The recruiting agency that launched here yesterday seemed like a good example of this. Their entire product consisted of two webforms (without even any validation) that would collect contact information. It's entirely possible there was no database behind it, and that it just emailed the founder.
The founder would then send out a mail to the addresses in Pile A saying "pay us $25k and we'll forward your details to Pile B using our Top Secret Algorithm". No computers necessary. And genius.
There are a lot of businesses that start out that way. Probably my favorite example is ZeroCater, which -- to my understanding -- was a cell phone, a Googledoc spreadsheet, and a lot of hustle.
"Hey YC companies hit me up, I'll order all the sandwiches this Thursday.
"Hello Bay Area restaurant, I want to place a $4k order this Thursday and every two weeks for the next six months. Can I talk to your owner? We have some requirements to make this work."
"Hey Valley IT company, tell me your dietary restrictions and food magically appears at your office, for the low low price of [guesstimate: $400 / employee / month]."
"Hey Valley restaurant, we're really loving the sandwiches. Here's an order for $6,000 and please pay extra special attention to the note about the vegan ones. I know it's a hassle but then again I do order $6,000 of sandwiches at a time so I expect you to deal."
In the process you'll discover things about this process which suck, and you can automate or systemize them as business needs/opportunities dictate.
I agree. I like the section in The Lean Startup on the related idea of the 'concierge MVP', whereby you're serving your initial customers very manually to really understand their needs before investing heavily in automated systems.
The example from the book that comes to mind (and I forget the name of the startup) was a grocery delivery app. They started out by manually going up to people at the grocery store and offering to give them suggestions on groceries to buy based on meal ideas. Eventually, they got someone to agree to participate and provided enough value to the person that they could - and did - get paid by the customer. This helped validate their idea to started building out the app that would do the same thing using software.
Good point. As programmers, we sometimes forget that we can get the business going without the software. Most of the time, all we need is some sales hustle going to confirm viability and get initial traction.
Conceptually I agree, but having spent the last <way too long> being fed by ZeroCater, there's a lot of stuff that falls through the cracks when humans are involved - and when you are dealing with your customers every single day that tends to get noticed.
They have a feedback form that's emailed out an hour after lunch, but the actual suggestions we provide go largely ignored. Several employees have described it as them having really short-term memory.
They also seem to insist on "trying out" restaurants again that the entire company dislikes.
Further, the feedback (when taken into account) never seems to apply to the company, only to the specific restaurant. For example: we request that next time $sandwich_shop delivers to leave the bread dry and put mayo and mustard on the side. That happens the next time $sandwich_shop delivers (though frequently not the time after that), but does not happen when $other_sandwich_shop brings food.
Interesting, thanks for that. Guess the problem is the people doing it don't remember, and their systems aren't advanced enough to make the link between $sandwich_shop and $other_sandwich_shop having similar menus. A good problem to solve.
We actually started out with a fully fledged system, however we needed to drastically simplify things so we cut back quite a bit :) Had some help from some awesome folks and we got moving! If anyone has ?'s let me know, we've bootstrapped everything so far.
The founder would then send out a mail to the addresses in Pile A saying "pay us $25k and we'll forward your details to Pile B using our Top Secret Algorithm". No computers necessary. And genius.