In early 2005, three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, registered the domain YouTube.com. The plan was a dating site with a twist: instead of writing a profile, you’d upload a video of yourself. The slogan was “Tune In, Hook Up.”

It didn’t work. Nobody uploaded dating videos. Karim later recalled that the team was so desperate for content that they posted ads on Craigslist offering women $20 to upload a video of themselves. Nobody took them up on it. The first video ever posted to the site, on April 23, 2005, wasn’t a dating profile at all. It was a 19-second clip of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, standing in front of the elephants, called “Me at the zoo.”

The founders had built a working product with no audience for its intended purpose. What they noticed, though, was that the few people who did upload were posting other things: their pets, their vacations, clips of whatever they found funny. The technology, a simple way to upload a video and share it with anyone, was useful. The dating part was the only thing nobody wanted.

So they dropped it. Instead of telling users what YouTube was for, they let users decide. The site became a place to share any video at all, and the growth was immediate. By the summer of 2005 it was getting tens of thousands of visitors a day. By mid-2006 it was serving about 100 million video views a day. In October 2006, Google bought it for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered.

The founders didn’t need a new product. Everything that made YouTube valuable was already built. They only needed to stop insisting on the one use of it that nobody wanted.