I agree. I like the section in The Lean Startup on the related idea of the 'concierge MVP', whereby you're serving your initial customers very manually to really understand their needs before investing heavily in automated systems.
The example from the book that comes to mind (and I forget the name of the startup) was a grocery delivery app. They started out by manually going up to people at the grocery store and offering to give them suggestions on groceries to buy based on meal ideas. Eventually, they got someone to agree to participate and provided enough value to the person that they could - and did - get paid by the customer. This helped validate their idea to started building out the app that would do the same thing using software.
The example from the book that comes to mind (and I forget the name of the startup) was a grocery delivery app. They started out by manually going up to people at the grocery store and offering to give them suggestions on groceries to buy based on meal ideas. Eventually, they got someone to agree to participate and provided enough value to the person that they could - and did - get paid by the customer. This helped validate their idea to started building out the app that would do the same thing using software.