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Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to design an amazing user experience

“How do you make something for a million people? I don’t know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Don’t stop improving it until that person loves it, and you’re not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on.”

As Brian argues, designing the perfect experience for one person is a much easier place to start than trying to design something for a million people. You can figure out how to scale it later.

“If you can design something really amazing using the hand-crafted part of your brain, 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.”

When people truly love your service, they become your marketing department. But counterintuitively, the biggest and best products seem to mostly get started by solving a very specific problem for a very specific user.