Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

by Ryan Holiday

On the other hand, Airbnb invested heavily in an expensive program that a lot of growth hackers doubted at first. In 2011, in an effort to improve the site’s aesthetic appeal and attract higher-end customers, Airbnb began offering free professional photography for its listings. If you listed your house on the service, they’d send a pro over to taking amazing photos that made your house look irresistible. Why? Because, as they put it, “taking crisp, well-lit and composed photographs that accurately convey the look and feel of the space is the most difficult part of creating a listing, so we make it easy.”35 Not that Airbnb was flawless here either. It took outside companies like PriceMethod to innovate and come up with the idea of algorithmic (or data-based) pricing for Airbnb listings, which gave better insights on what to charge per night and how to maximize revenue for hosts. Airbnb should have developed this in-house—instead of, say, spending millions of dollars sponsoring the Rio Olympics in 2016—but they eventually caught up and incorporated such technology in their offerings, to the benefit of users and the company’s bottom line.