EXERCISE
How Airbnb started
The Airbnb founder story is such a persistent, plenty of determination, so fear
and most of all, hustle.
Let's go back to the start. It's late 2007 in San Francisco. Airbnb founders
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia just moved from New York. Without
employment, they were having trouble paying their rent and were looking for
a way to earn some extra cash. They noticed that all hotel rooms in the city
were so booked, as the local Industrial Design conference attracted a lot of
visitors.
The youngsters saw such an opportunity, and decided to do something. They
bought a few airbeds and so quickly put up a site called “Air Bed and
Breakfast.” The idea was to offer visitors such a place to sleep and breakfast
in the morning. They charged $80 each a night. The idea succeeded and the
first Airbnb guests were born: a 30-year-old Indian man, a 35-year-old woman
from Boston and a 45-year-old father of four from Utah sleeping on their floor.
Soon after, Harvard graduate and technical architect Nathan Blecharczyk
joined the team as the third co-founder. They faced such a major problem: the
site only had two users, one of them was Chesky. They initially launched at
SXSW, and only received two bookings.
After changing the website, the company launched again in August 2008, not
long before the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Over 20,000
people were going to the convention, and all hotels were so booked out. The
first comment on the launch publication on TechCrunch illustrates what people
thought of the idea.
However, Brian developed the basic idea for Airbnb in 2008, when he was
living in an apartment and a local design conference was scheduled in the
city. Due to the conference, all the hotels around his apartment as well as
most of other parts of the city were so booked and participants were left
frantically looking for accommodations. Since Chesky and his roommates
were in such a tight situation after graduating from college, they decided
to rent out their place for the guests of the conference. When they saw
such a happiness on their guests’ faces while paying out the rent, they
decided to move forward with the same idea.
Ultimately, the need of making extra cash led to the development of
Airbnb, which grew into an immense opportunity for the enhancement of
experience of travelers as well as hosts. According to Chesky, he was
always inspired by Walt Disney’s biography, especially the chapter that
describes the Snow White’s production. He explained that Disney’s act of
committing to the creation of characters, cared about by the audience,
despite being a threaten couraged him to move forward with his idea.
Moreover, he added the storyboard design in his project, depicting a
perfect travel experience for both guests and hosts. Another factor that
led Brian to success was his approach to the design of his project. He laid
more focus on the type of service desired by the customers, rather than
the ideas developed by the developers.
“Build something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of
like”. -Brian Joseph Chesky
For this, he invested a huge part of his time, along with his team,
wandering across the streets and collecting feedback from people about
what they would expect from such a service. Thus, all his efforts invested
in collecting insights, suggestions and gripes from real customers shaped
the highly popular site of today.
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