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

Question

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-mvpHe 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=1503867Personal anecdotes, links to articles or suggested search terms are all equally welcome.

romanhn · Accepted Answer

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 · Answer

Not personal anecdote... but it tickles me that YouTube was a dating site idea.

DoreenMichele · Answer

Clickable links:https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6f-how-to-plan-an-mvphttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1503867I also found this and it's not really what I am looking for either:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23642739

DoreenMichele · Answer

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 · Answer

eBay was the same. There was a 25c listing charge, and omidyar used to get letters with 25c attached

mindhash · Answer

Product hunt was an email list