Ask HN: I'm looking for pre tech MVP anecdotes from successful companies

I watched a video by Michael Seibel where he talks about the fact that AirBnB didn't even have a way to take payments at first. You had to take cash and pay the host directly.

https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp

He also made the point that you need to stop thinking of your MVP as "special" and think of it like you are looking for an old shirt in your closet to paint in and destroy. And I really liked that.

I also remember reading a comment on HN by a YC company saying they didn't even have any tech yet. They were doing intake via email and manually pairing up matches in their two-sided market.

I searched the web for "pre tech MVP" and it thinks I typoed that. I searched HN and I like the top comment on this piece, but the article is no longer even available:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503867

Personal anecdotes, links to articles or suggested search terms are all equally welcome.

12 points | by DoreenMichele 1261 days ago

7 comments

romanhn 1261 days ago
As a PagerDuty alum, one of my favorite anecdotes was of a time when the system experienced an outage early on and the founders along with early employees had to resort to calling people up manually and reading off alert messages.
pkrotich 1261 days ago
Not personal anecdote... but it tickles me that YouTube was a dating site idea.
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- DoreenMichele 1261 days ago
  And if you google "origin youtube" you get some series, but the Wikipedia page says:
  the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive females to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#History
DoreenMichele 1261 days ago
Clickable links:
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvp
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503867
I also found this and it's not really what I am looking for either:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642739
DoreenMichele 1260 days ago
In case someone other than me is wanting more of this:
Building a Startup Is Not About Building a Product, It's About Solving a Problem by Avni Patel Thompson
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/5O-building-a-startup-is...
fiftyacorn 1261 days ago
eBay was the same. There was a 25c listing charge, and omidyar used to get letters with 25c attached
mindhash 1261 days ago
Product hunt was an email list
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- DoreenMichele 1261 days ago
  Thank you.
  That reminds me: Craigslist started as an email too.