Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Exactly. Probably both of these were key, but that second piece was especially key because yeah, how do you get the demand, how do you get traffic? You can go hand-to-hand combat, convince people to put listings on the site, but do you get them bookings? You put it on Craigslist, get the bookings through there, and you capture those bookings and you don’t let them go back to Craigslist. You say, hey, you did this thing, you had this great trip, why don’t you book your next trip with Airbnb? Right. Craigslist captures very little of the value that they create. Effectively, what they did here is say there’s value created on Craigslist. We’re going to be the way to capture it. That was Craigslist. And then the other thing they do, that Nate does—especially given his history that he knows well—is Google and Facebook Ads. These were the early days of Facebook Ads. We’re talking 2009. The platform existed, you could do it, and you could target by interest. What they do is when they want to grow demand, they run Google Adwords for places to stay in San Francisco, places to stay in Paris, places to stay in New York. Okay, that seems like a great way to get demand, but how do you get the supply that uses Facebook? What they do is they go on Facebook, you can target by geography. Hey, we need some more supplies in New York. Okay. We’re going to target New York, and we’re going to run Facebook Ads. We’re going to target by interest. Brad talks about this in the book. We see this person likes wine—rent your place to a wine lover. This person is interested in yoga—rent your apartment while you’re gone to someone who loves yoga. That’s how they would get supplies to sign up on the platform. And then, of course, the people that they would send, no guarantees that they like wine or yoga, but it worked pretty well. To be fair, these are some pretty great growth hacks. It wasn’t just that Airbnb growth hacked their way to success—as we talked about. There were a bunch of trends that were at their back here. The financial crisis, people needing to pay their rent, people want to travel cost-effectively. We talked a little bit about the supply-constrained nature of hotels in markets when there are big spikes in demand. I think the other thing too that took a while for people to realize—but has probably become the most sustainable part of Airbnb in the ensuing 10+ years—is you don’t always want a hotel experience. Almost anybody who’s traveling, sometimes you want a hotel experience, but sometimes you actually want to stay in a place. Especially if you have a family or you’re traveling as a group. It’s such a much better and totally new and different experience to travel like this.…

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