A tiny version of the product where the founders personally do the work by hand for a few customers, learning the workflow before writing any code to automate it.
Founder Manuel Rosso started Food on the Table in 2009 by personally building one customer's weekly meal plan, walking the grocery store, and reading prices off shelves. He repeated it for a handful of families before writing software, and used the manual rounds to learn which decisions the eventual product had to automate and which ones did not matter. The company was acquired by Scripps in 2014.