Not my story, but useful and interesting no less... Somebody I used to work with told me about a project they did (about 25 years ago now) where they were developing a movie on demand service for a cable provider.
Given the year, it used tapes to play the movies. The user would dial in with their phone, enter a code for the movie they'd want to watch, a motorized catalog system would fetch the tape, insert it into a player and then the user could control the tape player with their phone.
Well, it was a couple days before launch and the catalog system was still not working. They ended up launching with the system printing a receipt, then a human would fetch the tape and insert it into a machine. This went on for several weeks before the automated catalog system was working.
In hindsight, they realized it was actually easier to scale the humans fetching tapes than the machines and therefore the humans were even faster at busy times. System subscribers didn't even know humans were used in the beginning and it launched without a hitch as far as users were concerned. So, like many stories in this thread, sometimes it's easier to bootstrap with manual labor and it can scale with machines doing the right parts of the process.
Given the year, it used tapes to play the movies. The user would dial in with their phone, enter a code for the movie they'd want to watch, a motorized catalog system would fetch the tape, insert it into a player and then the user could control the tape player with their phone.
Well, it was a couple days before launch and the catalog system was still not working. They ended up launching with the system printing a receipt, then a human would fetch the tape and insert it into a machine. This went on for several weeks before the automated catalog system was working.
In hindsight, they realized it was actually easier to scale the humans fetching tapes than the machines and therefore the humans were even faster at busy times. System subscribers didn't even know humans were used in the beginning and it launched without a hitch as far as users were concerned. So, like many stories in this thread, sometimes it's easier to bootstrap with manual labor and it can scale with machines doing the right parts of the process.