(1:48) In Silicon Valley there’s a myth that you must solve problems in a scalable way, that you write some code and you reach plenty of people. They tried that with Airbnb, and so zero growth. But they then they understood that it’s ok to start with things that don’t scale: they saw than many room listings had terrible photos, so they went to NY for a weekend telling their first users that they would go to them and take professional photos of their apartments on their behalf. Since they were there to do the photos for 30 hosts, they talked to them, saw who they were using their product, and realized that these users were not using it the way it was meant to be used (they basically did some informal UX research). (8:10) It’s there that they saw the distance between the product they had built, and their actual market, their users. But then they went home and immediately started implementing ideas they had gotten and telling their hosts about it. They immediately double they revenue but also their audience, by pure worth of mouth, and all because their initial hosts started to love them. New hosts would see the quality of the initial hosts’ photos (the ones taken by Airbnb founders during the weekend in NY) and so they also uploaded very good photos, and so on in a virtuous circle. As quantity and quality increased, they finally started getting bookings. Today they have tens of thousands of professional photographers for all major cities, that a host can request for free to their house.
(12:22) At the beginning they struggled to get funding, because people didn’t believe in the idea of getting strangers to sleep at your home. They had to come up with a way to build trust between hosts and guests. The analysed the acceptance rate for guests according to the length of their presentation messages and other things, and came up with guidelines and suggestions.
(15:40) Just like “it’s a lot easier to mold concrete when it’s still wet”, it’s easier to set the culture of a company while it’s young, and that will be a tremendous impact as it grows, and so they always spent a lot of effort in hiring great people that shared their values. Gt the right people and the culture will follow, not the other way around.
(16:42) For the first 2 years, the co-founders themselves attended all interviews. As they needed to scale, they trained people to do interviews like they would do it, by looking for their core values and making sure that candidates believed in what they believed.
(19:16) Dog feeding (which is an expressions meaning “use your own service”) is very important to stay engaged with the result of what you do at work, and to be in customers’ shoes, and so and their encourage all their employees to rend their apartments on Airbnb. They also give some credit to employees so that they can travel around and use Airbnb as guest.
(21:35) Reid Hoffman: implementing the ideal solution from the very beginning is not economically feasible. But start from that idea and go backward to try and understand what you can do today, with the aim to get to your final solution at some point in the future.
(25:02) When you know that you need to scale (even in early stages), bring in senior management, don’t wait too long for it (they did, and regret it). Hire someone that seems out of reach today but that you think would be a good fit in 6 months according to where you’re heading to.
(25:54) At the beginning they needed many lists to keep the momentum going, so they started working with business that you have 50 properties to list. These people however only cared about making money, not about their guests’ experience, so it was good to get supply, but bad for the overall customer experience (and it fact they started getting feedback about bad stays), so they dropped that strategy after a few months. They focuses on regular people offering their room in less touristic neighborhoods, because that will give guests a more interesting experience and is closer to their values. One of their fastest growing segments is empty-nesters, people that have a free room because their kid left home.
