QUOTE : Airbnb’s strategy for photographing its hosts’ rooms offers an instructive example. Early on, Airbnb’s founders discovered that one of the key factors that increased the chances of renting a room on Airbnb was the quality of the photographs of that room. It turns out that most of us aren’t professional photographers, and our poorly composed, poorly shot cell phone pictures don’t do a good job of conveying the awesomeness of our living spaces. So the founders took to the road, visiting hosts and taking photographs for them. Obviously, personally visiting every host was hardly a scalable solution, so the the task was soon outsourced to freelance photographers. As Airbnb grew, the strategy shifted from the founders managing a short list of photographers, to an employee managing a large group of photographers, to an automated system managing a global network of photographers. Founder Brian Chesky describes this strategy succinctly: “Do everything by hand until it’s too painful, then automate it.