On a cold winter morning in 2009,  Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky stood outside an apartment in New York. 

He was twenty-eight and five years short of becoming a billionaire. His company, a small website that allowed people to rent their homes to strangers, was around fifteen months old and worth less than a trip to Erewhon. New York was a city he could barely afford, and the camera he held was a rented DSLR. 

With the confidence found only in young entrepreneurs with nothing to lose, he pressed the doorbell a second time. The woman who answered was one of the few customers on his website. She listed an apartment and had been waiting passively for someone to book it. What she didn’t expect was for the founder of the website to appear at her doorstep, asking if he could photograph the apartment for her. 

This marked the first of the dozens of times that week, when he’d explain to listers that the photographs on the website weren’t working. Guests didn’t want to pick sketchy photos with bad lighting and angle, carelessly taken from a couch, over the professionally taken photos of a hotel. Chesky thought he could do better, and the woman let her in. I picture him adjusting the angle of a lamp, moving a plant from a shelf to a windowsill to create a meticulously designed lighting, and emphasizing the kitchen with the copper-bottomed pots and the bedroom with light coming from the West, never imagining that his Industrial design degree from the Rhode Island School of Design would be used in such a way.

A few years later, Chesky was asked how Airbnb survived during that time. He went on to repeat a wise and counter-intuitive piece of advice his mentor, Paul Graham, offered him: “Do things that don’t scale.” His 40 minutes spent taking photos in that apartment embodied this idea wholly: to find one person, earn their trust, learn what they need, and repeat. Dozens of times. The first customer may tell you something only relevant to her circumstances, but the second confirms or modifies it. The tenth will bring the eleventh, unprompted. 

This clearly differed from the aggressive and flamboyant yacht parties and paid growth intern strategies found in the startup scene today. While they exist because they work on some level, the myth marketing agencies wanted you to believe is that to get customers, one needs to advertise, and to advertise, one needs to spend money. 

Here lies the chicken and egg problem: you need customers to prove the product works, but you need to prove it works in order to attract customers. I’ve always believed the chicken comes first. If you can figure out who your customers are and what would make them trust you, the rest all fall into place. They may even lay a golden egg for you.