What fascinates me with this story is how low tech everything was. A simple landing page, email list/newsletter, and "value" in the form of travel deals. Anyone can do it, and the barrier of entry is minimal.
As programmers, we often fool ourselves into believing the opposite.
Horizontal - scaling up your application to lots of customers.
Scaling software is easy, there's no factory to buy more equipment for. Creating business value is much harder.