Business case story 1: airbnb

June 5438+October 2007 10, San Francisco held an international design conference, and the surrounding hotels were full. Two young people had a brainwave: they put some air mattress in the apartment, rented it for $80 a night, and provided free breakfast.

Therefore, this service is very popular. During the whole meeting, they made a net profit of $65,438+0,000.

Later, they promoted a new rental model and founded a company-Airbnb. These two young people are the founders of Airbnb: Brian Cesch and Joe Gebia.

Today, Airbnb has become a unicorn company with a valuation of $30 billion.

1. Accurately grasp the pain points of users

The users here are not tenants, but landlords. One of the big problems Airbnb faced in the early stage was that the landlord would not take pictures of the house, which led to the house not being rented out. What do we do? CEO Cesc is a photographer himself, taking photos from house to house and uploading them. In two years, he has developed a huge network of photographers, providing photography services to at least 5,000 landlords every month, greatly improving the booking rate of housing.

2. Establish a high-cost pricing system.

Because of the location, quality, tourist season and other factors, the price of the house will fluctuate at any time, which also brings a problem: the landlord can not set the price as accurately as a professional hotel. To this end, Airbnb still chooses to introduce technical talents at high cost and build a set of core algorithm software to help landlords set prices when funds are insufficient. This has also become one of the key magic weapons for Airbnb to win market competition.

3. Establish a "cosmopolitan" brand culture.

Many people just regard Airbnb as a hotel, but in addition to providing accommodation for people, it is more important for Airbnb to establish a brand culture of "being at home in the world": let landlords and tenants have interpersonal interaction, enjoy life experience and make tenants feel at home in foreign countries. In this way, Airbnb has established an emotional bond between the landlord and the tenant, which has never been done by any previous house leasing company.

4. Explore more applicable scenarios

As we said at the beginning, Airbnb started as a housing and short rent business for large-scale conferences and activities, but these activities are not frequent and it is difficult to make a sustained profit. What do we do? The founder constantly explores more applicable scenarios, such as short rent B&B, which we are familiar with now, and cooperates with commercial companies to provide personalized customized business trips, and plans to enter the wedding service and launch unique rooms such as English castles, Italian villas and California pastures.