How did Airbnb develop?

At first, even the founders of Airbnb thought it was a terrible idea. They only saw it as a way to pay rent while looking for truly viable entrepreneurial ideas.

After the first attempt was successful (paying next month’s rent), they tried to promote this approach to large *** like SXSW. In the process, Airbnb made two important changes :

People should be able to use credit cards to book accommodation through Airbnb, avoiding the embarrassment and trouble of in-person settlement;

Regardless of whether there are meetings or not, people need to travel to all parts of the world, Airbnb There is no need to limit it to meetings;

As a result, the new Airbnb is online, with online payment functions and support for accommodation at any time and at any place.

But here comes the problem: no one knows about this website.

In 2007, two designers living in San Francisco, USA, Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, were troubled by their inability to pay the rent.

In order to make some extra money, they plan to rent out the loft.

The traditional way is to post on the Craigslist website.

"But we didn't want to do that, because posting the same posts on Craigslist would look cold, so we planned to build a website ourselves."

There was a design event held in the city at that time. Show, the surrounding hotels are fully booked.

They quickly set up a simple website to solicit the business of opening a "family hotel".

The website includes photos of three air mattresses on the floor, as well as a promise of serving a home-cooked breakfast.

Soon they obtained three tenants, each paying $80.

A week later, they started receiving emails from people around the world asking when they would be able to enjoy such a service in other popular tourist destinations around the world, including Buenos Aires, London, Japan .

They then copied this practice to other large websites, such as SXSW, and allowed people to pay online via credit card.

During the 2008 Democratic National Election, Obama delivered a speech to 100,000 people in Denver, Colorado.

At that time, there were only more than 30,000 hotel rooms in the city, so Airbnb chose to be exposed to the public again in a timely manner, and it once gained extremely high traffic and attention - although it gradually fell silent for a considerable period of time. .

Seven years later, Aired & Breakfast has become the world-renowned Airbnb.

Its nightly rental room bookings even surpassed hotel giant Hilton in one fell swoop.

As of the spring of 2014, Airbnb has more than 10 million users, 550,000 rooms worldwide, and a valuation of US$10 billion.

Early fund raising

When the project was founded in 2008, several founders needed to find ways to obtain start-up funds.

At first they tried to support their team by doing marginal business, so they bought a large number of boxes of cereal and redesigned two presidential election-themed packaging boxes - Obama style and McCain style.

They sold the two cereals at the fall show for $40 a box, eventually selling more than 500 boxes and raising about $30,000 for their project.

But the money is still not enough for them.

Once the election results were finally settled, they had to figure out how to get rid of all the remaining McCain boxes.

This made several founders very anxious and once fell into a trough.

This unsuccessful trial vividly reflects the efforts that small companies had to try every possibility in order to survive in their early days.

The following spring, they finally got to have dinner with Paul Graham***, the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

Although Graham admitted that "I think this idea is so crazy...how could anyone think of doing such a thing?" Airbed & Breakfast was able to join the entrepreneurial incubator founded by Graham—— Y binator's 2009 winter class and received an investment of US$20,000.

After receiving the money, the project was officially renamed Airbnb, and soon received another $600,000 in seed funding.

Despite the successful financing, there are still investors in the market who do not understand their business model, or are not optimistic about the fact that the two founders have the same background as designers.

Discover new users from existing platforms

Craigslist, the largest competitor in the field at the time, had a massive user base that Airbnb envied.

Although Airbnb has been trying to differentiate itself from its competitors by creating differentiated product forms, one undeniable fact is: for supply and demand platform services such as room booking, the number of users How much is the most important factor in people's choices, because suppliers will choose the platform with the most potential consumers to publish information, and consumers will also choose markets with sufficient goods to compare prices and place orders.

After realizing this, Airbnb regarded Craigslist’s user base as a piece of fat and tried to get a piece of it.

So they launched a feature that allows users to easily post a copy of the information content to Craigslist while posting information on Airbnb - although Craigslist does not provide such a ready-made interface.

According to engineer Rishi Shah, this hack for Craigslist at the time was actually not very troublesome.

Since Craigslist at that time saved the list content through a string of clear text parameter structures in the URL (instead of using cookies), Airbnb wrote a robot to access and parse the URL, and add specific information to it. The modified URL is then forwarded to the user for publishing.

Users post information on Airbnb and then receive an email informing them that posting the information at the same time to Craigslist can help increase income by up to about $500 per month. You only need to click This link and we can do it for you.

So users often click on links without thinking. After all, there is nothing wrong with this, but it saves a lot of trouble.

Next, Airbnb’s robot will automatically perform some actions. In addition to copying the content intact, it also needs to do some in-depth processing, such as choosing which category to submit to Craigslist and selecting a current geographical location.

This chore requires a lot of physical effort for engineers, because they have to do one by one for each directory option given by the crawled object, or the state, county, city and its corresponding zip code. correspond.

In addition, the robot also needs to block anonymous email addresses, bypass prohibited HTML code restrictions, etc.

Engineer Chen recalled: "These tasks are very detailed. I even think some very smart technical experts need to spend a lot of time to make it perfect.

Traditional The person in charge of marketing probably wouldn't have thought of this technique at all. It contains too many technical details that need to be overcome.

I guess only the engineer who was asked to obtain users from Craigslist would have thought of it.

”

This successful technical marketing has brought several major rewards to Airbnb: First, more returns from Craigslist have supported Airbnb’s popularity, more people have signed up, and more rental properties have been posted. information; secondly, users who were used to posting information on Craigslist began to become Airbnb users, because now they can appear in two places at the same time as long as they post in one place; finally, the original Airbnb users became more sticky because they It is true that more income is obtained here

"Borrowing Flowers to Offer to Buddha" uses a third-party email system

Another not-so-kind way Airbnb "poaches" from Craigslist is to use Their email notification system advertises itself.

Airbnb will detect new rental information posted to Craigslist, and then simulate a customer to "leave a message" to the owner, recommending Airbnb's services. > Through Craigslist's automated email notification system, the homeowner will also receive such an email, telling him: I really like the room in this rental information you posted, please post it on Airbnb as well, here But there are more than 3 million page views per month

Although this method is much inferior to the previous technique, and it does constitute spam in a sense, it is undeniable. Helping Airbnb grow faster in the early stages at almost zero cost

Good sales bring good profits

As mentioned before, Airbnb successfully attracted 3 people in its embryonic stage. Travelers who came to San Francisco to attend the conference began to receive accommodation requests from people from all over the world, suggesting cities they wanted to visit and suggesting Airbnb locations.

It can be said that Airbnb has developed rapidly. It grew to such a size because people did have such strong and universal needs, and Airbnb's services satisfied them.

As the company grew, in 2009, Airbnb began to raise funds to move to a new home.

In the process of looking for first-hand housing, they discovered that the transaction volume that summer was actually not very impressive.

So Gebbia and Chesky set out to investigate the matter. They flew around. *Reservation experience in 24 different family hotels, trying to find out the root cause of the problem: Many people who rent on Airbnb do not know how to show the best room as much as possible when posting content. On the bright side.

Their poor shooting techniques and poor copy organization obscure the advantages of the house itself, making it difficult for people on the other side of the world to judge from across the screen

"Well, that's not surprising at all, no one would pay for something they don't know they're going to get. "Chesky said, "The general approach of websites is to send mass emails to users, teach them how to take photos, and evaluate and rate them. ”

But Airbnb adopted a method that seemed inefficient but actually worked.

They spent $5,000 to rent a high-end camera and rented it door-to-door for free for many people in New York.

Soon the number of bookings in New York increased two or three times, and Airbnb’s local revenue doubled by the end of the month.

This approach was very successful. It has been copied to Paris, London, Miami and other places.

In the summer of 2010, they officially established a special project to provide shooting services to homeowners.

Any homeowner can do it. Make an appointment in advance with a professional photographer to take pictures at your door.

Initially, Airbnb signed up 20 photographers, which caused another traffic blowout at the time.

Although starting this project is expensive for startups, the founders are well aware of the long-term benefits: houses that benefit from professional photographers can get two to three times the price of similar products. The number of bookings, and Airbnb can then get an additional monthly share of about $1,025 from the host, which is definitely worth the price.

By 2012, more than 2,000 freelance photographers were employed by Airbnb and had photographed more than 13,000 houses on six continents.

During the process of going to the scene to shoot, Airbnb was also able to contact typical users offline, which laid a solid foundation for future product development.

Open up the chain of social relationships

The benefits of the emerging model of Airbnb are obvious. People can often stay in family hotels at a price of 30-80 yuan cheaper, without having to spend money to book professional hotels, and You can also communicate with local people and become friends.

However, some sharp media pointed out that if this model becomes mainstream, criminals who take the opportunity to engage in criminal activities such as theft, robbery, and illegal sex will also benefit from this system, which will It makes the world worse and creates fear and degradation.

If this hidden concern does exist, then Airbnb will definitely not be able to grow bigger.

The media’s concerns are not unreasonable. If Airbnb wants to continue to grow, it must face the problem of mutual trust among users.

So in the summer of 2011, Airbnb opened the social network connection function, allowing users to access their Facebook accounts.

When the social network connection function is enabled, people can see who are the same friends as the homeowner, or who has rented this room in the past.

People can also search based on the geographical location, gender and other parameters of the homeowner to find houses of interest.

To protect privacy, this feature can be set to be open only to all users registered with their social network, or it can be turned off completely.

When this product feature was launched, Chesky quickly announced that there were 16,516,967 friend relationships on Airbnb, and the number continued to increase.

After the most basic problem of trust between people has been solved through social networks, people can easily and freely check the background information of the homeowner in advance and choose a suitable person to live in.

The connections and transactions between friends from the same city, the same university, and the same neighborhood are also closer.

Stars VS Hearts

In the summer of 2012, Airbnb redesigned the “Wish Lists” function.

Four months later, 45% of users had used the feature, creating more than 100,000 wish lists.

Prior to this, the wish list function had actually been launched for several years.

But the team hopes to explore more possibilities through optimization to see if there is room for improvement.

In addition to completing a series of optimizations, the team also tried to change the "star" icon representing the collection function into a "heart".

As a result, they were surprised to find that this simple small change alone increased the user usage rate by 30%.

One explanation for this is that this change transitions the wish list from simple functional value to sentimental value.

People can not only use it to mark their favorite rooms so that they can compare and book before traveling, but they can also check it here on bad days with rain and haze or when they are exhausted from heavy work. Look at beautiful photos and find a moment of peace and quiet.

It simply became a means of temporarily escaping from real life.

Embracing mobile

In order to embrace the trend of mobile Internet, Airbnb began to prepare a dedicated mobile team in October 2013.

As early as July of that year, Airbnb had allowed homeowners to post information and upload photos through mobile devices.

When October comes, there are already about 50 users using the mobile APP.

These people respond to customer needs more than 3 times faster than non-mobile users, which means order closing rates are 8 times higher.

Since then, in the revision of the APP, other functions have been added and optimized, including dynamic pictures, map positioning, exploring destinations, etc.

User Promotion Program

At the end of 2013, Airbnb plans to relaunch their user promotion program (referral program).

The program was previously deemed "underutilized" and "ineffective."

Gustaf, Airbnb’s product growth manager, feels that such a thing is really not something to be proud of.

In order to comprehensively transform the user promotion plan, they first investigated the previous data, carefully studied the usage behavior and retention of each recommendation and recommended user, and tried to predict what kind of people would be converted into real users. user.

At the same time, they communicated with companies that have had successful cases in the industry to discuss the elements of good execution.

Through A/B testing to compare the traffic characteristics brought by Email, Twitter, Facebook and external links, they adjusted the copy to ensure that the referral invitation looked like "giving a discount to a friend" and not It's not random advertising.

They found that including a photo of the sender in the promotional content enhanced the feeling of gift-giving between friends.

In addition, they also found that contacts obtained through Gmail and Android phone API calls to the address book tend to have a higher conversion rate, perhaps because these people are more closely connected to each other.

Through A/B testing, they also came to a conclusion about promotional copywriting: showing users “altruistic” copywriting is more likely to bring about conversions than “self-serving” copywriting.

As shown in the figure, telling users "Invite friends and get $25" is not as impressive as "Give your friends $25 in travel funds".

After three months of closed development and the accumulation of 30,000 lines of code, Airbnb’s new user recommendation system was officially launched in January 2014. The effect has been significantly improved, and the order volume has increased in some areas. Improved by up to 25.

At the same time, these recommended users usually have a higher retention rate than ordinary users, and are more willing to continue to recommend others to join.

Controllable and rapid development

Airbnb’s development experience has attracted the attention of investors and international media.

"Fortune" magazine wrote an article in 2012 and commented, "No matter by any measure, the development speed of the home rental website Airbnb appears to be too fast.

In just 4 years During the year, the company has added about 500 employees, has a valuation of US$1.3 billion, and has opened offices around the world.

Airbnb recently opened a new office in San Francisco. Another 700 people need to be recruited.

But what’s most impressive is the sheer volume of people using the service: 50,000 people stay in rooms booked through Airbnb every night. ”

Chesky, who became CEO by accident, may not have expected that he would later trigger a new trend in business model change with his extraordinary product experience and novel growth strategies while studying design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

"We are about to usher in a new wave of development of the Internet.

It seems inevitable that people will gradually move from the online world to the offline real world.

And we want to reproduce people's activities on Facebook in the real world.

”

It seems that Airbnb will continue to go further and further in connecting online and offline businesses.