The Idea: Back in 2009, Markus "Notch" Persson was a bored programmer at King (pre-Candy Crush), spending his evenings tinkering with side projects and posting on indie game forums. One game caught his eye - Infiniminer, a block-based mining game - and he thought: what if you combined that building mechanic with the survival depth of Dwarf Fortress? He prototyped the first version in six days. Called it "Cave Game." Renamed it Minecraft. Posted it on the TIGSource forums on May 17, 2009 and asked people to try it. The graphics were crude - blocky, pixelated, almost ugly. But the creative freedom was unlike anything else. Players could build literally anything, and they couldn't stop. Notch kept his day job and updated the game every few days based on forum feedback. Within months, the community was growing faster than he could keep up with. This was the beginning of Mojang.

The Execution:

• May 2009: Released the first public alpha on TIGSource forums - built the prototype in six days while still working a day job at King.
• 2010: Quit his job to go full-time on Minecraft after Alpha sales surged. Founded Mojang with friends Jakob Porsér and Carl Manneh.
• January 2011: Sold the one millionth copy - with zero marketing budget. Growth was entirely organic through YouTube and word of mouth.
• November 2011: Officially launched version 1.0 at the first MineCon in Las Vegas with 4,500 attendees. Handed lead developer role to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten.
• 2013: Mojang hit $259M in revenue and $126M in profit - from a game that cost essentially nothing to build. 54 million copies sold.
• June 2014: Notch tweeted his frustration about running a massive game company and casually suggested someone should buy his stake. Microsoft called the next day.
• September 2014: Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion. Notch walked away a billionaire. The game has since sold over 350 million copies and generated an estimated $10-12B in total revenue.

The lesson? Notch didn't raise a cent. He didn't have a pitch deck. He built a rough prototype in six days, posted it on a forum, and let his users tell him what to build next. The game's most iconic enemy - the Creeper - was literally a coding bug where he accidentally swapped a pig's dimensions. He kept it because it looked cool. Sometimes the best products aren't polished. They're playgrounds that let people build whatever they want.