Make the Problem Small

Shrink the scope until you can reach everyone

Better to have a hundred people love a product than a million people sort of like it. Brian Chesky credits the formulation to the early culture around Gmail, and uses it to argue for narrowing a product's scope until a team can reach every customer directly. He frames the discipline as an antidote to the game-of-telephone decay that sets in as a company scales and adds abstraction layers between an idea and its outcome. He offers a compact image for it: instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub, making the problem as small as possible so that the team stays close to the customer.¹

The underlying formulation Chesky credits comes from the early culture around Gmail: it is better to have a hundred people love a product than a million people sort of like it. The reasoning is that once a hundred people genuinely love something, the model generalizes, and the sample is large enough to trust. The failure mode is the inverse, designing for a million users before understanding one, which produces a shallow surface that delights no one because a team cannot actually talk to a million people.¹

How it shows up

Chesky traces the principle through Airbnb's own history. In the company's founding, the advice to go where the users were, rather than build at a distance, sent the founders door to door in New York to understand roughly a hundred early users instead of scaling from afar. He notes that Airbnb, and comparable marketplaces, launched in a single city first, achieved density, and only then expanded.¹

He applies the same rule inside a large company. He describes concentrating a small team on one surface and one metric, then progressing through stages, fixing bugs, developing features, rethinking the flow, and finally reinventing it, rather than attempting a broad overhaul at once. He contrasts this with a vertical launch that spread across many cities and failed, after which the team returned to a single market. The resulting rule he states is to pilot in one place, prove it, expand to ten, and only then industrialize.¹ The scope discipline pairs naturally with the eleven-star experience exercise, which narrows focus to one customer and one moment of delight before anything is built at scale.

Why smaller scope works

Chesky's causal claim is that smaller scope means fewer abstraction layers, which means more direct contact with reality. He uses the game-of-telephone metaphor deliberately: every management layer, intermediary, and additional launch market is a relay at which information decays. Reducing scope removes relays.¹

A central distinction in his framing is that finding product-market fit is a different problem from industrializing. A team does things that do not scale to prove the model, then industrializes once the essence is found, and the ocean-heating problem comes from trying to design for scale before proving anything. He draws the parallel to industrial design, where a product is prototyped repeatedly until it is right and only then manufactured, an analogy that links the principle to simplicity as distillation.¹ The related investor-side version of the same intuition, zero-to-one monopoly thinking, argues for owning a tiny market completely before entering a large one, on the grounds that small markets carry less competition and can be grown. The tension the principle leaves open is one of timing: capital and pressure often push teams to demonstrate scale early, and Chesky's own recounting shows the discipline being recovered after an over-broad launch rather than always held in advance.