As we work with super early stage startup founders, one of the things that comes up repeatedly is how can we launch the site with a killer UI/UX. It is obvious that you’d want a UX of killer product like Facebook for your site / product but I always push back and explain that UX is something that always evolves and gets better and better with data, user feedback and just availability of more time and is inherently an iterative process, just as is the core product development process. You may think you have the right product and UX, but look at it in 6 months and 9 months and 12 months and you will know you didn’t. And the most important resource that you leverage is the Wayback Machine to not only prove this point but also to learn the evolution of Product/model/UI/UX of the most popular products to gather insights and apply them to the product you are building. Its an invaluable resource and I would encourage everyone to give it a try and see what you can learn and apply to your startup product. You get access to only a few pages (mostly the homepage) but it still gives you a lot to learn from. Here are some ideas:

• If you are launching a reviews site or community, won’t it be interesting to track how Yelp.com evolved to become such a stellar success?
• If you are doing a social site for colleges, then there is a lot you can learn from early screenshots of Facebook and its messaging on the homepage?
• Look up the launch page of any successful startup and see what their homepage looked like at launch and then a few months in their first year to see what you can learn and apply to your business.

These are just a couple of pointers and every startup founder can find information most relevant to their business and defintiely not make the same mistakes and leverage things that have worked. Here is a screenshot of the Yelp.com homepage when it was launched

And here is the homepage of Yelp.com a few months later and you can see the additional of the “what is yelp” section at the top.

And here’s the hompage in latter part of 2005 and you can see the dramatic change of the site and product and business model!

And ofcourse, here’s the Facebook homepage in its early days!

There is a wealth of information and insight that can be derived from Wayback Machine and you may want to consider it an important tool in your product development process. Once you know what you are building, try to find related sites and learn from their history! History teaches us a lot of lessons – in startup product development as well