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 then you literally start designing touchpoint by touchpoint. What else? ‘I want to know where they work, where they went to school.’ OK. I don’t know who they are.’ Well what if we had profiles? ‘Great!’ Well what do you want in your profile? ‘Well I want a photo.’ Great. We’d find out ‘Hey, I don’t feel comfortable with the guest. Hey, this is Brian, Joe, we’re founders and we just want to meet you.” We had their addresses and we say, “Knock knock. We literally would knock on the doors of all of our hosts. Early on, Joe Gebbia and I literally commuted to New York from Mountain View. If I want to make something amazing, I just spend time with you…. “It’s really hard to get even 10 people to love anything, but it’s not hard if you spend a ton of time with them. Lesson #1: Pay passionate attention to your user You can listen to the entire episode here, or subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Play. Here are 4 lessons from Brian Chesky from our conversation on Masters of Scale. Since then, he’s learned a lot about winning over customers. “We have this website and maybe 50 people a day are visiting it and we’re probably getting like 10 to 20 bookings a day,” Brian says, reflecting on Airbnb’s first year and a half. Eight years ago? A very different picture. In order to scale, you have to first do things that don’t scale at all. But I’d argue that painstaking, handcrafted labor is actually the foundation of Brian’s success. Now this may sound inefficient if you’re an entrepreneur with global ambitions. He went door-to-door, meeting Airbnb hosts in person, taking photographs of their space, and learning what they did and didn’t like about his product.

As co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, Brian’s early work was more akin to a traveling salesman. And don’t stop until you know exactly what they want. And in many ways, the best way to begin is to stop thinking big, and start thinking small. But here’s the thing: You don’t start with 100 million users. And just about every entrepreneur I meet with has that ambition as they get started. Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. How to Scale a Magical Experience: 4 Lessons from Airbnb’s Brian Chesky

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