One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren’t that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.

Case is recalling an early-market “chicken-and-egg” problem: before personal computers became common household tools, any business built around consumer computing faced a severely limited and hard-to-find customer base. The quote highlights that early growth constraints were not only about product quality or competition, but about the underlying adoption of the enabling technology itself. It also points to the practical difficulty of targeting and reaching a niche audience before today’s data-rich marketing channels—when identifying likely buyers required guesswork, partnerships, or broad messaging. Implicitly, Case frames later success as dependent on expanding the overall ecosystem, not merely selling a single product.