The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy

by Leigh Gallagher

They learned a lot from talking to their customers, but they learned more by simply parking themselves in their living rooms and observing them as they used their product online.

people had trouble pricing their properties, and photos were a huge problem area.

at no charge.

the most successful companies always end up being the ones that participated most eagerly.

“The biggest enemy of a start-up is your own confidence and your own resolve.

“We weren’t visionaries,” he says. “We’re ordinary guys. We thought, ‘There have to be other ordinary people like us with a little extra space that want to make a little money.’”

When they didn’t understand something, he says, they went and learned it. If you told them to look something up to learn more, they looked it up. “They didn’t spend a lot of time ‘imagineering’ things,” Seibel says. “They launched.”

Product/market fit is a key first achievement; without it, there is no company.

So getting the first hire right really mattered.

One thing the founders noticed was that all the companies they admired had a strong mission and a set of defined “core values,”

they are especially helpful when shaped during a company’s formative days.

it’s hard to overestimate the significance of the ability to find these “free ways to grow,”

it connects buyers and sellers and takes a commission, what’s known as the “service fee,”

Anytime Airbnb enters into a new market, it has to grow both sides, but the supply, or host side, is inevitably harder to grow. This is why almost all of the fee structure lies on the guest side.

if anything, Airbnb subsidizes hosts with not just the fee but also its free-professional-photography policy and many other forms of coddling, from mailing out free mugs to featuring stories about some of the hosts on its website to flying certain hosts to its occasional launch events and annual conventions.