Airbnb Started Growing When Its Founders Put Down Code and Picked Up Cameras
With no users, the founders took high quality photos of rentals themselves, the example behind a famous startup essay.
Y Combinator · Startup Experts Discuss Doing Things That Don't ScaleThe founders went out with cameras in hand.
They had been working on an idea for letting people rent rooms in private homes for a while, and they had almost no users. The site was live, but bookings were not coming. What they faced was what startup advisers call a hair on fire problem, the urgent problem that is killing the business now. They needed to get early customers, not to prepare for some future problem of scale.
Paul Graham, the startup investor who was advising them, told them to fix what was in front of them. Their story later inspired his 2013 essay, “Do Things That Don't Scale.” The title sounded crazy at the time, especially coming from an investor, when founders and funders were obsessed with building software that could serve millions.
Graham's point was about timing. He argued that a young startup should worry about its biggest problem first, and for most startups that is getting from zero users to the first customers. He told the team not to spend months perfecting software before finding a real customer, but to feel urgency and do everything possible to win early users, even through slow work done by hand for each one.
In this case, that meant listings. He told them they needed high quality listings, and that what counted in a listing was the photo. If hosts would not post sharp photos on their own, the founders should go and take the photos themselves.
So they did. They visited apartments one by one and photographed the rooms themselves until they had a small catalog of great places to stay shown in professional quality photos. Much of that kind of early work can feel beneath a founder, especially for engineers used to well paid jobs with staff and support, from cold emails and cold calls to admin and errands. This was that kind of work, manual and personal, and it clearly did not scale.
But it got the flywheel turning, with each early booking helping to bring the next, and growth starting to feed on itself. The photos gave travelers a reason to try an unknown service, and bookings started to come.
Questions people ask
Who were the Airbnb founders?
Airbnb was founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk. Chesky and Gebbia studied design, while Blecharczyk handled the technical work. They started by renting out air mattresses in their own apartment.
Did better photos really increase bookings?
Yes. Airbnb later found that listings with professional photos drew more bookings than those with amateur snapshots. The company then created a program that let hosts hire local freelance photographers, turning the founders' manual effort into a service.
What does it mean for growth to feed on itself?
It means each new customer makes the service more valuable for the next one, so growth feeds on itself. For Airbnb, clearer listings brought more travelers, which attracted more hosts, which in turn attracted more travelers.