The Airbnb Lesson Every New Business Needs to Hear

A note to young leaders.

If you’re starting a new business, and you want me to invest – start by showing me a dozen customers that absolutely love your product.

Not just like it, or highly rate it – totally, fanatically, love it.

It’s better to have a 100 customers that love you than a million people that just like you.

And if you want to achieve this blissful “love” state, you’ll need to get close to your users. You can’t do it by remote control from a distance.

Here’s what happened when Brian Chesky (then a struggling co-founder of Airbnb) met with legendary startup investor, Paul Graham, from Y Combinator.

Graham: Where’s your business?

Chesky: What do you mean? Where are we based?

Graham: No, where’s your traction?

Chesky: We don’t have a lot of traction.

Graham: People must be using it.

Chesky: There are a few people in New York using it.

Graham: So your users are in New York, and you’re still in Mountain View?

Chesky: Yeah.

Graham: What the hell are you still doing here?

Chesky: What do you mean?

Graham: Go to your users. Get to know them, one by one.

Chesky: But that won’t scale. If we’re to grow to millions of customers, we can’t meet every customer.

Graham: That’s exactly why you should do it now. Because this is the only time you’ll ever be small enough to meet all your customers – and make something directly for them that they’ll rave about to all their friends.

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Love goes viral. But to get love, you’ve got to get intimate with your customers, one on one.

And you can’t do that from a distance.