a story with the moral - there is no shortcut to success
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here is a story with the moral- there is no shortcut to success
Airbnb was the kind of startup nobody expected to succeed. In the days before Uber and the sharing economy, the idea of renting out your personal property was unheard of. The notion of sharing your own home with strangers online through a website was ludicrous. Prominent Silicon Valley investors told the AirBnB team their idea would never scale.
The Airbnb team was having none of it. If they couldn't raise money with investors, they thought, they would do it themselves. Unable to raise money the traditional way, they did so by selling campaign-themed cereal boxes for $40 a pop during the 2012 presidential race. And it worked. Their collector's edition cereals got them out of debt.
It also got them accepted into Y Combinator.
For some, getting accepted into Y Combinator is the happy ending, but Airbnb's challenges didn't stop there. Once they got a website up and running, they found they were able to attract home listings, but most homeowner's photos were blurry, scaring away potential renters. The naysayers were right. Their model wasn't scaling.
They could have taken the easy way out and just emailed homeowners over and over again until they took better photos, but they didn't. The Airbnb team flew to New York City (where the majority of their listings were at the time) and, armed with professional photography equipment, took studio photos of listings for homeowners on their behalf. While they did this, they used the opportunity to connect with their community and develop a better product.
As to whether that worked for them... Judging by their $31 billion valuation, I'd say it did.
Airbnb's story is such an excellent one because it reminds us of something we'd rather forget: that there's no shortcut to success.