Airbnb's dark growth history: How to get early blowout growth with substituting hack

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Editor's note: This article is from Xdash, former Grand Innovation Institute product manager, technology blog synchronization control author, Pingwest guest author. This article is a section of the chapter probation the new book that the author is writing. If you are interested in this topic after reading, please pay attention to the author's microblog: @XDash or micro-letter: ifanbing. On the progress of this book, you can pay attention to id:growthhackerbook public number.

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In 2007, two designer--brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia, who lived in San Francisco, were plagued by their unaffordable rent. They planned to rent out the attic in order to make some extra money. The traditional practice is to post on Craigslist website. "But we don't want to do this because the same thread at Craigslist will look cold, so we're going to build a website ourselves." ”

There was a design exhibition in the city and the surrounding hotels were all booked up. They quickly set up a simple website to attract the "family hotel" business. The site contains photos of three mattress beds placed on the floor, as well as a commitment to provide home homemade breakfast services. Soon they got 3 tenants and paid 80 dollars per person. A week later, they began to receive e-mails from people around the world asking when they could enjoy such services in other popular tourist destinations worldwide, including Buenos Aires, London and Japan.

They then copied the practice to other large gatherings, such as SXSW, and allowed people to pay online via credit cards. During the 2008 Democratic National Rally, Obama delivered 100,000 speeches in Colorado State Denver. At that time, there were only 30,000 hotel rooms in the city, so Airbnb the timely choice of a high-profile public exposure, once received a very high flow and attention-although after a considerable period of time and gradually attributed to silence.

Time quickly dial seven years, the aired & Breakfast has become a world-renowned Airbnb. Its night-rented rooms are even more than the hotel's giant Hilton. By the spring of 2014, Airbnb had more than 10 million users, 550,000 rooms, and a 10 billion dollar valuation.

Early fundraising

At the beginning of the 2008 project, several founders needed to find a way to get the start-up money. At first they tried to raise the team on their own edge, buying a lot of boxed cereal and redesigning two presidential-election-themed boxes--Obama and McCain. They sold the two cereal at more than $40 a box at the autumn show, eventually selling more than 500 boxes, raising nearly 30,000 dollars for their projects.

But the money is still not enough for them. After the results of the election were finally settled, they had to manage to dispose of the remainder of the McCain box. This has left several founders in a rut. This is not a successful test water vividly reflects the small company early in order to survive and have to try any possibility.

The following spring, they finally had dinner with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Paul Graham. Although Graham admits, "I think the idea is crazy ... Why would anyone want to do something like that? And the weekly income of 2009 was only 200 dollars, almost bankrupt, but Airbed & Breakfast was able to join the start-up incubator created by Graham Y Combinator's 2009 Winter class and received 20,000 dollars in investment. The reason that Graham saw them was that "the group of people who can even support the project by selling cereal, their projects will not die," as one of the most hardworking teams he has ever seen. After getting the money, the project officially renamed Airbnb, and soon got a 600,000 dollar seed fund.

Despite the success of the financing, there are still investors in the market who do not understand their business model, or the two founders of the same designer background is not optimistic.

Mining new users from existing platforms

Craigslist, the field's biggest competitor, had Airbnb's enviable mass of user base. Although Airbnb has been trying to differentiate itself from its competitors by shaping differentiated product patterns, but there is an undeniable fact that the number of users is the most important factor in the choice of a supply and demand platform service such as a reservation, because the supplier will choose the most potential consumer platform to publish information, And consumers will pick the goods enough market to compare orders.

Aware of this, Airbnb the Craigslist user base as a piece of fat, trying to get a slice of it. So they launched a feature that allows users to easily copy information content to Craigslist while Airbnb publish it-although Craigslist does not offer such a ready-made interface.

According to engineer Rishi Shah, the hack technique for Craigslist was not really a bother. since Craigslist saved the list content (rather than using cookies) through a set of clear parameters in the URL, Airbnb wrote a robot to access and parse the Web site, add specific information to it, and then transfer the modified URL to the user for publication.

The user publishes the information in Airbnb and then receives an e-mail message informing the user that posting the information to Craigslist can help increase revenue by up to $500 a month, and you just click on this link and we can do it for you.

So users will often click on the link without hesitation, after all, this is nothing bad, but it is a lot of things.

Next, the Airbnb robot will automatically perform a number of actions, in addition to copying the content intact, still need to do some deep processing, such as choose to post to Craigslist in which category, and choose a current location. This chore is really going to take a lot of physical work for engineers, because each directory option given by the crawled object, or a one by one correspondence between the counties and their corresponding zip codes. In addition, the robot also needs to screen anonymous e-mail addresses, bypassing the restrictions on HTML code, and so on.

Engineer Chen recalls: "These jobs are very fragmented, and I even feel that some very intelligent technology people also need to spend a lot of time to make it perfect." The traditional marketing director should not have imagined this technique, which contains too much technical details to conquer. It is also estimated that only engineers who are asked to obtain users from Craigslist can think of it. ”

This successful technology marketing has brought a few big rewards for Airbnb: first, more Airbnb from Craigslist, more people joining the register, releasing more information about the rental, and second, users who were used to posting information on Craigslist, Began to become a Airbnb user, because now as long as in one place can appear in two places at the same time, and finally, the original Airbnb users of the stickiness is stronger, because they really actually get more revenue.

"Jiehuaxianfo" utilizes a Third-party messaging system

Another airbnb from Craigslist "poach" is to use their email notification system to advertise themselves.

Airbnb will test the new lease information released to Craigslist, and then simulate the customer's "message" to the homeowner and recommend Airbnb services. through Craigslist automatic email notification system, the owner will receive such an e-mail, the letter told said: I very much like your release of this rental information in the room, you put it on the Airbnb, but there are more than 3 million times a month page views.

Although this approach is a lot less than before, and does constitute a sense of spam, but it is undeniable that early help Airbnb growth faster, and almost 0 cost. Craigslist will naturally not sit idly by and quickly take steps to ban it.

Good will bring good benefits

Previously mentioned, Airbnb in the embryonic stage had successfully attracted 3 visitors to San Francisco, and after this began to receive people from all over the world's accommodation needs, put forward the city they want to go and suggest Airbnb set up. It can be said that the rapid development of Airbnb to such volume, because people do have such a strong universal just need, and Airbnb services to meet them.

With the company's development, by 2009, Airbnb began to raise new homes. In the process of looking for a listing, they found that the deal in the summer was not very impressive. So Gebbia and Chesky to investigate the matter, they fly around, in a total of 24 different family hotel booking experience, trying to identify the root cause of the problem.

Finally: Many people who rent on Airbnb do not know how to show the best side of the room as much as possible when releasing content. Their botched filming techniques and poor copywriting organizations obscure the advantages of the house itself, making it difficult for people on the other side of the world to make judgments across the screen. "Well, it's not surprising that no one will pay for something they don't know they're going to buy." "The general site's approach is to send mass mailings to users, teach them how to take photos, and give them a rating," Chesky said. ”

But Airbnb used a seemingly inefficient way to actually work. "Don't care how many people like you, pay attention to the people who really love and use your product," said Graham, who spent 5000 dollars on a high-end camera and went door-to-door for a lot of New York's rental homes. So soon New York's booking volume rose two or three times-fold, and at the end of the month Airbnb earned a full increase in local income. The practice was quickly replicated in Paris, London, Miami and other fields.

In the summer of 2010, they formally set up a special project to provide filming services for homeowners. Any homeowner can book a professional photographer to take a photo. At first Airbnb contracted 20 photographers, which at that time caused a flow blowout.

Although starting this project is expensive for startups, but the founders are well versed in the long-term benefits: the houses that benefit from professional photographers can get two to three times times more orders than their peers, and Airbnb can then receive an extra 1025 dollars a month from the homeowner, which is the absolute price. By 2012, more than 2000 freelance photographers had been employed by Airbnb to shoot more than 13000 houses on six continents.

During the pro-filming process, Airbnb also had access to typical users from offline, which laid a solid foundation for future product development.

Get through the chain of social relationships

Airbnb the benefits of this emerging model are obvious: People tend to be able to stay at home hotels at a price of 30% to 80%, without having to book a professional hotel hotel, and to meet and become friends with locals.

But there are also sharp media that if the model becomes mainstream, then criminals who take the opportunity to engage in theft, robbery, unlawful assembly and other criminal activities will also benefit from this system, which will make dumbing, create fear and depravity. If it does exist, then Airbnb will not be big.

The media's concerns are justified, and if Airbnb want to continue to grow, they must face the problem of mutual trust between users. So in the summer of 2011, Airbnb opened up the social networking features that allowed users to access their Facebook accounts.

When the social networking feature is enabled, one can see who the common friend is with the homeowner, or who has rented the room. People can also be based on the location of the owner, gender and other parameters to search, find the interest of the listings. To protect privacy, this feature can be set to be open only to all users who have registered their own social network, or to shut down completely.

When the product features online, Chesky soon announced that the Airbnb had 16,516,967 friends and continued to soar. After solving the most basic interpersonal trust problems through social networking, people are able to easily review the owner's background and choose the right person to stay. The connections and transactions between friends from the same city, the same university and the same block are closer.

Star VS Heart

In the summer of 2012, Airbnb redesigned the "Wish list (Cytopathic Lists)" feature. Four months later, 45% of users used the feature, accumulating more than 100,000 wish lists.

Before that, the wish List feature had been online 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 is particularly trying to change the star icon that represents the collection function to a "heart". As a result, they were surprised to find that a simple little change made the user's usage rate rise by 30%.

One explanation for this is that this change makes the list of wishes transition from simple functional value to sentimental value. People can not only use it to mark their favorite rooms in order to compare and book before travel, but also in the rain haze windbreaks bad days or hard work, here by looking at the exquisite photos, seek a moment of tranquility and serenity. This is a temporary escape from real life means.

Hug move

In order to meet the trend of mobile internet trends, Airbnb in October 2013 began to prepare a dedicated mobile team.

As early as July, Airbnb had allowed homeowners to post information and upload photos via mobile devices. When October came, about 50% of users were using mobile apps. These people respond more than 3 times times more quickly to customer needs than mobile users, which means that the turnover rate of orders is 8 times times higher. Since then, in the revision of the app, we have added and optimized other functions, including dynamic pictures, map positioning, exploration destinations and so on.

User Promotion Program

At the end of 2013, Airbnb plans to restart their user outreach Program (referral). The plan was previously identified as "underutilized" and "actually ineffective". Airbnb's product growth department manager, Gustaf, thinks such things are really not to be proud of.

In order to overhaul the user outreach program, they first investigated the previous data, carefully studied the behavior and retention of each referral and referral user, and tried to predict what kind of person would turn into a real user. At the same time they communicate with companies in the industry who have had successful cases to explore what elements of good execution are.

By using a/b test to compare the traffic characteristics of email, Twitter, Facebook, and the outside chain, they adjust the copywriting to ensure that the referral invitation looks like "giving a friend a discount" rather than a small ad. They found that adding a photo of the sender to the referral content raised the feeling of gift-giving between friends.

In addition, they also found that access to contacts through Gmail and Android phone APIs often had a higher conversion rate, perhaps because they were more closely related to each other.

Through A/b test, they also have a conclusion about the promotion of copywriting: To show users "altruistic" copy, more than "self-interest" is more likely to bring transformation. As shown in the picture, telling the user "invite friends to get 25 dollars" is not as effective as "giving your friends 25 dollars in travel money" is more impressive.

After 3 months of closed development and 30,000 lines of code precipitation, Airbnb new user referral system was formally launched in January 2014, the effect achieved a significant increase in some areas to increase the order volume of up to 25%. At the same time, these promoted users, compared to ordinary users, usually have a higher retention rate, and are more willing to continue to promote others to join.

Controllable High speed development

Airbnb's development experience has aroused the eyebrows of investors and international media. In 2012, Fortune magazine commented that, "regardless of the measure, the development of the rental website Airbnb is too fast." In just 4 years, the company has added about 500 employees, valued at $1.3 billion trillion, and opened offices around the world. Not long ago Airbnb opened a new office in San Francisco and recruited 700 additional employees. But what is most impressive is the popularity of the service: 50,000 people live every night in a room booked through the Airbnb website. ”

Chesky, who chanced to be CEO, may not have thought of learning to design at the Rhode Island Design school, but has sparked a new trend in business model change with exceptional product experience and novel growth strategies.

"We are about to usher in a new wave of development on the Internet." It seems inevitable that people will step from the online world into the real world below. And we're just trying to recreate people's activities on Facebook in the real world. ”

It seems that the Airbnb on the connected line and offline business, will continue to go further and farther.