Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

by Sean Ellis

Using some sophisticated programming, and lots of experimentation to get it right, the team figured out a seamless way to cross-publish Airbnb listings on Craigslist, free of cost, so that whenever someone searched the popular classifieds site for a vacation rental, listings for properties on Airbnb popped up. The cleverness of this hack cannot be understated. Because Craigslist did not offer any sanctioned way for Airbnb (or anyone) to post new listings, the team had to reverse engineer how Craigslist managed new listings, and then re-create those steps with their own program. This meant understanding how the Craigslist posting system worked, which categories vacation rentals were posted in in different cities, figuring out the limitations of what could be posted on Craigslist, such as rules around images and formatting the listings, and much more. As Andrew Chen, who leads rider growth at Uber, commented when analyzing the hack, “Long story short, this kind of integration is not trivial.