We often think of the possibilities of an idea before we expand on it. If it’s too small, it sounds boring, unexciting — we think: this won’t work, I’ll probably only have 10 customers. I need something bigger.
I recently listened to a Tim Ferris podcast episode by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Brian Chesky of Airbnb and here are the really useful insights I gained.
The truth is, it’s really hard to get even 10 people to love something.
But if you spend enough time with them, it’s not that hard. So, learn what people love. Sit in the shoes of a child about to play building blocks, the user of your product, the one paying for your service. Design with empathy.
Why is this important? Nobody wants to start building a skyscraper on an unstable foundation. To stabilise your ground, you need to create a handcrafted experience for your users. Go to your users, get to know them, get to know them one by one. This is the only time you’ll ever be small enough to make something directly for them.
Create a product roadmap. Ask your customers for the roadmap. The roadmap often exists in the mind of the users you’re designing it for. Ask them what they’d like to experience. In fact, don’t just meet with your users, live with them. Literally start creating touch point by touch point.
Ask for feedback with every change. Passionate feedback is a sign that your product really matters to someone. One passionate user can turn into many, if you listen to them, and if they feel they’re being heard. User feedback ensures you’re guarding the very core of your business — the fact that you’re adding value or solving your customer’s problems.
To extract detailed feedback from users, ask for the product of their dreams. Not how to make it better (they’ll say something small). Ask what is something that will make them tell it to everyone they know. To draw out specific insights and understand what exactly is their 11/10 star experience, use a rating system. Start with 7/10, then 8/10, 9/10…Adding stars excites your users. To build something truly viral, you need to create something that creates a mindf**king experience. The kind of stuff that creates great experience. The Nirvana product.
Exercise judgement and discerning on the particular type of users and feedback you listen to. What works for one user may not apply to many other users. Ideas may or may not be feasible, but there will be a sweet spot you can find between designing the extreme and coming back to reality. You have to come back down to earth at some point.
Which part of the perfect experience do you scale?
Work backwards. Find something that seems like magic, but still totally doable. Design the elements that help you build the totally doable thing. Build everything by hand. Until it’s painful. Then get help, like an intern, or something.
Automate tools to increase efficiency. Find out what’s the easiest thing to automate, but for the better. Eventually, create a system that does everything. Gradually work out a solution.
React to what users ask for. It gives your team the inspiration to build the feature that users really want. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of STRIPE, paid close attention to users through a chatroom when Stripe was still a scrappy startup in its early days. People would come into the chatroom while they were sleeping and they wouldn’t get a respond. They then added a pager system. Frustrated users would page him at all hours. KAYAK, a search engine for the lowest available rates for flights/hotels used to provide a cellphone number as their customer service number.
Thoughtful founders will never say, “what a complete waste of time”. It’s the most creative period of their career. Kill your very few handful of customers with kindness.
The transition from the handcrafted phase to the massive scale phase is a challenging one. It requires two opposing mindsets, (1) you have to fully empathise with a single user, and at the same time (2) you have to worry about everyone.
Basically, the designing of the experience requires a different part of your brain from the one scaling the experience.
To design the experience — the brain acts in a way that is intuition-based, with human touch, it’s empathetic, thinks of the end-to-end experience. It’s the handcrafting phase, like writing.
To scale — the brain goes into an analytical mindset, where there is very little room for errors. It now acts more like an editor where it prunes, compacts, distills and architect.
Transitioning the handcrafted product to a scaled organisation who can now run it is tricky, because you get stuck in a messy system of bureaucracy. Now you need legal departments, management, communications, etc. Then you need to consider operating at a federal level. Every city is different. Go city by city. Hire people to deal with all these different issues.
It’s like a video game. You slay a dragon, you think you’ve completed the board game, but in the next level — multiple dragons appear.
When you’re busy slaying dragons, it’s hard to hold onto the handcrafted mindset. But it’s important to never let go of it completely, because that’s where the heart of innovation lies.
In a scaled organisation, antibodies exist against every single new handcrafted idea. It’s an automated response that protects organisational inefficiency. The natural reaction would be to say: It won’t operationalise. It won’t fit our process.
So, be extremely selective about which handcrafted innovation you choose and how you protect it organisationally. If you truly believe in it, you need to protect it. Because the natural reaction of the scaled organisation would definitely be to kill it.
To reinvent an industry, don’t look directly at that industry. Look at methodical industries. For Airbnb, they looked at travel and cinema industries.
To innovate within a scaled organisation, you have to switch from focusing on global concerns to zooming in on that one radical user again.
- Follow your user.
- Learn his pain points.
- Tell him you want to create the perfect product or service for him.
- Design an end-to-end experience that deeply moves him.
Then switch back to an analytical mindset and extrapolate from the single handcrafted journey the essential ingredients that you can apply on a macro level.
That was how Airbnb Trips came about. The inspiration came from the narrative of every movie — the Hero’s journey:
Character in ordinary world > character leaves ordinary world > character crosses over to a new magical world where obstacles happen > character overcome obstacles.
The Hero’s journey applied to Airbnb Trips:
Follow user > Finds out user needs a challenge from the ordinary world by day 2/3 > User has to step out of their comfort zone, because otherwise they do not remember the trip > User feel they belong while stepping out of their comfort zone > A transformation occurs in the user > A magical trip is created.
So, think small before thinking big. Spend time and effort indulging in the handcrafting experience. You’ll miss the times where you only have a handful of users. You’ll miss the handcrafted work. When you get bigger, your product changes less. So relish in the small moments and take advantage of the sub-scale to design the perfect experience, it’s when you experience the biggest and most innovative leaps.
Dream big, and act small.
