If we challenge ourselves to outline the complete mindf#ck experience for our customers, we can get closer to delivering it than we think.
What’s an 11-star experience?
The 11-star experience concept stems from a fantastic Reid Hoffman “Masters of Scale” pbluepiodcast interview with Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky from back in May 2017.
We highly recommend the whole interview, but the relevant part starts at 12:40 here (and here’s a link to the full transcript if you prefer to read vs listen).
Below is the transcript of the relevant 11-Star Experience section, adding our formatting for guidance and emphasis.
CHESKY: If you want to build something that’s truly viral you have to create a total mindf#ck experience that you tell everyone about…
Chesky then builds and builds the Airbnb experience up to his 11-star experience:
You get to your Airbnb. and no one’s there. You knock on the door. They don’t open.
You get to your Airbnb. If they don’t open, you have to wait 20 minutes.
You knock on the door, they open. That’s not a big deal. You’re not going to tell anyone about it. “I used Airbnb. It worked”
You knock on the door, the host opens. On the table would be a welcome gift. It would be a bottle of wine, maybe some candy. You’d open the fridge, there’s water. You go to the bathroom…toiletries. The whole thing is great. This is a six-star experience. “Wow. I love this more than a hotel. I’m definitely going to use Airbnb again.” That’s a six-star experience.
You knock on the door. Reid Hoffman opens. “Welcome. Here’s my full kitchen. I know you like surfing. There’s a surfboard waiting for you. I’ve booked lessons for you…you can use my car. And I also want to surprise you. There’s this best restaurant in San Francisco. I got you a table there.
And you’re like. “Whoa. This is way beyond.”
A ten star check-in would be the The Beatles check-in. in 1964. I’d get off the plane and there’d be 5,ooo high school kids cheering my name, with cards welcoming me to the country. I’d get to the front yard of your house and there’d be a press conference for me and it would be just a mindf#ck experience.
I would show up at the airport and you’d be there with Elon Musk saying “You’re going to space.”
CHESKY: The point of the process is that maybe 9, 10, 11 are not feasible. But if you go through the crazy exercise of “keep going,” there’s some sweet spot between “they showed up and they opened the door” and “I went to space.” That’s the sweet spot. You have to almost design the extreme to come backwards. Suddenly, doesn’t knowing my preferences and having a surfboard in the house seem not crazy but reasonable? It’s actually kind of crazy logistically, but this is the kind of stuff that creates great experience.
HOFFMAN: But how far do you go toward the 11-star experience? To create the nirvana product, all successful entrepreneurs, at some point, have to come back down to earth.
CHESKY: There’s really two stages of a startup’s product. The first is, design a perfect experience and then you scale that experience. That’s it. [Note from John & James: that’s a pretty good sister framework too]
When to use 11-star experience thinking?
We love this framework because it spans all manner of experiences: it could be a digital product like Notion (what we used to create Blueprints and James’s favourite product by far) or it could be envisioning an off-the-charts date or unbelievable wedding (two causal events!).
The 11-star experience works especially well when laying out user & customer journeys, so is common in R&D orgs: outlining what an incredible experience looks like from onboarding through ongoing engagement and outcomes. Teams often lay out the flows across a journey - sometimes printing out and taping up the various steps on a wall - and then identify opportunities to improve each step. With the 11-star experience mentality, it’s less about suggesting incremental improvements and often more about magically combining steps or even removing them entirely.
How do we use 11-star experience thinking?
James:
This is the R&D framework I share the most: I send out the link to the Masters of Scale interview transcript more than once a month. Especially with startups I’ve started spending time with that are digging into their user/customer experience. [Now I can send them this Blueprint instead!] I don’t recommend going through the whole experience of mapping out every star, but I love to send across the Chesky transcript excerpt - especially his 7-, 10-, and 11-star experience answers - and then I ask a follow-up question: ”What would a mindf#ck, 11-star experience look like?” /turn 9 times out of 10, I hear back the 6-star or occasionally 7-star experience: it’s slightly better than today’s reality, but it’s nothing like what unbef#ckinglievable looks like. From there, I can make that point (constructively) and push to dream bigger.
In addition, when you push to think of something truly outlandish, it gets at the underlying Jobs to Be Done. In Chesky’s memorable example around going to space with Elon Musk, this assumes the guest’s job to be done was a once-in-a-lifetime experience; if the guest’s main job to be done was to get to know San Francisco, maybe they’d be less psyched to leave the earth?!
John:
I love this concept. It’s a newer one for me - I haven’t used it on the GTM side of things, but I could absolutely use it to envision an off-the-charts buying or service experience. I could imagine a half day at an offsite dedicated to brainstorming ideas with this format. Do you recommend doing the 11-star experience live and in-person or over a day or two in-writing?
James:
Both can work. What I’ve done twice - and found useful both times - was to take the 11-star experience idea and then flesh it out in more detail. With LinkedIn Learning, our 3 product leads each wrote a full 1- to 2-page walking through an 11-star experience day in the life of a learner and Enterprise buyer. We outlined the impact of massive improvements in reducing friction and making learning content hyper-relevant; it was inspiring. I wish I could tell you that we shipped all of it, but a few “crazy” ideas proved more doable than expected, the whole point of the exercise. In today’s AI-powered world, the gap between dreaming and reality feels like it’s shrinking, so I can’t wait to see what previously seemed like mythical, 11-star experiences soon come to life.
Want to learn more?
WANT TO GO DEEPER ON THE 11-STAR EXPERIENCE?
Reid Hoffman himself wrote a piece on the 11-Star Experience from the perspective of how to be a valuable Board member here:
Included in Reid’s piece is this suggestion for how Board members can help lay out their own visions for a company’s experience. A practice that clearly doesn’t need to be restricted to Board members. Here’s his 3-step advice:
- Pick any topic areas to focus on and have everyone add their 1 to 11 star vision
- Clear the board, then ask each board member to join the game
- After everyone has finished writing, take turns reading out loud your ideas. As each board member presents their spectrum (1-11 stars), the rest of the board marks the “sweet spots” - the experiences that are both delightful and feasible - that the company should consider implementing.
WANT TO GO DEEPER WITH BRIAN CHESKY?
Brian Chesky is on the Mount Rushmore of tech CEO interviewees.
He’s an off-the-charts quality storyteller who exudes inspiration and charisma.
To highlight a few great interviews, one of the most inspiring videos on entrepreneurship ever created is the first 6 minutes of this Brian Chesky clip with Steven Barlett (the full interview is here on YouTube and here on Spotify).
Finally, here’s an excellent interview, Chesky sitting down with Lenny Rachitsky on his podcast via YouTube and Spotify:
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