The advice from Paul Graham that helped Airbnb find product/market fit

With Paul Graham gave us a series of advice that probably changed our business forever. Probably the most important single piece of advice I got, which is probably advice that is probably the most important advice I can give you. Or one of the most important advice is he basically drew out this chart and he basically said, it's better to have 100 people that love you, 100 customers that love you, than a million customers that just sort of like you. In other words, if you have 100 people that absolutely love your product, they'll tell 100 people, and then they'll tell 100 people, or even 10 people, and this thing will grow. We call it growing virally. In fact, almost all movements in history have grown this way as well. There's, like, deeply passionate followers, and they grow it, and they're customer advocates. And the problem is, in Silicon Valley, the general wisdom is, I need to build some app, this thing, and these have this viral coefficient. I need to get millions of people to use it, and they got to like it enough to share it. And that's totally the wrong way to think about it, especially if you're in a service business like ours. So Paul Graham said, all you have to do is get a hundred people like you don't worry about millions of people. That was totally freeing, because until then, I'm like, how the hell am I going to get a million people to do this if I can't even get my mom or my sister to do it? But I can find 100 people. And so we literally decided do things that don't scale. If all you need to do is get 100 people to love you, do things that don't scale. It turns out 100 people that love you is really hard, because it's Easy to get 100 people to like you. 100 people to love you means you need to meet them. You need to understand the problem. And so we literally would fly during Y Commandeer from Mountain View. We commuted from Mountain View to New York. We would go. Joe and I would go to New York and we'd go door to door because New York was where most of our community was. We'd meet with every one of our hosts and we'd live with them. We literally would live with them. We'd write the first reviews for the places. And in fact, I would go there and I'd be like, wow, the photos are terrible. This is actually a really nice house. And the host was like, well, I can't figure out how to get photos onto my computer. This is before, really the iPhone and high quality camera. This is like people had to plug a camera into their laptop. And she thought, what if you just clicked a button and a photographer next day would magically show up and photograph your home? And they thought that would be amazing. And so I went home with Joe and we borrowed a camera from one of our friends in Brooklyn who was a photographer. We knocked on the door and they're like, hello, yes, I'm here. The photographer. And they're like, wow, this is a small company. The founder is also photographing my home. I used to also carry a bank ledger in my backpack. And if you need to get paid, I'll just like Rick about the check. And I'd knock on your door and hand you a check. So that was also a reminder of how small we were. But the point was that doing things that don't scale, if you just think about building something that even just one person loves, it's super easy to create something a single person loves, especially if it's a service. And then you go like, person by person. Once you have 100 people, then you just focus on figuring out how to scale that. And it's a totally different instructional problem to scale something 100 people love, then figure out and what that is. And that was a turning point for us. And so by April 2009, we had hundreds of people that loved us. People started booking, and it became clear there was a real business here.