How Airbnb developed

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 expand this approach to large gatherings like SXSW. In the process, Airbnb made two important changes:< /p>

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

Whether there are meetings or not, people need to travel to all over the world, Airbnb is not necessary Only for meetings;

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

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. To make some extra money, they plan to rent out the loft. The traditional approach is to post on Craigslist. "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."

At that time, there was a design exhibition held in the city, and the surrounding hotels were all closed. 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 acquired 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, and Japan.

They then replicated this practice at other large gatherings, such as SXSW, and allowed people to pay online via credit card. During the 2008 Democratic National Rally, Obama addressed 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 thereafter.

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 had 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 on their own, 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 the remaining stock of all the McCain boxes. This made several founders very anxious and fell into a trough. This unsuccessful trial vividly reflects the efforts of small companies in their early days to try every possibility in order to survive.

The following spring, they finally got to have dinner with Paul Graham***, the godfather of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. Although Graham admitted that "I thought this idea was so crazy... How could anyone think of doing such a thing?" Airbed & Breakfast was able to join the 2009 winter class of Y Combinator, the entrepreneurial incubator founded by Graham. 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.

Taking new users from existing platforms

At the time, Craigslist, the largest competitor in the field, 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 that for supply and demand platform services such as room booking, the number of users is the most important thing for people to choose. Factors, because suppliers will choose platforms 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, add specific information to it, and then forward the modified URL. To users for publishing.

After users post information on Airbnb, they will receive an email informing them that posting the information at the same time to Craigslist can help increase their monthly income by up to about $500. All you need to do is click This link and we can do it for you.

So users tend to 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 make a one-to-one correspondence for each directory option given by the crawled object, or the state, county, city and its corresponding zip code. In addition, the robot also needs to block anonymous email addresses, bypass restrictions on prohibited HTML codes, etc.

Engineer Chen recalled: "These tasks are very detailed. I even think that some very smart technical experts need to spend a lot of time to make it perfect. Traditional marketing managers should never think of it. This technique contains too many technical details that need to be overcome. It is estimated that only engineers who were asked to obtain users from Craigslist could think of it."

This successful technical marketing has brought Airbnb. Several major rewards: First, more return traffic from Craigslist supports Airbnb’s popularity, with more people signing up and posting more rental information; second, users who were used to posting information on Craigslist have begun to become Airbnb users , because now as long as it is published in one place, it can appear in two places at the same time; finally, the original Airbnb users are more sticky because they really get more income here.

"Borrow 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 to advertise themselves.

Airbnb will detect new rental information posted to Craigslist, and then simulate as 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 is There are over 3 million page views per month.

Although this approach is much inferior to the previous techniques and does constitute spam in a sense, it is undeniable that it helped Airbnb grow faster in the early days and at almost zero cost. .

Good appearance brings good profits

As mentioned before, Airbnb successfully attracted three tourists who came to San Francisco to attend the conference in its embryonic stage, and then began to receive Accommodation needs from people around the world, suggesting cities they want to visit and suggesting Airbnb locations. It can be said that Airbnb has been able to rapidly develop into such a large scale because people do have such strong and universal needs, and Airbnb’s services satisfy them.

With the development of the company, in 2009, Airbnb began to raise funds to move to a new home. In the process of searching 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 and booked rooms at 24 different family hotels in an attempt to find the root of the problem.

The truth finally came out: Many people who rent on Airbnb don’t know how to show the best possible side of their room when posting content. 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 make judgments through the screen. "Well, it's not surprising at all. No one is going to pay for something they don't know they're going to get." Chesky said. "The common approach for websites is to send mass emails to users, teach them how to take photos, and Give them an evaluation score.”

But Airbnb uses a seemingly inefficient approach that actually works. They spent $5,000 to rent a high-end camera and went door-to-door to take free photos of many tenants' houses in New York.

As a result, the number of bookings in New York quickly increased two or three times, and Airbnb's local revenue doubled by the end of the month. This approach was quickly copied to Paris, London, Miami and other places.

In the summer of 2010, they officially established a special project to provide photography services to homeowners. Any homeowner can make an appointment in advance with a professional photographer to take photos at their home. Initially, Airbnb signed 20 photographers, which triggered 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. Book volume, 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 homes on six continents.

In 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 30%-80% cheaper prices 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, illegal gatherings, etc. will also benefit from this system, which will change the world. Under the sun, creating 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 up 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 properties of interest. To protect privacy, this feature can be set to be available 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 solving the most basic problem of trust between people through social networks, people can easily and freely check the background information of the homeowner in advance and choose the right person to move 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 and more than 100,000 wish lists had been created.

Before 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 especially 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 user usage by 30%.

One explanation for this is that this change transitions the wish list from simple functional value to emotional 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 seek a moment by looking at beautiful photos here on bad days with rain, haze and wind or outside of heavy work. The peace and tranquility. 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, about 50% of users are already using mobile apps. These people respond to customer needs more than 3 times faster than non-mobile users, which means orders are filled at an 8 times higher rate. 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 scheme 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 giving a gift 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 lead to conversions than “self-serving” copywriting. As shown in the figure, telling users "Invite friends to get $25" is not as effective 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 rapid development

Airbnb’s development experience has attracted the attention of investors and international media. "Fortune" magazine wrote an article in 2012 and commented, "By any measure, the growth rate of the home rental website Airbnb appears to be too fast. In just 4 years, the company has added about 500 new employees. It’s valued at $1.3 billion and has offices around the world. It recently opened a new office in San Francisco and needs to hire 700 more employees. But what’s most impressive is the people using the service. The grand occasion: 50,000 people stay in rooms booked through the Airbnb website every night.”

Chesky, who became CEO by accident, may not have expected that he studied design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Later, with its extraordinary product experience and novel growth strategies, it triggered a new trend of business model change.

“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 are going to be in the real world Reproduce people’s activities on Facebook.”

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