I just listened to a podcast interviewing Brian Joseph Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb and learned a few things.
The most interesting part was the absolute genesis of Airbnb.
The original business idea came to Brian back in 2007. There there was an upcoming design conference in San Francisco and all the hotels in the area were booked for the four-day weekend. Him and his friend - and now co-founder - Joe Gebbi decided it might be a good idea to get some inflatable beds and make a bed & breakfast for the weekend. The idea for an “air mattress bed and breakfast” for designers was born. They bought the domain name and “air-bed & breakfast” was open for business.
How ’bout that!
The amazing thing is that they never thought of it as a breakthrough idea. They just wanted to make a few bucks. In fact, they went about their lives like nothing happened while they worked on coming up with a winning business idea.
Little by little, Brian got to thinking:
what if we could design a storyboard for the of the perfect vacation? From the time you book, to the time you check in. what if we design the end-to-end journey?
we can call it “service design” 💡
None of the kids had any idea how to get millions, thousands or even hundreds of people to like a product or service.
But...
If they could only get one person to like the experience, they could learn what they liked and maybe they could get a second customer and maybe a third later on. One by one they could maybe get to 10, 20 and eventually 100 people that loved the service.
And once they had 100 people who loved their service, they basically had a marketing department made up of loyal customers who would spread the word of mouth like wildfire (kind of like what's going on with HIVE in Sucre and other places in Venezuela, right?)
This is the idea that Brian and Joe had and they even pitched it to several investment funds for a $150,000 raise for 10% equity of a company that could potentially be worth a whopping $1.5 Million
Some of the rejection letters are hilarious now that Airbnb is value as of November 10, 2023 is $76.61B.
Have you ever come up with an idea and didn’t think that much about it?
Don’t underestimate where you could take it in 10 years with some dedication, a lot of great ideas seem like hobbies, they seem like toys at the time. But look what came out of a silly idea for a weekend gig with a couple of college friends.