The 'Desperate' Thing Airbnb Did That Actually Worked"
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The Truth About Getting Your First 10 Customers
Back in 2009, Airbnb was struggling. They had a website that technically worked, they had a clear value proposition, but they were stuck. Bookings were hovering around $200 a week, and they were running out of money.
"We had this website, but the website wasn't working," Brian Chesky later explained. "We were in a situation where we needed to pay the rent, and our company wasn't going anywhere."
That's when they did something that seemed absolutely crazy at the time.
Instead of trying to optimize their website or improve their algorithms, Chesky and his co-founder Joe Gebbia flew to New York. They went door to door, meeting their hosts in person. They brought a professional camera and offered to take photos of every single listing.
"The hosts thought we were a bit strange. Here were the founders of a website, coming to take photos themselves."
That's when it hit me. We've been telling ourselves the wrong story about how to get those crucial first 10 customers.
Think about it.
We spend months perfecting our products. Tweaking designs. Optimizing landing pages. Crafting the perfect pitch. All based on the assumption that if we build something good enough, customers will come.
But they don't.
After spending years studying early-stage startups, I've noticed something fascinating.
The gap between having no customers and having ten customers is vastly different from the gap between ten customers and a hundred. Or a hundred and a thousand.
Those first ten customers operate on completely different rules.
When you have zero customers, you're not just lacking revenue. You're lacking something far more fundamental.
Trust.
And trust doesn't scale. Not at the beginning. Not when you have zero proof that your idea works.
The Hidden Problem
Your brain has a feature that's becoming a bug.
When you're building a product, you're thinking about scale. About automation. About smooth user experiences that can serve thousands of customers.
But here's what nobody tells you about those first ten customers: They don't care about any of that.
They don't care about your scalable solutions or your automated onboarding. They don't even care about your perfect product.
They care about one thing: Can you solve their problem?
This creates a trust paradox. When you need trust the most, you have to build it in ways that don't scale.
Just like Airbnb discovered, sometimes the only way forward is to temporarily forget about scale and do things that seem ridiculous in the long run.
The Manual Work That Matters
Let's go back to that moment in New York.
Picture two founders, lugging camera equipment up and down stairs, knocking on strangers' doors. It looks like failure. It feels like desperation. But here's what's actually happening.
They're not just taking photos. They're learning exactly what makes people trust strangers enough to let them into their homes.
This is where most founders get stuck.
They keep tweaking their product, their website, their pitch deck. Meanwhile, their real problem isn't the product at all. It's the gap between what they think customers want and what customers actually need.
Think about what Airbnb was really selling in those early days.
Not a website. Not a booking platform. Not even a place to stay.
They were selling trust.
The Counter-Intuitive Truth
Here's what analyzing hundreds of early-stage startups has taught me.
The more scalable your eventual solution needs to be, the more unscalable your first customer acquisition needs to be.
When Airbnb needed their platform to work automatically for millions of users, they first had to do things manually for dozens.
AKA. The way you get your first 10 customers will look nothing like how you get your next 100.
Those manual, unscalable things you're doing? They're not just about getting customers. They're your real product research.
When Airbnb was manually photographing apartments in New York, they discovered something unexpected. The listings with professional photos started getting booked two to three times more often.
This wasn't just a nice insight. It became the foundation for their next phase of growth. But here's what most people miss about these early, manual interactions.
Every time you do something manually for a customer, you're not just serving them.
You're learning:
The exact words they use to describe their problems
The moment they actually decide to trust you
The real reason they choose to pay you
This is worth more than any market research you could ever buy.
Here's what nobody tells you about manual work: it feels slow, but it's actually the fastest way to learn what matters.
Think about what Airbnb learned in those first few weeks in New York. Not just that professional photos increased bookings. They learned exactly what made people trust strangers with their homes.
This creates a fascinating paradox: the more time you spend doing things manually early on, the faster you can automate the right things later.
The Hidden Speed of Slow
Most founders get this backwards. They try to move fast by automating everything immediately. But they end up building the wrong things faster.
Speed isn't about how quickly you can automate. It's about how quickly you can learn.
Those manual interactions with your first customers? They're not just sales conversations. They're compressed learning cycles. Each one teaches you something that would take months to learn through A/B testing or user surveys.
The Math That Actually Matters
Let me show you how this works in practice.
One manual customer interaction might take two hours. That feels slow. But in those two hours, you'll learn more about what actually drives purchases than you would from a hundred customer surveys.
Most founders try to skip this phase. They want to jump straight to scale. To automation. To growth hacks and viral loops.
I see it every day in my consulting work. A founder will come to me with a perfectly built product, frustrated that no one's using it. When I ask them how many potential customers they've talked to in person, they get quiet.
They've been hiding behind their product.
The Scale Hidden in Manual Work
When you do things manually for your first 10 customers, you're not just serving them.
You're building:
Your future marketing language
Your scalable onboarding process
Your product development roadmap
Your customer success playbook
Think about it this way: Airbnb's manual photography sessions didn't just help them get their first bookings. They became the blueprint for a program that would eventually scale to millions of listings.
The manual work you do for ten customers becomes the template for how you'll serve thousands.
The Path Forward
The question isn't whether you should do things that don't scale. The question is which unscalable things you should be doing.
Let me show you what this looks like in practice.
Make a list of five potential customers. Real ones. Not hypothetical user personas.
Now, ask yourself one question: If this was my only customer, what would I do to ensure their absolute success?
The answer will probably make you uncomfortable. Good. That discomfort is telling you something important.
If you're building a SaaS product, it might mean personally setting up their entire system. If you're creating a marketplace, it might mean manually finding matches. If you're launching a service, it might mean doing way more than your pricing suggests.
The temptation will be to automate this away immediately. Resist it.
Remember what Airbnb learned from those manual photographs? They didn't just get their first bookings. They discovered a crucial insight that shaped their entire business.
Your first 10 customers aren't just transactions. They're your education.
Every interaction is teaching you something essential about what you're really selling. But only if you're paying attention.
So here's your roadmap:
Pick your most promising potential customer. Reach out to them personally. Not with a pitch, but with an offer to solve their problem. Do whatever it takes to make them successful. Document everything you learn.
That documentation becomes your real product roadmap. Your marketing language. Your feature list. Your future.
Sometimes, just like Airbnb discovered, the manual work you do for your first customers becomes the very thing that helps you scale.
So get out there. Get uncomfortable. Get your hands dirty.
Your first 10 customers are waiting.
Until next week,
Scott