Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia helped start a company when the notion of a designer-as-founder was pretty much unheard of – and he has the psychic bruises to show for that.
Here are some lessons he shared at Roadmap 2013 that the company learned on the way to building Airbnb into a company valued at $2.5 billion.
1: Get out of the office. You need to talk to people first to find your audience, second to validate what you think you should do, and keep doing that as you build your product. YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham gave the young entrepreneurs “the single greatest piece of advice” they ever got, which was: “go out and meet your people. Go out into the world and interact with customers.”
2: Think holistically: One strength of putting a designer in charge of a product or company is they tend to think of the whole process, the whole product as an end-to-end experience, Gebbia said. That meant in the beginning 7 years ago Airbnb co-founders started out thinking about renting out air mattresses on their floors to visiting conference goers, but also providing them with breakfast, maps, a subway pass.
“It’s not just about the room but the airport pick up, the experience of entering the apartment,” he said.
3: Solve a problem: Know what your target audience needs and experience that problem first hand. Gebbia cited an early project at RISD when his class had to design a medical device. They talked to doctors, nurses, patients at Rhode Island Hospital, but the defining moment came when the students lay down in hospital beds and had the device applied to them. They immediately “got” the problem, he said.
4: What you take out is as important as what you put in: Simplicity matters. In the early days, one Airbnb pain point was the payment system, which took eight clicks to complete a purchase. “it was almost an obstacle course.” They decided they had to sweat that process down to three steps.
5: Embrace rejection: When they started out no one wanted to fund Airbnb. One VC actually left them mid-pitch — his smoothie still on the café table — and never came back. While this was hugely and personally demoralizing, the co-founders decided to looked at those rejections as invitations to keep going,” he said.
6: Let go: When they started out, Airbnb co-founders were the design team. But as the business grew they had to turn it over to a team. “There’s a moment where you hand off the baton for your creation to a creation of many people,” Gebbia said. “You have to build up trust in talented and capable designers and let go a little bit.”
Check out the rest of our Roadmap 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:
via Gigaom http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/OmMalik/~3/BhKw4ngU3Gk/
0 comments:
Post a Comment