Airbnb - A "Mindf***ing" Experience

This is a 10 minute read. To get a 1 minute gist, read the Introduction, A Model For Growth and the Action Points for You.

Introduction

What experience have you had with a brand in the past month which was so great you just wanted to share it with the world? How about in the past year? Your lifetime?

To create a company that is truly transformative, you need to provide experiences that are transformative for your customers. 

If you're able to achieve this, those customers won't just be customers, they will become the fuel to your growth through their advocacy of your brand.

Airbnb - A "Mindf***ing" Experience

Unlocking Virality

Airbnb was founded on the principle of getting into your customer's shoes, and doing everything possible to blow their minds.

Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky started Airbnb when they let complete strangers stay in their home for the first time. After saying goodbye to their guests, who they'd cooked for and shown around their city, Brian and Joe realised, "did we just discover it was possible to make friends, whilst also making rent?"

The pair had identified what was to become the key to their customer advocacy and rapid word of mouth growth. Overcoming the "stranger danger" bias through Airbnb will change how you view your fellow human beings, so much so that you'll want to spread the word.

Overcoming the "stranger danger" bias through Airbnb will change how you view your fellow human beings, so much so that you'll want to spread the word.

Despite this initial insight, the founders still lacked the ability to turn this bespoke experience into a platform.

Investors couldn't get past the outlandish concept, and it seemed like their customers felt the same way. They needed both the guest and the host to trust each other enough that they will be comfortable risking their money and safety. As Joe puts it, "we sat back and waited for the rocket ship to blast off. It did not."

To overcome this major hurdle, Joe and Brian got into the shoes of their customers. On a weekly basis the pair would travel to NYC to stay with their hosts, and they would ask them questions like "what can we do to make you tell all your friends about us?", instead of the standard "how could we improve this feature?" 

Stop for a moment and think about this. If you're a startup founder, or an innovator at a larger company, would you ever consider flying across the country every week, to talk to your customers face to face? Would this be a good use of your time? Couldn't you just email them a survey, or call them?

This is an example of where the competitive world of business separates the rookies from the pros. Joe and Brian were not searching for incremental improvements, they were searching for a breakthrough. And to find their breakthrough, their weapon was empathy.

To find their breakthrough, their weapon was empathy.

Two breakthroughs came.

1. They uncovered a unique two way review system where reviews were only shared with both the guest and the host, after both had written their reviews. This ensured that the reviews were trustworthy and not adjusted in response to the other person's review.
2. They came up with the idea of "the introduction", where prospective guests would send a short message introducing themselves and the purpose of their visit to their prospective hosts, and hosts would have a chance to either accept or reject their booking.

Trust was initially Airbnb's biggest challenge, but once these small, yet crucial, features were unlocked, Airbnb grew, and grew, and grew.

The initial fear people felt before staying with, or hosting, a stranger had become Airbnb's key strength. People were coming out the other side of their first guest or host experience with a new worldview, and every night more people were turning into Airbnb advocates.

Airbnb had created a transformative experience, and their advocates spread the word. By the end of Q1 2019, over 500 million nights have been booked on Airbnb.

Applied to your company: 

1. To create a transformative experience, don't focus on 'improvement'. Focus on doing something which is a quantum leap better. Go from zero to one.
2. Be hands on and personal when trying to uncover or design your transformative experience. Your empathy is your best guide.

Doing It Again (In 3 Steps)

Fast forward 8 years later to 2016, and with the Airbnb experience now kind of 'normal', Brian, Joe, and now Nathan, needed to find a way to re-ignite their customer advocacy to continue their pace of growth.

They put out an ad, and found an English traveler named Ricciardo who was willing to have his entire trip documented by Airbnb, if he got to keep the photos. 

Brian, Joe and Nathan wanted to again go deep into what the traveling experience was like for their customers so that they could, hopefully, find a new part of the trip that they could transform.

As Brian puts it, "the designing of an experience is a different part of your brain than the scaling of an experience... it's more intuition based, human, empathetic." 

This is the same, hands on approach they had used in the early days, and is a crucial learning. Even once you're at scale, like Airbnb was in 2016, often your best customer experience insights don't come from data, but from your own intuition after getting to know your customers really well.

Often, your best customer experience insights don't come from data, but from your own intuition after getting to know your customers really well.

What they found out was, unfortunately, Ricciardo's trip was terrible. He spent a lot of time in line, he didn't do anything out of his comfort zone and he let his introverted nature hold him back from meeting new people, so he spent a lot of time alone.

So the question became, if there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people travelling like Ricciardo every year, how can Airbnb give them an incredible journey? This is what they did, in 3 steps:

1 - The Hero's Journey

The Hero's Journey is a popular narrative template used by writers. It prescribes that a hero of a film, book, play or in this case, a trip, transitions from their ordinary life to an unknown world through a call to adventure. Then the hero must overcome challenges in this unknown world, and return to their original life a better person.

Quickly think of a movie, any movie, and you'll very likely notice that the plot follows The Hero's Journey. 

For example, in Lord of The Rings, ordinary hobbits get called to go on an adventure to save the world. They face many challenges along the way, in many strange and dangerous environments where their characters are tested, and their true nature is shown. When they eventually return to The Shire, they do so as more worldly people.

For a trip, Brain explains the key stages a person needs to go through to complete a Hero's Journey of their own.

"When you first go to a city, you need a welcome event within the first twenty four to forty eight hours where you are around people. By day two or three you need to have a challenge, which is out of your comfort zone. If you do not leave your comfort zone, you do not remember the trip. If you can belong, out of your comfort zone, and something new happens to you, then there's going to be a moment of transformation, where the person you were in a small way dies, and a new better version of yourself is reborn."

2 - The 11 Star Experience

The Airbnb team then went through a brain storming structure they call the "11 Star Experience", where they describe what different stages of the customer journey would be like if they were rated 1 star, 2 star, 3 star.... all the way up to 11 stars. The 9-11 star experiences, are "completely mindf***ing" as Brian puts it, but the exercise of dreaming them up forces you to focus on creating a something which is transformative for the customer.

For example, this is how Brian describes the 11 star Airbnb check-in experience brain storm:

• 1 - 3  Stars: You get to your Airbnb and nobody is there, or they are late. You think to yourself, "I'm never using Airbnb again."  
• 5 Stars: You knock on the door, the host opens and lets you in. You think to yourself, "Airbnb worked, just as I expected."  
• 6 Stars: You knock on the door, the host shows you around, and on the table is a welcome gift they've gotten for you. You think to yourself, "Airbnb is great. Better than I expected."  
• 7 Stars: You knock on the door, the host lets you in, they know you love surfing, they've booked lessons for you and they'd like to lend their car to you as well. You think to yourself, "Wow, this is amazing. I'm definitely going to use Airbnb again."  
• 10 Stars: This is the Beatles check-in. You get off the plane and there are 5000 people cheering your name. You get to your house, and there would be a press conference for you. You would think of this as a "mindf***ing experience". 
• 11 Stars: You show up at their airport, your host is their with Elon Musk and they say, "We're going to space!"  

3 - The Test

The team applied what was possible from the best parts of the 11 Star Experience, into the Hero's Journey, and invited Ricciardo back to San Francisco to have a trip on them. The test was to not to see whether Ricciardo would enjoy himself, but whether he would have a transformative experience, just like he would if he were the hero in a movie.

As Brian explains it, "we had a driver pick him up from the airport, we took him to the perfect Airbnb, he went to dinner parties, we got him the best seats at restaurants, we took him on this midnight mystery bike tour which 60 riders go on and nobody but the leader knows where they'll end up, and it was just like this crazy magical world."  

At the end of the trip, Brian went to meet Ricciardo. Ricciardo told him that it'd been a great trip and, as they parted ways, just like in a movie, Ricciardo turned around and yelled out to Brian. He had started crying, and said, "thank you, this is the best trip I've ever had."

This experience became a blueprint for Airbnb. They realised that nobody had ever tried to design the end-to-end travel experience for customers, as though they were in a movie.

Airbnb had not only learnt how to create transformative trips, but trips which were repeatable at scale.

A Model for Growth

Airbnb launched Trips in 2016 with huge success. They are now available in over 1000 cities, and are driving over 1.5 million experience bookings annually. Just last fortnight, they extended their offering with the release of Airbnb Adventures, which includes this trip which takes you around the world in 80 days.

Airbnb is on their way to creating more transformative experiences for their customers, and are reigniting the advocacy they had in the early years. From their example, we can learn how we can build advocacy in our own businesses. 

If we get to know our customers really well, on a personal level, we can stop trying to "improve" the customer experience, and instead can focus on creating transformative ones. If we can do this, we will be on our way to creating a tribe of advocates who propel our growth.

Action Points for You

If you're serious about using advocacy as a means to grow your business, these are the steps Airbnb took which you can repeat. The key lesson is that they focused on making the experience amazing for one or a few customers, before focusing on scaling. This is the opposite to what most companies do, and also means none of us have an excuse not to try this as a side experiment.

What you can do today to replicate this strategy:

1. Ask your customers "what can I do to make you want to tell all your friends about us?"
2. Brainstorm without limits, using the 11 star experience method
3. Hand-make a pilot customer experience for one or a few customers. Focus on making it amazing for them, and de-prioritise scaling considerations
4. Measure your results on the right metric, was it transformative for these customers?
5. Scale the experience

Credits

A big thanks to Reid Hoffman, and his podcast "Master's of Scale", and to TED, for making the insights of the Airbnb founders available to the world.