I could not follow this article at all. He does not even say what his project does: "I had potentially identified [market demand] related to ecommerce, and then I spent 3 hours building it before opening it up for business."

The remainder of the article is about using a Google Docs spreadsheet and PHP to fulfill the "ecommerce demand" by hand. Once he saw the business could be sustainable, he began to automate the fulfillment process.

That is a novel, low-risk approach, but it's difficult to wrap one's head around it when you don't know what he is actually doing.