The Social Ventures Forum

Nice article I translated and summed as a makeup assignment.

The article tells the evolution of Airbnb.com, a service that allows anyone to turn hers/his house to a source of revenue and offers tourists a cheap and friendly alternative to standard hotel rooms.

In the article we can see a great implementation of many principles we have learned such as: the lean start up, concierge mvp, triple bottom line and more

Founded by Joe Gebbia, Brian Chesky, and Nathan Blecharczyk, the story begins in the living room of Joe and  Brian's San Francisco loft in 2007. Alumni of the Rhode Island School of Design, they knew that a prominent design conference was coming to town, but that all the nearby hotel rooms had been booked solid  so they decided to offer up their place, along with tasty breakfast and local hospitality, to a few friendly strangers attending the event. 

Each guest paid 80$ a night (as opposed to 300 in a hotel) and in return Joe and Brian offered the breakfast, air port pickup, site seeing and just hanging out together, they made a total of 1000$ that weekend.

After many inquiries on where else is this service available, Joe and Brian thought about the idea of building a web site connecting property owners who are interested in renting their apartments for short term periods and tourists looking for a cheap lodging.

  Since both Joe and Ben had no technical knowledge in website building, adding Nathan Blecharczyk to the mix helped them turn the idea into a functioning website,

Ben tells in the article: "on the first day we had an idea, on the second day a website and on the third day we started getting media coverage in interior design blogs" 

At first, the start-up encountered the classical problem of supply and demand, they had to create both.

The company had only 75 hosts at the beginning of the road, so during a few weeks Ben and Joe went and met with every one of them, slept in their houses and apartments, basically using their own service. By doing that they heard many problems they didn't think of, for example. The owners said they didn't know how to take nice pictures of their own places, in order to help them the company launched a free service of apartment photography. Today there are 3000 photographers working for Airbnb.com

From the day the company was founded until June of this year as many as 10 million orders were placed in the website, the majority of them, by outside the U.S. residents. The profit comes from charging a 3% premium from the owners and a 6%-12% commission from the ordering party,

Airbnb has offices all over the world and works hard to customize the service to local users in terms of language, currency and photography.

The local managers use the offered rental spaces to test them and also in order to keep in touch with the services' community.

To sum things up , the Airbnb model fits well into a  growing perception call "Sharing Economy" . The main idea is to create an open market which allows trading a resource that belongs to the individual but is not in use, or no profit is generated from it.

We also saw principles that we learned in class:

First the lean start-up , like Joe said, in three days people were already talking about them.

Second the concierge mvp - going to the apartments and using them, taking to the owners etc.

Third, PPP - the idea of "sharing economy" received a lot of support by the winds of change blowing all over the world (99%, occupy wall street, Israeli demonstrations and more)    and  integrates well with the idea of helping your community and your planet.