Airbnb founder Brian Chesky explains the concept of designing a 7-star product experience

As Brian points out, the status quo for the Internet is 5-star reviews. But the problem with 5 stars is that the bar is really low.

“If you rate an Uber four stars, your life might have been in danger, right?”

But in the early days of Airbnb, they wanted to design a product experience users loved so much they would tell everyone about it. They wondered:

“What if you booked an Airbnb and you didn’t leave 5 stars, but you emailed the company asking for a 6th star because the product was so you had to almost go above and beyond?”

After some brainstorming, they thought a 6th star might be if the Airbnb host picked you up from the airport.

Then they asked, what’s a 7 star experience?

“Well 7 stars, they don’t pick you up at the airport. They send a limousine, and you open the limousine door and there’s coconut water and they know you’re into surfing and there’s some surfing magazines.”

They did this all the way up to 10 stars, which they decided is Elon Musk picking you up from the airport and taking you to space.

As Brian explains:

“It’s very easy to take for granted that the 5 star experience is what people expect. But to build something people love, you need to do something more than they expect. And every moment [in your product experience] is an opportunity to do something slightly more than people expect.”

Obviously Elon Musk won’t be able to take every Airbnb guest to space, but offering an airport pickup service might be something they could offer.

There’s also a really important point here that your product is not just a mobile app or a web page, but the whole experience — every point of contact with the customer is an opportunity to delight them.

Full video: Greylock “Blitzscaling 18: Brian Chesky on Launching Airbnb and the Challenges of Scale“ (Nov 2015)

More popular advice from Brian Chesky

Brian Chesky on what your startup can learn from Ernest Shackleton’s famous job ad “Don’t sell a rosy picture of the experience… Why do the most fit people in the world want to be Navy SEALs? Because they want the challenge. The average person doesn’t want a challenge, but the best people want a challenge. And so that will turn off mediocre people, but it will turn on great people.” (full article).

Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to interview and reference check new hires “Ask them to explain how they did something, and then the key is to ask two follow-ups. You never want the first answer. You always want the third answer. And if people don’t know what they’re talking about, they struggle. They might be able to follow-up, but the second follow-up, they become absent of details.” (full article).

Brian Chesky on why Airbnb took months to hire their first employee. “I felt your first engineer was like bringing DNA into your company. If we were successful, there were going to be 1,000 people just like him or her in the company. And so it wasn’t a matter of getting somebody to build the next three features we needed to ship for our users. There was something much more long-term and much more enduring, which was, do I want to work with 100 or 1,000 more people like this?” (full article).