The customer matters.

Their opinion and experience with your company determine if they come back.

Therefore, designing their experience to be nothing short of exemplary, even if that means meticulously one by one, is in your best interest.

During this during the beginning phase of your company is ideal, but even if you’ve been established for decades, do not stop until you know exactly what your customers want.

In order to get a large number of users, you must first get a small number of users to be very excited about your product.

And that involves providing extremely good service and conducting user research that often doesn’t scale to those first users.

A great example of this was Airbnb.

Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb,  functioned as more of a traveling salesman during the first years of Airbnb because he was so focused on understanding the needs of the users.

He literally went door-to-door to meet Airbnb hosts in person and discuss their pain points and desires.

His value proposition to get in the door was to show up with a professional camera and offer to take photos of their home, an offer they couldn’t resist. All the while Brain asked them questions which helped shape the future of Airbnb.

Now, of course, this wasn’t scalable but it allowed him the first hand, invaluable experience to handcraft the customer experience.

If you want your company to scale, you’re going to have to do things that don’t scale.