How does Airbnb become a 10 billion dollar company?

Whether you're a start-up that's fast growing, or a company that already has a certain size, it's important to be successful on the road of entrepreneurship, which is to select your products and focus. Here, I want to talk about this point, is the data. Riley Newman, head of the Airbnb company's data science department, recently received a media interview about how to use data science to help Airbnb optimize product decisions and eventually make the company's performance fast. Of course, his share of experience can be applied to other companies as well. Data, is the voice of the customer in Airbnb company, Riley the collected data as the voice of the customer. In fact, by analyzing the customer interaction logs, data scientists play a role as a microphone within the company, they can magnify the voice of their customers, comb their needs, and then "explain" to the company's product team, marketing team, and customer support team to help them make actionable decisions. Riley's exact words are: The data is the voice of the customer. Data can effectively record the behavior of users, for your company's products, the data actually represents the user made decisions, what they will do, will not do what, in fact, reflected in the data above. Data scientists transform the decisions made by users into information that the enterprise can understand. Improve search in order to explain the importance of listening to the voice of the customer, I will give a special example to tell you how Airbnb companies use data to improve their products. As a travel listings, leasing platform, search is Airbnb matching the core of housing information, but also Airbnb the entire platform to operate the engine, but also Airbnb high-speed development and to please the important driving force of customers. At the beginning of the Airbnb, however, they did not know what guidance to provide to their clients. As a result, they start with the simplest solution, Airbnb the location of the user search, search for listings within a certain radius, and then list the highest quality results and return them to the user. "After that, with more people logging in and using Airbnb sites, they are getting more and more data." Eventually, the Airbnb company started using user data-driven searches and replaced that initial search solution. Riley said the new search engine not only brought more customer orders for Airbnb companies, but also improved user satisfaction. His exact words said: "At first, the search problem really bothered the company for a long time, but we decided to let the user group help us solve it." Through object and object interaction, the company collects a large number of datasets, and we build a model that estimates the probability of a user searching for a room at a particular geographic location. In the process of solving the search problem, Airbnb found out how to provide moreThe secret of good products, the answer is to use the data generated by the company's user base! Drive company growth for different user groups, Airbnb also uses data to adjust its user experience and then drive the company's growth. Riley explains this: "Let's go back to the notion that the data is the customer voice", and the Airbnb site will deploy a number of A/b tests to make the Airbnb site more intuitive, and to make the site more comfortable for the different users around the world. In early 2014, for example, Airbnb found that users from some Asian countries had a very high bounce rate (bounce rate) when visiting the home page. Through data mining analysis, Airbnb company soon found that users in these countries will often be in the click of the Block "link, lost in the site to provide a large number of photos, but will not go back to the home page to make a reservation." In response to the problem, Airbnb, a data scientist, dug in and conveyed his findings to the company's engineering team, and soon the Airbnb company adjusted its product design to address the issue and removed blocks from Airbnb sites in some Asian countries. is to provide the best tourist destinations, including China, Korea, Japan and Singapore. This helped Airbnb to achieve a good effect, from the Asian user conversion rate is increased by 10%! Summing up through digging data, not only let Airbnb company seize many development opportunities, but also improve the product. They have a good combination of data intelligence and entrepreneurial knowledge, the global access to millions of of users, but also to their own market value reached an astonishing 10 billion dollars. Airbnb's valuable experience in taking data seriously is worth learning from other companies. Finally, the author needs to emphasize again: the enterprise should not see the data monotonous, but to regard it as the voice of the customer, and then with the power of data scientists to understand the real meaning behind the data, only rely on the data to make the product decision, can let the company performance soar.