The Humble Beginnings of Airbnb: A Journey from Struggling Designers to Global Dominance

today airbnb is one of the largest online businesses in the world with billions of dollars earned every year’s revenue but it didn’t always start out this way yet brian chesky and joe gabia were able to revolutionize tourism as we know it brian actually studied industrial design at the rhode island school of design and this is where he met joe although brian has always been quite the designer he never saw himself as an entrepreneur in fact it never really occurred to him to start a company especially since his
parents were both social workers all they wanted for him was to get a job that had health insurance and going into arts was not exactly the kind of plan they had for him either but then meeting joe gabia who later became the co-founder at his company was one of the moments that set him on a new path that would change his life forever here’s a story of how airbnb became what it is today the investor that made airbnb encouraged by joe bryan agreed to quit his job and moved to san francisco where they would think
of a business to come up with they didn’t exactly have a plan only that they thought of creating a company so in october of 2007 brian rolled an old foam mattress into his back seat of his old honda civic and drove away to san francisco with just a thousand dollars to his name when he finally got to his destination brian was shocked to discover from joe that the rent was 1150 instead so that many didn’t even have enough to pay for rent they discovered that brent had gone up so much in the past year and luckily
this was just before the annual designer conference they both had no money and thought it would be a great idea to create a designer bed and breakfast for the conference all they had were three air beds that joe had used to go camping and this was what led to the company’s name airbnb actually stands for air bed and breakfast because this billion dollar brand we know today started out with just air beds due to the upcoming designer conference most of the hotels in the city were already fully booked and there was a huge chance that the
conference would end up being cancelled so the pair decided to rent out a section of their home with their airbeds to stop it from being canceled or people missing out on the opportunity to attend they gave this out for just 80 dollars and the designers also had the opportunity to get a city tour during the weekend when they tried this again for the austin conference it became obvious that it was time to expand so why not use this to make a huge difference in the travel and tourism market and that’s exactly what brian and joe
did in 2008 president barack obama’s election would see more than a hundred thousand visitors coming into washington to occupy only about 30 000 rooms so joe and brian spent all of their savings relaunching their website and it took just about a month to go from zero bookings to hundreds of thousands this brilliant idea was already taking form but there was one more problem it’s one thing to have a brilliant idea and another thing to have funds to see it through joe and bryan didn’t have the cash supply to expand their business as much
as they wanted sadly investors didn’t seem interested in funding the project and they had to think of a way to self-finance it since it was the political season they decided to create customized pop-tart cereal boxes with cartoon versions of john mccain and barack obama the two candidates for the election they were only able to produce a thousand boxes with their limited budget and they sold them as limited edition for the elections surprisingly the prices of these boxes were so high at the local retailers
that people had to bid online to get them thanks to this genius if not exploitative idea they were able to raise more than thirty thousand dollars by the time it was sold out when paul graham discovered what they had done with the cereal boxes he was impressed at how they were able to sell what were really ordinary boxes for tens of thousands of dollars he didn’t sugarcoat the fact that he had no faith in the project but he was ready to finance airbnb and with this brian and joe were ready to employ the first set of staff
at the airbnb company riding on the real estate crisis of 2008 when looking at the story of airbnb we can’t ignore the role of the real crisis of 2008 in pushing this company to the top during this crisis people saw their houses as a loss and were desperately looking for ways to make money to handle mortgages and other bills airbnb popped up just at the time when people were more than happy to look into this extra way of making money so in a world where we would have considered it close to impossible that anyone would allow strangers to spend
several nights at their home airbnb began to grow in popularity however many people didn’t know how to get on the website to rent their homes so airbnb offered to do a free photo shoot for anyone willing to become a host starting from new york they created an email list of everyone who wanted to rent their homes and visited them personally like guests the company officially became known as airbnb in 2009 and posting reviews of each apartment on its website gave it a more welcoming and professional tone now people were starting to pay a lot of

attention to this trend picking airbnb homes over impersonal hotels more investors came knocking and the first major investment was six hundred thousand dollars from sequoia capital this brought a huge sigh of relief to brian and joe who couldn’t believe how far they’d come since spending most of their time at the company in 2010 this opened the floodgates of investments from other brands and even the famous union square ventures investor fred wilson admitted at the y press event in 2011 that he was wrong not to believe in
airbnb from the start really who can blame them who would have thought that an idea based on sleeping on an air mattress and other people’s homes could become a trend across hundreds of countries airbnb launched its app in 2011 and this pushed it to become a worldwide company even receiving several awards now that they’ve achieved huge fame the big guys at wall street were forced to start taking them seriously from rising market shares to an investment of 112 million dollars from some vcs computer companies in silicon
valley it looked like things would never go wrong however you can expect that this business wouldn’t be without its unique challenges surviving a pandemic the first major challenge that airbnb had to survive came around in 2021 the company got caught up in a scandal where one of these houses was left in terrible condition and filled with garbage completely different what we could see in the photographs this started to become a trend and of course became viral on twitter hosts didn’t like the idea of their
guests leaving their houses in such awful conditions and of course new guests weren’t a fan of such surprises when they arrive after a long trip so the company had to come up with a solution to this fast they decided on an insurance policy the host guarantee which would cover the cost of any damage if the house was left in unsuitable conditions thankfully that helped to reduce issues like this from putting the company in a bad light unfortunately the idea of airbnb clashed with the rules of many countries they weren’t fans of online rentals
because it was a good way to launch a scam where houses listed didn’t actually exist some governors in the united states were also not happy about the online rentals specifically airbnb were destroying the physical housing market in fact san francisco came up with a law in 2014 that forbids of renting houses for less than 30 days airbnb was able to get through this by investing more in real estate tourism through discount promotions and paying the taxes of rented houses today you can get access to an airbnb in
almost 100 countries including fiji islands with its huts and tree houses their biggest challenge came around in 2020 and we of course know this story with the spread of covet 19 most countries had to put their citizens on lockdown airbnb rentals went really down as people were not willing to rent out their houses during a pandemic however with the vaccine rollout and people being able to move around once again airbnb is going back to its formal glory days and it looks like the worst of it is over many people would still rather book an
airbnb than a hotel when trying to discover new cities no doubt about it brian and joe changed the world of online marketing and real estate forever now you know all about how airbnb became what it is today and that’s a wrap if you’ve ever rented an airbnb in any country what was your experience with the host and environment let us know in the comments .