The business model is to grow until the market is saturated, and then become one of the 3-4 entities that dominate their niche. VRBO chalked out the “vacation home” scope, hotels do their thing, so AirBnb dabbles in everything, but owns the “shared” accommodation part of the market. While they advertise a treehouse in the rainforest or whatever, the socially problematic conversions of apartments to flop houses in locations without hotels ultimately drives the business.
If you are wildly successful (oh, to be so lucky), what will your company be forced to optimize?
Mid-years Amazon's radically generous customer service refunds and Etsy's seller revolt yanked their courses away from volume optimization for a few years... but it's their inevitable end state for boosting revenue. No public company can resist maximizing revenue by any means available, and especially when no other plausible alternatives are available.
So think really hard on how to set up a marketplace / platform with a business model that mixes in more user-aligned and sustainable goals? Looking at you, Apple...
As a consumer of B2B services, I’m always amazed by the awful deals companies make to show revenue growth. One in particular a few years ago was particularly amazing. The sales dude was getting paid on revenue, and pushed through a deal that cost the company fortune. The entire sales chain of command retired and bought boats.
And of course, while the grift is going, the execs and shareholders get rich. But everyone knows when the gig is up. Evidence: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/11/uber-doordash-plunge-as-labo...
btw. I'm all for interruption but please... it shouldn't be through these means (at least not on this scale).
Never forget "skirting consumer product safety regulations and trademark protections". Their entire retail business at this point is no more subject to regulation than buying "designer" handbags off some dude's street stand.
No, they hire the authorities, and the shit-show goes on forever. The gig is only up when they've passed their overvalued business on to late investors, who demand to be paid through strategic neglect of core functions, price rises to rational market values (or higher), and moonshot PR.
I imagine that it could have pivoted in many directions. That’s really the tragedy of AirBnb. It seems like a platform that could have been more.
It’s a good thought experiment for any startup - how could this cool thing that people like destroy the world if it became a paper clip maximizer?
It all went horribly wrong.
This would be fine if you were paying consummate prices. I’ve used AirBnB years back and for $20 a night you got about what you can expect.
$3000 for that hovel is extortionate!
Well, clearly it doesn't.
The police laughed at me and told me what I did wrong. Part of it was racism, but the other part of it was just laziness.
To actually get something to happen you have to send a letter to the general prosecutor, who then orders the police to investigate. This process takes months.
I have yet to use Airbnb. But it seems that the target customer has changed. I have been aware of them since they first showed up on Hacker News. They were pitched as renting an airbed where hotels are not a useful choice. That target customer is a demographic that I had aged out of before they started. If they were still marketing only to very young people willing to sleep on an airbed and not risk-averse to bedbugs, there would be a lot less disappointment. But of course the company wants to, as all do, grow to other customers and markets.
I wonder if the original investors always thought that they would try to compete with hotels for higher end customers as they do now.