Start small and then grow bigger.

“Don’t think about building a startup. That’s a premature shortcut. Just build something that looks interesting.” — Paul Graham

To further understand how some of the most important Internet companies in the world started out small, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time. The design of a company's products doesn't give us a full picture of what's going on behind the scenes, but looking at their past designs is still a way to peek into their development process. In addition, the founders of these companies have very useful advice on why they started small and why they ended up being so successful.

Now let’s take a look at how these giants have transformed from being insignificant at the beginning to being so important today.

Facebook — “Build a long-term product”

“I’m all about building a long-term product. Everything else is just a distraction.” — *Mark Zuckerberg*

Zuckerberg's vision was big: to bring the world closer together through social networking. But at the beginning, his goal was just to connect college students, but today it has grown into one of the largest and most popular social networks in the world. And because of Zuckerberg's commitment to continuously build the company, Facebook continues to grow and develop today.

“I know it sounds corny, but I’m passionate about improving people’s lives, especially in terms of social interaction… Making the world more open is not something that’s going to happen overnight. It’s going to take 10 to 15 years.”

Facebook when it was founded in 2004

Facebook is much larger and more complex today than it was when it first started, but Zuckerberg still maintains the vision it promised back then;

"A lot of the principles at Facebook are about how the world will be a better place if people have access to more information and are more connected; people will have more understanding and empathy. That's been my guiding principle. When I was having a hard time, I sometimes wanted to give up, but it was that guiding principle that pulled me back."

Facebook in 2013

Google — “Do one thing well”

"When Sergey and I founded Google, we hoped, but did not anticipate, that it would reach its current size and influence. Our strong and abiding interest has been in objectively enabling people to find the information they want more efficiently." — Larry Page

Google in 1998:

Google's design has remained simple over the years, even as the company has expanded and added more products and services like Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and Drive. When you open Google.com, you'll see that Google is still focused on the same fundamentals: information retrieval.

“When you use Google, we want to get your request as quickly as possible.” — Larry Page

Google in 2014

Tumblr — “Created to solve my own problems”

David Karp created Tumblr out of his own desire to create it. Blogs were already popular, but the focus was on writing text — something Karp correctly judged was not something everyone wanted to do.

“You’re given a blank input field, and then you need to come up with a headline that convinces the reader to click, and then you need to write a few paragraphs with beautiful HTML and well-placed images, and then you can provide some audio, and then you have a real creation.” — David Karp

Tumblr in 2007

Today, Karp attributes Tumblr's success to its vision of "more stuff," like visual elements like photos and GIFs, and that Tumblr will continue to focus on building features his team loves to use.

"Something that's still very true today is that I think Tumblr is still a product that was built first and foremost for us as a team, and we use it for hours every day. I think that's not only made the product successful, but it's also kept us very close to the essence of what Tumblr is, and kept us from straying too far from the original vision."

Tumblr in 2014

YouTube — “Don’t assume you know the answers”

The YouTube team promised that they would validate their assumptions and build new features based on how the community integrates with their products and based on some of their previous experiences:

"We actually have a lot of ideas for the development of YouTube. For example, we can imitate PayPal and eBay and make YouTube a very powerful way to integrate videos into auctions, but we don't see that our current users will use our product in this way, so we didn't add these features." - Chad Hurley

YouTube in 2005

Co-founder Chad Hurley advises other startup founders to listen to their users to validate their assumptions, and not jump right into a giant product blueprint that aligns with your company’s vision:

“When you start building a product, don’t assume you have all the answers. Listen to what your community (users) are saying and then adjust.”

YouTube in 2014

Yahoo! — “Preparing for future expansion”

Yahoo!, like all of these companies mentioned, started as a small project that solved a specific problem: the founders were frustrated that they couldn't find pages they had visited before, so they started indexing the entire web.

“We called it ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.’ Before we knew it, people all over the world were using the database we had built.” — Jerry Yang

Yahoo in 1996

Based on this experience at Yahoo!, co-founder Jerry Yang advises everyone to prepare for the expansion of your business:

“I think you have to start a business with the idea that you can scale massively someday. If your business model doesn’t scale, then ultimately it won’t work.”

Yahoo in 2014

Amazon — “Customer First”

“We innovate through our customers, and then we innovate back to our customers. That becomes the touchstone for how we innovate.” — Jeff Bezos

Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos has always adhered to the principle of customer first, which has become Amazon's biggest competitive advantage.

“We at Amazon have three principles that have been adhered to for 18 years, and they are also the reasons for our success: customer focus, innovation, and patience.”

Amazon in 1999

Amazon started as a small online bookseller and has become the online retail giant that sells everything today. But even with its rapid growth, Bezos has not changed his original intention of putting customers first:

“When competitors get up in the morning and take a shower, they think about how to beat another competitor. When we get up in the morning and take a shower, we think about how to bring innovation to our customers.”

Amazon in 2014

Of course, there should be many examples of people starting small and achieving great success. In Joel's article, he shared an example from Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which started with a simple conversation and a simple note on an index card.

***You may give some domestic examples in the comments.