AirBnb is a billion dollar business now? I thought that usually refers to revenue and not valuation, otherwise we'd call a bunch of startups without a product "20 million dollar business".
Was really hard to figure out what in that article has anything to do with "design". If anyone is as confused as I was, it seems that "design thinking" is something totally different:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking</a><p>and I'm not too sure what that phrase really means either.
They owe a lot of success to craigslist. They had been sending emails to users who had been posting the rentals on craigslist. I had read this in some initial success story.
i like the underlying message (get out and try stuff, even if it doesn't scale), but is the core example (increasing revenue & possibly saving the company by iterating on the product) really a "design thinking" solution? it seems that this kind of thinking should pervade the whole team at a startup, not just be confined to the designers.<p>don't get me wrong, i love good design and have used google venture's design sprint methodology (<a href="http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-recipe-for-startups" rel="nofollow">http://www.gv.com/lib/the-product-design-sprint-a-five-day-r...</a>) to great effect. but there's something about the term "design thinking" that draws a line that doesn't seem to need to be there, particularly in early-stage startups.
I am feeling a tad jaundiced but can I give a reason for AirBnB's success as well:<p>They found a way to allow people who do not own property nor have the rights to rent out the property, to receive cash for renting out said property.<p>The recent BBC article estimated 40% of their bookings in this illegal / legal grey area.<p>When you have the ability to give income off capital to those who don't own capital it is an attractive deal - see stock shorting etc.<p>PS<p>I am (depressingly) expecting a fair number of downvotes, but I do hate to see businesses which operate dubiously (albeit a mild version relatively speaking) not being called out on it. At least YouTube got a roasting off the music and movie lawyers.<p>And I would like to point to ethicalconsumer.org as a fairly eye watering list of the ways in which "dubious" is ingrained in our society. We have a long way to go.
> This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be ‘scalable.’ It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’<p>The place where everything changed is where the company literally started disregarding the concept of design (not saying it's a bad strategy, but afaict the entire point of design is to be forward thinking before you actually do something). It seems, if anything, becoming <i>less</i> designed saved them.
I must have read atleast 3 versions for the reason of airbnb's success.<p>As they say, history is written by the winners. Might as well write multiple versions.
Great article. Joe really nails it. I wrote about an early experience with them, and the resulting lessons learned from watching their evolution here <a href="https://medium.com/@adambreckler/its-like-craigslist-but-better-76d6de78afa0" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@adambreckler/its-like-craigslist-but-bet...</a>
Having apartment hunted myself, I have the personal experience of noping right out of any listing with no / bad photography. Categorizing this realization as 'design thinking' leans on hyperbole, and that ultimately has more to do with editorial direction than AirBnB beating its own chest.
I only found out about airbnb around a year ago. At the time the map was ridiculously small. Is (was)that design focused?<p>(Actually design seems to be a particularly ambiguous words, that can mean anything from translating engineering requirements to "looks pretty and is in the current style")
I like how their success story keeps changing. I think it was a TED interview or something like that I heard a couple years ago of their success story. Which was Paul Graham, convinced them to go meet their customers face to face to learn their customers and form a personal relationship with them. Now it seems to be bright pretty pictures.