Prototype before Google

Here are a few homepages of today’s tech giants from their early days. The homepages serve as a poignant reminder of the fact that it’s better to launch as quickly as possible when you are in a good market, rather than honing the perfect look and design.

If you cut across the technology industry, the whole idea of a “minimum love-able product” just doesn’t hold up to the backstories of the major players in the sector.

Every major tech company below had quite humble beginnings, where they focused on learning, iterating, and building a viable business around a product idea. Once they knew they were viable, they went back and optimized product design.

These homepages serve as a good reminder of what Field Marshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke said, “No campaign plan survives first contact with the enemy”. You could easily argue that that the real test of a business is whether it survives its first major pivot. Yet in order to pivot using a Lean Startup approach, you gather data to confirm your intuitions.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

Also, if the founders had not explicitly formulated an experiment around their landing page, the below are not really landing page MVPs. They’re just homepages.  To find out more about building your own landing page MVP experiment, check out Launch Tomorrow.

Google

Before Alphabet there was Google, and before Google there was…Backrub.

This was a prototype of the search service that took over the online world.

Initial days of Google!

In the early days of Google, the designers would occasionally get an email from a strange fan containing just one number. That was it. Every few months or so, they got another one of these emails and they were confused why this oddball was emailing them numbers.

Eventually, they realized that the email always came the day after the changed their main homepage design. The number referred to the number of characters visible on the main screen. Their email stalker was helping them stay true to their minimalist style.

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[image: Mark Chen]

Twitter

Paper prototype, basis for the homepage of Twitter

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This picture is from Jack Dorsey’s notebook, before the twitter guys actually put up their first version of their homepage. Paper prototypes are good sources of discussion, and they are useful for communicating the value proposition–which in Twitr’s case at the time was their biggest challenge. After all, who would even want to write 140 character long blog posts?

[image:medium.com]

keeping tabs on friends, good early days of Twitter!

This early homepage stresses twitter’s function of serving as a way to keep tabs on friends. The value proposition was that you will know what others are doing.

[image:onemonthrails.com]

Amazon

Consistently low prices and greater chances of availability of books at Amazon.

Founder Jeff Bezos claimed, “one million titles, consistently low prices”–a claim physical bookstores couldn’t really make, as detailed in Launch Tomorrow. As a result, Amazon became the go-to place for consumers who were browsing slightly less popular books in the “long tail”, knowing that there would be a much greater chance that the book would be available.

[image: Mark Chen]

Facebook

the first look!

This is how Facebook looked, when Mark Zuckerburg decided to create an electronic form of the Freshman Facebook, arguably as a way to gain notoriety on campus at the time. Seems quite far from the billion dollar advertising juggernaut it is today.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

Here’s how the user profile looked after login

[image:onemonthrails.com]

Apple

Who can believe this is Apple Computer? Yes the same Apple from today.

While clearly not a landing page, as the Internet didn’t exist at the time, Steve Jobs and Woz arranged to sell 50 assembled computers to the Byte Shop (a computer store in Mountain View, California) at $500 each, despite not having the parts. To fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days.

This was in a day when home computers were assembled from scratch by wide-eyed hobbyists. A classic pre-sell MVP lies at the beginning of the Apple empire.

[image:Wikipedia.org]

YouTube

“Tune in Hook Up” to 100 million videos daily on myriad subjects

Youtube had its roots as a dating site before focusing specifically on video. YouTube fizzled in an early version, namely a dating site called “Tune In Hook Up”. The founders later developed the current site, now broadcasting 100 million short videos daily on myriad subjects.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

PayPal

Uniqueness of Idea that sending money to someone using their email address, we call it PayPal.

Before Peter Thiel became “The Peter Thiel”, he ran around doing customer development trying to convince people to beam money between PalmPilots. Over infrared. It was only when they realized that people really latched on to the idea that sending money to someone using their email address, did they have a value proposition that actually worked.

[image:waybackmachine.org]

Yahoo

First directory of links of the world wide web

Yahoo was originally the first directory of links of the world wide web, before search engines even existed. The founders manually curated links and organized them into a tree structure to make them easy to find and use.

[image:onemonthrails.com]

AirBnB

An idea that counts, renting mattresses opened way to progress.

The idea for AirBnb came from the founders’ need to get cash for their other startup ideas. They offered to rent out an air mattress to ISDA conference (a design conference) attendees. When they found that surprisingly easy, they continued to do so, only to realize later…that this was their big idea.

[image: YC/Jessica Livingston]

And the takeaway is…

Design remains quite important, particularly for consumer technology companies. But over-designing a product before proving demand exists is just an elaborate form of waste. Premature optimization, even.

A minimum loveable product is a great idea. As a principle, I myself find it quite alluring to only show your absolute best to the world. From a business point of view in the tech sector, though, it may be a trap.