Behind every successful business is a well-crafted customer experience. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky shares his insights on how to bring that magical experience to life – from hand-serving customers, understanding their needs, and creating a “mindf**k” experience that they’ll want to tell all their friends about.
The Secret of Scaling: Think Small
Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, has scaled his company from a small start-up with only 50 visitors a day to a $31 billion behemoth.
His secret?
Don’t think big, think small.
Hand serve your customers and win them over one by one.
Only when you understand what they want can you begin to scale.
Lesson #2: Design an 11-star experience
We basically took one part of our product and we extrapolated: what would a 5-star experience be? Then we went crazy.
And what would a 10-star check in be?
The point of the the process is that maybe 9, 10, 11 are not feasible. But if you go through the crazy exercise, there’s some sweet spot between “They showed up and they opened the door” and “I went to space.” That’s the sweet spot. You have to almost design the extreme to come backwards.
Lesson #3: Create a magical experience… and then figure out what part of that magical thing can scale
To illustrate his point, Chesky talks about creating a perfect trip to San Francisco for Ricardo, an introverted traveler from London.
Through the exercise, Airbnb discovered that they could create an unforgettable experience by providing Ricardo with a driver, taking him to the perfect Airbnb, and organizing dinner parties and mystery bike tours.
We said we are confident on an unscalable basis that we know how to create a trip that deeply moved somebody — that was better than anything they’ve ever experienced. The question is: Can we develop a technology that scales and do it 100 million times?
Hand Serving Your Customers: Learn What They Want
In his conversation with Reid Hoffman on Masters of Scale, Brian Chesky spoke about the importance of meeting with customers in person and spending time with them – even sleeping on their couches if needed – to understand what they want.
The creation of the peer review system, customer support, all these things came from — we didn’t just meet our users, we lived with them. And I used to joke that when you bought an iPhone, Steve Jobs didn’t come sleep on your couch. But I did.
Lesson # 4: Take advantage of the time before you scale
“I tell a lot of entrepreneurs who don’t have traction, I miss those times. Yes, it’s exciting to have traction, to have a company that has huge scale. But the biggest leaps you ever get are when you’re small. Another way of saying it is: Your product changes less the bigger you get because there’s more customers, more blowback, more systems, more legacy” Brian Chesky
The most innovative leaps you’ll ever make, especially if you’re a network, are going to be when you’re really, really small.
“If you want to build something that’s truly viral you have to create a total mindf**k experience that you tell everyone about. If I say, ‘What can I do to make this [product] better?’
