The Story of Airbnb #1 Birth
Hi everyone today we are gonna start with a new journey of talking about business stories.
So talk let’s talk about the Airbeds and breakfast company a.k.a Airbnb.
In this Airbnb series, we are going to see the following
Birth of Airbnb — Unemployment which brings the innovation
Cereals for the feed — The hope
Momentum — The rise of Airbnb
Crisis — The fall of Airbnb
Pandemic — The unexpected turn 🔻
Brian and Joe were on the verge of getting evicted from their apartments when their due. During that time they knew there was a design conference which is going to be held in their cities and soon the hotels are going to be full.
They figured out that they could charge people for staying in their apartment for a low rent by providing the 3 airbeds that they had with them along with the breakfasts.
To advertise this they create a website named Airbed&Breakfast using a free word press template.
The hotels did fill up as expected but Brian and Joe managed to get a few people. With that four-day conference, they were able to make $1000 which was enough to pay their rents, and ultimately got some extra time to come up with their real business idea because
Airbed & Breakfast wasn’t their long term business idea
Brian and Joe were looking at some other ground-breaking ideas but they end up nowhere. So they figured out may be other people wanted to make money by renting airbeds in their apartments too.
Brian and Joe recruited their old roommate Nathan a computer programmer who could make their website to be professional. They revamped the website and started advertising for the soldout conferences for the people to make money from their airbeds.
But people were very skeptical because many thought it was a weird social experiment that ended up in people not listing their homes.
But the founders believed if there were enough people actually tried it would be a great experience. This was the time they heard about the 75,000 people coming to the Democratic National convention where Obama would be giving a speech.
So they decided to relaunch Airbnb which brings a weird business lesson to Brian
And it works right before the conference Brian and Joe contacted every single blogger and journalist they could to tell them about the new service that they are going to launch which is Airbed&Breakfast.
Because of this quick idea, many started to write about it and soon they got noticed which eventually made their website crash, and even PayPal banned their account for receiving too many payments in a short span of time because too many people were rushed to book during weekends.
Once the website is back many started to list their rooms and others started to book them. It was proof of their idea but as soon as the conference was over they were back to level zero where there is no customers.
This time they need to have a solution where the people could use their service all year around. At the same time, they were running out of cash when Brian suggested about Angel
Brian and Joe met several angel investors but it doesn’t work. The idea sounded so risky letting people rent out their own space for strangers sounded like a disaster and their business model was just taking a small transaction fee for every deal.
This led the investors to not take risks with this idea. To make their service up and running Joe and Brian started to take Credit card debt. They thought it was a potential idea but seemingly nobody else did.
So with the debts and risks what were Brian and Joe doing with Cereal? Let’s look at it next 👇
