A short transcript excerpt of Brian Chesky explaining a method for designing products that can scale from one devoted user to millions: pick one user, iterate until they love the product, then repeat for additional users so enthusiastic users drive viral growth. He contrasts rapid platform growth to Hilton’s 100-year history, claiming they achieved comparable growth in ten years.
Questions this video answers
1919
10 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 in the audience and I study you and I take your journey and say, how do we improve this part of the journey? How do we prove that part of the journey? You can actually do something really personal. And if you design something, keep iterating till 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 when people love your service, they become your marketing department. They tell other people, if you can design something really amazing and you use 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. 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.