How Airbnb Made $68,000,000,000

So you start a business, but you can't find any customers. You're Airbnb in 2009. 3 founders, promising platform, but zero customers. So you join Y Combinator, where Paul Graham gives you counterintuitive advice. Better to have 100 people love you than a million who just sort of like you. But how do you make people love your product when you're starting from zero? So the founders fly to New York, their biggest market, and do something that could never scale. They personally visit every single host. They live with them, learn their problems, and most importantly, take professional photographs of their problems. So an Airbnb listing goes from this to this. But isn't this approach too manual, too slow, too expensive? Nope. The results are undeniable. Airbnb listings with professional photos receive double the bookings. But eventually you need to grow beyond what you can do yourself. So they hire professional photographers in key markets, an expense that would never make sense on a spreadsheet, but pays for itself many times over in customer love and retention. The path to scale often starts by doing things that don't scale at all.