Brian Chesky (Airbnb) explains a user-centered design method: pick one representative user, iterate until that single user loves the product, and scale that handcrafted insight into a repeatable service. He describes a 'Snow White' storyboarding exercise (hired Pixar storyboard artists) focused on the "moment of truth" — e.g., the Airbnb check-in — and uses a 5–10 star thought experiment to imagine extraordinary experiences and find elements worth industrializing. He argues designing 6–7 star experiences and then scaling them drives word-of-mouth growth, allowing Airbnb to match a century of hotel growth in about ten years.
Chapters
How do you know how to make something for a million people? I don't know where to start. But if I pick one person, the audience, and I study you and I take your journey and say, how do we, like, improve this part of the journey? How do we improve that part of the journey? You can actually do something really personal. And if you design something, keep iterating until they love it and don't stop improving until that one person loves it. And you're not allowed to get the second person to. The first person loves it. And then you get the second person and you keep iterating until they love it and. And then the third person. And what ends up happening is two things. One, you design this perfect experience, which is a different part of your mind than the industrial part of your mind that has to figure out how to scale this. And the second thing is when people love your service, they become your marketing department. They tell other people, so the first day, why come here, they give you this T shirt. And on the T shirt it says, make something people want. And we thought, what if we went even further? Make something people love. And so we've now done these exercises. We had this process I named after the movie Snow White. I learned that Walt Disney in 1937 created Snow White. It was one of the first uses of the storyboard because it was like this really long, feature length animated movie. And he storyboarded the experience. And I thought to myself, what if we storyboard the perfect experience for the Airbnb? We actually hired Pixar storyboard artists to do this. And then what we like to do is like, pick one frame of the experience. So the moment of truth in Airbnb is when you check in, right? You're like, is this gonna be what I think it is? And there's a really bad version of check in. Like the host didn't show up. And there's kind of a good version of a check in. They showed up. But we wanted to think to ourself, what would make the experience something people love. And so we created this exercise. We thought, like, you know, when you go on Airbnb, this is also true. Uber. Like a five star mostly means, like, nothing bad happened. And we thought, well, what if there was like a six star? What would that be? When you check into Airbnb and the six star is you get to your Airbnb and you know, there's like a bottle of wine waiting on a table and there's like some fruit and they like have a handwritten note to you and they're like, okay, that's like, really nice. And then I thought, well, what would a seven star experience be? A seven star experience is they get a limo, they pick you up at the airport, and there's this like whole curated experience. You get to the house and they know you like surfing and there's a surfboard there waiting for you and all that stuff. So then I thought, what would an eight star experience be like? An eight star experience, you get to the airport, there's a giant elephant, and you get on the elephant and there's a parade in your honor, and you go to your Airbnb. So what would a nine star experience be? The nine star experience is the Beatles check in, you land, and there's 5,000 teenagers cheering your name. And you get to your Airbnb and you have to do a press conference in the front lawn. So what's a 10 star experience? Keep going. A 10 star experience. You show up and Elon Musk says, we're going to space. And you do get back eventually. And the point of this story is that you maybe can't make an eight, nine or ten star experience, but most people try to design something that's just good enough. But if you can add that six or seven star, if you can design something really amazing and you use the part of your brain, the handcrafted part of your brain to create that perfect experience, then you can reverse engineer how to industrialize this millions of times over. And what happens is people love your product and they tell everyone else about your product. And what ended up happening in our business is Hilton was started in 1919, over 100 years ago. And we were able to have the entire growth of Hilton in 10 years. And this is how you do it without, you know, we had some marketing, but not, you know, initially not a lot.
