I read a great interview from SramanaMitra of Greg Gianforte, the CEO of RightNowwho practiced MVP and Customer Development long before the
practicewas codified by SteveBlank I also realized that some other companies and CEO's whoprobably had no idea that they were following a customer developmentprocess also built successful business using the same principles.

The relevant parts from Sramana's Interview on bootstrapping,MVP and customer development below.

Onvalue of Bootstrapping and talking to customers 
Now hereis a good lesson in bootstrapping. I did all of this (talking tocustomers) before I had a product. When I asked if they would buy it,they said no. Better to find that out early on! I then askedcompanies why they said no, wrote their answers down, and moved on tothe next phone call. This was an iterative process that took about400 phone calls to complete, but when I was done I was able to hone in on an initialproduct. In just one month, which is how long it took me to makethose 400 phone calls, I knew exactly what customers would buy. Thatis when I went and built the initial product which took just 45 days because I did not have to build a hugeapplication, just the pieces that I knew customers wanted. Our firstcustomer was PictureTel, followed by Time Warner. They paid us almostnothing - I think it was $250 a month, which was $3,000 a year. Itdid not matter to me. At that point you just have to get the cashstarted somehow.

Onthe value of Bootstrapping and building products that customers willbuy 
Bootstrapping is a discovery process. Rather thantrying to build an ark, wait for animals to come, and hope the tiderises, you take an incremental approach and discover a legitimate,real-world value proposition. That means you only have to build aproduct that customers will actually buy. I also like bootstrappingbecause it forces you to start the sales and learning process sooner. The only activity in an early stage bootstrappingcompany is selling.