The Airbnb host onboarding experience is a bit magical. You click the CTA in the top navbar that says "Airbnb your home," and instantly, you see this:

Whoa, I could make an extra $2k per month?

To give me this estimate, they had to make a lot of assumptions:

• That my home is where I'm accessing their site from (safe assumption)
• That I can charge $289/night for my place (average based on their data)
• That it has two bedrooms (median number of bedrooms)
• That I'd get 7 booked nights per month (average based on their data?)
• That my home is somewhat "average" and not crazy good or crazy bad (little do they know!)
• That I wanted to rent out my entire place and not just a private room
• That I'm even eligible to Airbnb my home

Some of those things could be horribly horribly wrong. But they committed to reasonable assumptions that allowed me to immediately experience the "magic moment" of seeing how much money I could make.

A bad experience would be making me do a long onboarding form, selecting all of these before seeing my estimate. It would be terrible if I had to enter my email to see my results or, worse yet, book a call with someone to discuss them.

This is the power of opinionated defaults.

Opinionated defaults loosely held

Opinionated defaults are pre-selected choices within your product that nudge users toward desired actions—or that simply make the experience that much easier or more delightful. For example, Airbnb made several opinionated defaults to show me my estimated monthly income.

Defaults are powerful for two reasons:

• They anchor you. If $20 is the default on a donation field, that will be the most common donation.
• They make it smoother for the most common use cases. If chosen properly it can make the experience more seamless for the average user.

"Loosely held" meaning the user can easily change them. For example, I could easily change my location, number of bedrooms, stay type, and number of booked nights to get a more accurate estimate.

You can assume a bunch of different variables:

• Location
• Pricing of users
• Preferred login method
• Preferred payment method
• Template
• Pricing/tier
• More nuanced, product specific things (ex: # of bedrooms)

Let's dive into some more real-world examples:

Uber/Lyft example

Both Uber, Lyft, and Google assume that you're booking a ride or getting directions from your current location:

You can, of course, change this, but it defaults to your current location because 99%+ of rides/navigating likely start there. They've made it more annoying to use 1% of the time to make it easier to use 99% of the time—great trade off.

Patreon example

According to Adam Fishman, Patreon had the problem of all their creators choosing $1 as their support membership price—it just became culturally normal to do it after the default was set to $1—which shows the impact a default can have.

To combat this, they changed the default text to say $1 to $5, which they eventually changed to:

This change significantly increased the average monthly price of tiers—increasing revenue for both them and their users.

Figma example

One thing we've covered previously is Figma's invite and billing mechanism. Most SaaS tools work like this:

• A team member wants to invite someone to the tool so they can collaborate on a project
• But they can't, they need an admin to approve it
• They get delayed waiting for the admin to approve it
• The admin responds 2 days later, saying, "No, we don't want to pay for them!"
• The team member gets annoyed waiting and needs to find a workaround

Here's what Figma does:

• Anyone can invite someone to a Figma file
• New people get added to the team but get the first month for free
• The admin gets an email reminding them of next monthly payment and tells them to check the users
• They go in (maybe) and see their team has added various people
• They either leave them or remove them

Figma made inviting someone to the paid membership the opinionated default. And I imagine that change alone has contributed a lot to their MRR over the years because it's significantly harder for the admin to revoke someone's existing access than denying it in the first place.

Canva example

Templates are a common thing these days. Pushing templates onto people is Canva saying, "Hey, you're probably trying to do something that most other users have already done before; why not use this thing and save hours of work?" In many cases, it works wonderfully—assuming you make templates for the most common use cases and legitimately solve the problem for most people.

Framework for Opinionated Defaults

Adam Fishman made an actionable framework for you. I could reword it for you but this image has all the necessary info.

Just remember, by thoughtfully choosing opinionated defaults, you can guide user behavior to benefit both your customers and your startup, leading to sustainable growth and a more intuitive product. But always, ALWAYS, make sure to let people adapt things how they actually want it in case the default is wrong.

Get going, folks!