Software version schemes are often started at 0, or other times 1, so why not any other integer? I don't expect software version numbers to mean anything except that higher is (probably) chronologically later. That said I would probably still start numbering internal/beta versions at 1 or 0 and use 2 for the first release.
It's not even in the same league of dishonesty as ubiquitous practices by blue-chip tech companies such as using trial pricing in advertisements, selling "new versions" of software with only trivial changes, selling "extended warranties" on hardware that don't cover the most common causes of breakage, or claiming customers have access to "expertise" developing intelligent zero-downtime SaaS solutions on the blockchain with the deep learning algorithms powering our global AR/VR-enabled IoT cloud.