They Have Disrupted Our Perception of Renting to Strangers!
これは、AirbnbのCo-founder Joe GabbiaのインタビューのTranscriptです。解説ページは、こちらです。英語表現の説明やビジネス側面からの解説が書いてあります。ご興味があれば、是非どうぞ！
Chapter #4: Build a Website, Build a Business
They tried to host more people by targeting conference attendees.
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Joe: Well, we knew that we needed a great technical expertise and funny thing, the roommate who moved out so that Brian can move in was a guy named Nate Blecharczyk.
Nate was an engineer who found me on Craigslist and as we lived together, there were some similarities in how Nate and I worked which is that we come home from our day jobs and in the evening, we would both work maniacally on our own projects and I’d look over my shoulder, I remember thinking to myself, this guy has a work ethic just like I do. If I ever need an engineer, I think I’m gonna call Nate. So, here we are, January of 2008. So, I meet Nate for a drink, I tell him about this weekend experiment with these three guests and Nate loved the idea. He’s like we can use the internet to actually get people off the internet. How cool is that?
Guy: And he had this coding experience that you neither you nor Brian have.
Joe: He has a computer science degree from Harvard. He sure did.
Guy: So, I guess at this point, you have your your team assembled, you place your idea of your website. So, when did you really decide to launch it?
Joe: We all agreed that we would launch the next version of our site, Air Bed and Breakfast at the next big tech conference because actually, we thought the original opportunity was housing for conferences. So, the next big one that was coming up was South by Southwest. And every year, the same thing happens. Hotels sell out months in advance, people scramble for housing and it’s also the the place where some of the tech greats had launched before us. Twitter had launched their Foursquare and others and we thought, well, this is perfect. We’re just gonna follow the rocket ship that all of them did. So, at this point, we have about three weeks to build before South by Southwest. I’m doing design, Nate’s doing the coding, we’re just pulling pulling the pieces together.
Guy: And no money at this point?
Joe: Oh, no money at all.
Guy: Just doing this just like shoestring
Joe: Half a shoestring.
Guy: Yeah.
Joe: So, we get it out just in time, we ship it…
Guy: When you say your ship it, what do you mean?
Joe: We released the next version of the site.
Guy: Okay.
Joe: And we think this is the next greatest thing.
Guy: And at this point, there’s not a single listing on, right?
Joe: Not yet.
Guy: Okay.
Joe: We actually had six people put up listings in Austin and we had two people book those listings one of them was Brian.
Guy: Wow.
Joe: So, it was not a smashing success at all.
Guy: Did you get…? Were you guys like sad or were you laughing about it or…?
Joe: No. This was completely demoralizing. Here was this idea that we were so excited about and nobody took us up on the idea.