How did Airbnb develop?

At first, even the founder of Airbnb thought it was a bad idea. They only regard it as a way to pay the rent, and are looking for a really feasible entrepreneurial idea.

After their first attempt was successful (paying the rent for next month), they tried to extend this practice to a large * * * like SXSW. In the process, Airbnb made two important changes:

People should be able to book a residence through Airbnb with a credit card, avoiding the embarrassment and trouble of face-to-face settlement;

People need to travel around the world whether there is a meeting or not. Airbnb doesn't need to be limited to meetings;

As a result, the brand-new Airbnb is online, with online payment function, and supports accommodation anytime and anywhere.

However, the problem comes: no one knows this website.

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

In order to earn some extra money, they plan to rent out the attic.

Traditionally, it is published on Craigslist website.

"But we don't want to do this, because posting the same post on Craigslist will seem cold, so we plan to build our own website."

At that time, there was a design exhibition in the city, and all the hotels around were fully booked.

They quickly set up a simple website to attract the business of "family hotels".

The website contains three photos of air mattresses on the floor and a promise to provide homemade breakfast service.

Soon they had three tenants, each paying $80.

A week later, they began to receive emails from all over the world asking when they could enjoy such services in other popular tourist destinations in the world, including Buenos Aires, London and Japan.

Then, they copied this practice to other large * * *, such as SXSW, and allowed people to pay online by credit card.

During the 2008 Democratic National Convention, Obama gave a speech to100000 people in Denver, Colorado.

At that time, there were only more than 30,000 hotel rooms in the city, so Airbnb chose to make a high-profile exposure in front of the public at the right time, which once gained extremely high traffic and attention-although it gradually became silent for quite some time.

Seven years later,&; Breakfast has become a world-famous Airbnb.

The number of rooms rented at night even exceeds that of hotel giant Hilton.

By the spring of 20 14, Airbnb had more than100000 users and 550000 rooms, with an estimated value of100000.

Early financing

When the project started in 2008, several founders needed to find ways to get start-up funds.

At first, they tried to support their team by doing marginal business on their own, so they bought a lot of boxed cereal and redesigned two presidential election theme boxes-Obama model and McCain model.

They sold the two kinds of cereals at the price of 40 dollars per box in the autumn exhibition, and finally sold more than 500 boxes, raising about 30 thousand dollars for their project.

But the money is still not enough for them.

After the election results finally settled, they had to try to dispose of all the remaining goods in McCain's box.

This caused several founders to be overwhelmed and once fell into a trough.

This unsuccessful test of water vividly reflects that small companies have to work hard to survive in the early days.

The following spring, they were finally able to have dinner with paul graham, the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.

Although Graham admits, "I think this idea is crazy ... how could anyone think of doing such a thing?" But air mattress &; Breakfast was able to join the 2009 winter class of ——Y binator, a business incubator founded by Graham, and received an investment of 20,000 US dollars.

After getting the money, the project was officially renamed Airbnb, and soon it received a seed fund of 600,000 US dollars.

Despite the success of financing, there are still investors in the market who don't understand their business model or are not optimistic about the background of the two founders as designers.

Mining new users from existing platforms

At that time, Craigslist, the biggest competitor in this field, had a huge user base of Airbnb.

Although Airbnb has been trying to differentiate itself from its competitors by shaping different product forms, it is undeniable that the number of users is the most important factor in people's choice for the supply and demand platform services such as reservation, because suppliers will choose the platform with the most potential consumers to publish information, and consumers will also choose market comparison orders with sufficient supply.

Realizing this, Airbnb regards Craigslist's user base as a piece of fat meat and tries to get a piece of it.

So they launched a function: while Airbnb publishes information, it allows users to easily post copies of information to Craigslist-although Craigslist does not provide such a ready-made interface.

According to Rishi Shah, an engineer, this hacking technique of Craigslist was actually not very troublesome at that time.

At that time, Craigslist saved the contents of the list through a string of plaintext parameter structures in the website (instead of using cookie), so Airbnb wrote a robot to visit and parse the website, add specific information into it, and then hand over the modified website to users for publishing.

Users post information on Airbnb, and then they will receive an email telling them that posting this information on Craigslist can help them increase their income by about $500 a month. You just 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 it, but it saves a lot of things.

Next, Airbnb's robot will automatically perform some actions. In addition to copying the content intact, it also needs to do some deep processing, such as choosing the category to publish to Craigslist and choosing a current geographical location.

This chore is really time-consuming for engineers, because it is necessary to correspond the crawled objects or each directory option given by the state, county and city with their corresponding postal codes.

In addition, robots also need to block anonymous email addresses and bypass the restrictions that prohibit HTML codes.

Engineer Chen recalled: "These jobs are so detailed that I even think it takes some very smart technicians a lot of time to be perfect.

The traditional person in charge of marketing should not have thought of this skill, which contains too many technical details to be overcome.

It is estimated that only engineers who are asked to get users from Craigslist can think of it. "

This successful technical marketing has brought several big returns to Airbnb: First, Craigslist's more backflow has propped up Airbnb's popularity, and more people have registered and published more rental information; Secondly, users who used to go to Craigslist to publish information began to become Airbnb users, because now they can appear in two places at the same time as long as they publish in one place; Finally, the original Airbnb users are more sticky because they really get more income here.

"Borrowing flowers to offer Buddha" uses a third-party mail system.

Another unfriendly way for Airbnb to "poach people" from Craigslist is to use their email notification system to advertise itself.

Airbnb will detect the new rental information posted on Craigslist, and then simulate it as "information" from customers to owners, and recommend Airbnb's services.

Through Craigslist's automatic email notification system, the owner will also receive such an email telling me: I like the room rental in this information you posted very much. Please post it on Airbnb, where there are more than 3 million page views every month.

Although this practice is much worse than the previous skills, it does constitute garbage in a sense, but it is undeniable that it helped Airbnb grow faster in the early days, and it was almost zero cost.

Good sales bring good returns.

As mentioned above, Airbnb successfully attracted three tourists to San Francisco in its infancy. Since then, it has received accommodation needs from people from all over the world, put forward the cities they want to go to and suggested that Airbnb set up a point.

It can be said that the reason why Airbnb has developed rapidly into such a volume is because people do have such a strong and universal demand, and Airbnb's service meets them.

With the development of the company, in 2009, Airbnb began to raise funds to move to a new house.

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

So Gebia and Ceschi began to investigate this matter. They flew around, always booking rooms in 24 different family hotels, trying to find out the root of the problem.

In the end, many people who rent houses on Airbnb don't know how to show the best side of the room as much as possible when publishing content.

Their poor shooting techniques and poor copywriting organization cover up the advantages of the house itself, making it difficult for people on the other side of the world to make judgments through the screen.

"Well, it's not surprising. No one will pay for something they don't know they will buy. " Ceschi said, "The general practice of the website is to send emails to users in groups, teach them how to take pictures, and evaluate and grade them."

But Airbnb took a seemingly inefficient way, but it actually worked.

They rented a high-end camera for $5,000 and went door-to-door to take pictures of many renters' houses in new york for free.

As a result, the number of bookings in new york increased by two or three times, and Airbnb's local revenue doubled at the end of the month.

This practice was quickly copied to Paris, London, Miami and other places.

In the summer of 20 10, they formally set up a project to provide shooting services for homeowners.

Any homeowner can make an appointment in advance for a professional photographer to take pictures at home.

At first Airbnb signed 20 photographers, which triggered another traffic blowout at that time.

Although starting this project is expensive for startups, the founders are well aware of its long-term benefits: houses that benefit from professional photographers can get orders two to three times higher than similar houses, and Airbnb can also get an extra monthly share of about 1 0,025 from the owners, which is definitely worth the fare.

By 20 12, more than 2,000 freelance photographers had been employed by Airbnb and photographed more than13,000 houses on six continents.

Airbnb can also reach out to typical users offline in the process of shooting on the spot, laying a solid foundation for the future development of products.

Open up the social relationship chain

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

However, some sharp media pointed out that if this model becomes the mainstream, criminals will also benefit from this system by taking the opportunity to engage in criminal activities such as theft, robbery and illegal * * *, which will make the world worse and worse, resulting in fear and degeneration.

If this kind of worry does exist, then Airbnb is bound to be unable 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 20 1 1, 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 their friends with the host are or who rented the room.

People can also search according to the geographical location, gender and other parameters of the owner to find out the houses of interest.

In order to protect privacy, this function can be set to only open to all users who have registered social networks, or it can be completely turned off.

When this product function was launched, Chesky quickly announced that there were16,516,967 pairs of friends on Airbnb, and it continued to increase dramatically.

After solving the most basic trust problem between people through social networks, people can easily check the background information of their owners in advance and choose the right person to live in.

The contacts and transactions between friends in the same city, the same university and the same block are also closer.

Star VS heart

In the summer of 20 12, Airbnb redesigned the "wish list" function.

Four months later, 45% of users have used this function and accumulated more than 6,543,800 wish lists.

Prior to this, the wish list function has actually been online for several years.

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

After completing a series of optimizations, the team especially tried to change the "star" icon representing the collection function to "heart".

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

One explanation for this is that this change makes the wish list transition from simple functional value to emotional value.

People can not only use it to mark their favorite rooms for comparison and reservation before going out, but also look at beautiful photos here and seek a moment of peace and harmony in rainy and foggy days or bad days of heavy work.

This has simply become a means of temporarily escaping from real life.

Hugging and moving

In order to adapt to the trend of mobile Internet, Airbnb began to prepare a special mobile team in 20 13 10.

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

When 10 arrived, about 50% of users were already using mobile applications.

These people's response speed to customer needs is more than three times that of non-mobile users, which means that the order closing rate is eight times higher.

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

User promotion plan

At the end of 20 13, Airbnb plans to restart their promotion plan.

This plan was previously considered "underutilized" and "ineffective in practice".

Gustaf, manager of Airbnb's product growth department, thinks that such a thing is really not to be proud of.

In order to comprehensively transform the user promotion plan, they first investigated the previous data, carefully studied the use behavior and retention of each promoted and promoted user, and tried to predict what kind of people would become real users.

At the same time, communicate with successful companies in the industry to discuss what elements are included in a good implementation.

They compare the traffic characteristics brought by email, Twitter, Facebook and external links through A/B tests, and adjust the copywriting to ensure that the recommendation invitation looks like a "discount for friends" rather than a small advertisement.

They found that adding the sender's photo to the promotion content can enhance the feeling of giving gifts between friends.

In addition, they also found that the contacts obtained by calling the address book through Gmail and Anroid mobile phone API often have a higher conversion rate, which may be because these people are more closely related.

Through the A/B test, they also came to a conclusion about the promotion of copywriting: it is easier to show users "altruistic" copywriting than "selfish" copywriting.

As shown in the figure, telling users that "inviting friends can get $25" is not as impressive as "giving your friends $25 for travel expenses".

After three months of closed development and 30,000 lines of code precipitation, Airbnb's brand-new user recommendation system was officially launched on 20 14 1, and the effect was significantly improved, and the order volume in some areas increased by as much as 25%.

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

Controllability has developed rapidly.

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

Fortune magazine once wrote in 20 12 that "by any standard, the development speed of Airbnb, the house rental website, seems to be too fast.

In just four years, the company added about 500 employees, with a valuation of $654.38+0.3 billion, and opened offices all over the world.

Not long ago, Airbnb opened a new office in San Francisco and needed to recruit another 700 employees.

But the most impressive thing is the grand occasion of people using this service: 50,000 people live in rooms booked through Airbnb every night. "

Ceschi, who unexpectedly became CEO, probably didn't expect that he studied design at Rhode Island School of Design, but in the future he triggered a new trend of business model reform with extraordinary product experience and novel growth strategy.

"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.

We just 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 services.