Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky: make 100 people love your product

Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO at Airbnb was onstage last Friday with Sequoia Capital’s Yinglan Tan as moderator at the National University of Singapore (NUS) to talk about his experience building Airbnb.

If you don’t know Airbnb, then you probably haven’t traveled much. Airbnb is the largest online marketplace to list and rent holiday homes and rooms around the world. To date, the San Francisco startup has over 500,000 listings, serving over 8.5 million guests across 33,000 cities and is apparently also very active in Asia.

Airbnb was founded when Chesky and his co-founder first started leasing out their own rooms for money. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any beds. But Joe my roommate had three air beds. I didn’t know why he had that. But we realized, we created not a breakfast but an air bed and breakfast. That’s where the name came from.”

It wasn’t long before they thought to replicate the idea and serve more ordinary customers who have rooms for rent. In three days, Joe Gebia and Brian, both from design backgrounds, built a basic html site and started running Airbnb.

If you are an ordinary person you actually represent millions of people. There are probably a lot of ordinary people like us […] go to a website and book someone’s home.

Back in 2008, Brian said that investors didn’t even want to invest in good ideas, let alone his, which many said was a crazy idea. “It’s not crazy good, but crazy,” he said. Airbnb had been running eight to nine months, but only had about 100 users and 10 visitors per day. “I’m pretty sure Facebook didn’t go through this experience,” he said jokingly.

It is really hard to build a marketplace. We ended up having travelers who wanted to [book a place] on our website but there was no one wanting to rent out their rooms. And we started with no money and got progressively more broke from there. […] We took on $20,000, $30,000 credit card debt just [to fund] the company.

Brian and his co-founders’ debt got so bad that they couldn’t get any more loans to fund their startup. Some days, Brian said he woke up with his heart thumping, feeling depressed about his life and startup saying, “Holy cow, how did I end up doing this? This a terrible idea and this is what I’ve asked for.” But other days he was brimming with enthusiasm and optimism.

The turning point

In 2008, during the Democratic National Convention, Brian and his team had an idea. 80,000 people were going to Denver for the convention and there was a shortage of hotels. Naturally, Airbnb became the go to site for folks to solve their accommodation problem. It was so effective that it caught the attention of New Yorks Times and CNN.

Airbnb also went on to smartly promote its brand by selling limited edition Obama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s cereal during the last US presidential election. These limited edition cereals even had jingles. It sounds simple and good. But to assemble these cereals, Brian and his co-founders had to cut and fold 1,000 cereal boxes from huge cardboard pieces. Once assembled, Brian sent the cereals to all the media people he knew. And overnight, it became nationwide news.

Make 100 people love your product