Your Users Will Tell You What's Broken

Airbnb: A Case Study

Here's a pattern I see constantly: founders build something, put it out into the world, and then wonder why it's not getting traction. They tweak the marketing. They adjust the pricing. They add features.

What they don't do is watch someone actually try to use it.

The Airbnb founders almost ran their company into the ground before they figured this out. They'd launched, they'd gotten press coverage, and they even had listings on the site. But almost no one was booking. They were surviving on credit card debt and selling novelty cereal to keep the lights on.

Their assumption was that the problem lay in the awkwardness of exchanging money in person. That wasn't it.

It took flying out to meet their earliest users to see what was actually happening. Two problems emerged immediately.

First, the listings looked terrible. Hosts didn't know how to take photos that made their spaces appealing. Easy fix - Airbnb started offering photography services.

Second - and this was the real killer- people who wanted to book couldn't figure out how to use the website. The navigation was so confusing that potential customers gave up before completing a reservation. There were people ready to pay, and the product was actively driving them away.

The founders had been using their own site every day. They knew exactly how it worked. They couldn't see that it was incomprehensible to everyone else.

This is one of the most common blind spots in product development. You're too close to it. You know where everything is, so you can't experience the confusion a new user feels. The only way to see it is to put your product in front of someone who's never used it and watch what happens.

Here's what I tell founders:

Test early, before you're attached to your design. The longer you wait, the harder it is to make changes - both technically and emotionally.

Watch, don't ask. Asking someone "is this confusing?" gets you polite answers. Watching someone try to complete a task shows you where they actually get stuck.

When you find a problem, fix it now. Not next quarter, not after the next release. If users can't figure out how to give you money, nothing else matters until that's solved.

Airbnb's "enlightened empathy" philosophy sounds nice, but it's really just user testing with a fancier name. Put yourself in front of real users, see what they actually experience, and fix what's broken. The sooner you do it, the less time you spend wondering why no one's buying.