What we can learn from Airbnb’s growth hacking secrets

In 2007, designers Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia were struggling to afford their rent. They came up with an idea to rent out their space to people who were coming to the city for the upcoming design conference. The easy option for them was to place an ad on Craiglist. But the designers never liked the design and experience of Craiglist. So they decided to launch a site that they called Air Bed and Breakfast. A site that’d eventually be called Airbnb and be valued at $100 billion.

Airbnb has been changing the travel industry for the last decade. But it started with solving two small yet age-old problems.

• How to increase supply?
• How to increase demand?

Airbnb’s growth hacking improved the supply side of the business

For Airbnb, the first problem was getting more people to list their properties on their platform. Users were using multiple other sites, including Craiglist. Airbnb did a very simple thing. They went where their would-be suppliers were and poached them.

Airbnb famously created a process to send e-mails to users who have put their places for rent on Craiglist. There was a huge number of people already there and Airbnb focused its efforts on bringing them to their platform.

Email sent by Airbnb to Craiglist users | Source: Viralify

Airbnb identified two pain points of users who were posting on Craiglist and addressed them by making their site more user-friendly and simple. Even after using a genius growth hack, they didn’t forget the number one growth hack of all time — your product has to be good.

The other pain point they addressed was visibility in Craiglist. While some users would make the effort to post on both Airbnb and Craiglist, others wouldn’t want that hassle of duplicating work. That meant they had to choose between Airbnb and Craiglist. Airbnb removed this dilemma by adding a simple option to the site. The users could post on Airbnb and it’d automatically get posted on Craiglist. The users were not missing out on anything and their transition to Airbnb became smoother.

What we can learn from Airbnb’s growth hacking

• Go where your suppliers are
• Create a process to bring them to your product
• Don’t ask users to fully leave what they are used to
• Make it easy for them to continue using their current solution
• But show how your product is better by addressing pain points — so that eventually they choose you

How Airbnb hacked the demand side of their business

Despite the growing number of listings, Airbnb struggled with attracting people to book on their site. The founders investigated the problem. They uncovered that the users were not finding the listing images to be attractive. It was not a problem unique to Airbnb. Craiglist users also complained the same.

Brian and Joe had an idea and they wanted to test it first. They went door to door to all New York listings and took professional photographs of them. When they posted those photos, the booking of New York sites increased 2–3 times. They knew their idea was working.

In the summer of 2010, they launched a free professional photography service with 20 contracted photographers. The results didn’t come immediately. But in 2011, they saw their bookings start going up. From there, they kept on growing to become what they are today.

What we can learn

• Identify the pain points of consumers
• Create ideas that can potentially solve them
• Test the new idea in a relatively small yet representative market
• If successful, launch that idea in all markets
• Be patient when it comes to result. Consumers take time to trust and move towards a new service

Final thoughts Airbnb’s growth hacking

Airbnb kept on bringing amazing solutions to existing problems. Their founders, being designers, employed their creative minds to tackle age-old business questions in simple yet effective ways. They showed that growth is not only about splurging money. It can start from simple ideas.