Broke Airbnb Founders Paid the Bills by Selling Political Cereal
They started with tiny bloggers to fill rooms for the 2008 Democratic convention, then lived off $40 boxes of Obama O's.
lennysnewsletter.com · How to kickstart and scale a consumer business—Step 4: Find your early adopters by doing things that don’t scaleBrian Chesky was sitting at a kitchen table, hot-gluing cereal boxes together by hand. He and his co-founder, designer Joe Gebbia, were behind on rent and running a little website that let strangers list air mattresses and spare rooms for travelers.
It was the summer of 2008, and the Democratic National Convention was about to pack Denver, Colorado. Hotels were full, and the two founders saw a chance to fill the gap with local hosts. Finding people willing to offer rooms turned out to be the easy part. Getting travelers to actually book them was harder.
Instead of chasing big newspapers or television, they pitched only the tiniest political bloggers, the ones with the smallest audiences. The plan worked. Those small posts gave the story credibility, and bigger outlets piled on until national TV crews were interviewing the little-known founders about lodging the convention crowds. The surge in bookings was real, but it lasted about a week.
Still extremely broke, Chesky and Gebbia met around that same kitchen table to figure out how to stretch the moment. Both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, a design college, they decided to make cereal.
They invented two fake brands, Obama O's, the Cereal of Change, and Cap'n McCain's, a Maverick in Every Box, after the two presidential candidates. They drew the box art themselves and persuaded a student at the University of California, Berkeley to print 500 of each on the cheap. The boxes arrived flat and had to be cut, folded, and glued by hand.
"I was thinking at the time, that Mark Zuckerberg was never hot-gluing anything at Facebook," Chesky recalled. Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, was already running a fast growing social network.
The pair mailed boxes to hundreds of well known tech bloggers, hoping the colorful boxes would sit on desks and prompt a story. Then they started selling the cereal for $40 a box. The Obama O's sold so fast that they began throwing in the Cap'n McCain's for free. The stunt brought the company to profitability and bought two broke founders enough time to keep building what would become Airbnb.
Questions people ask
How much money did the cereal actually make?
The founders have said they cleared about $30,000 from the cereal sales. They sold about 800 boxes at $40 each, mostly Obama O's, and used the cash to pay down credit card debt and keep Airbnb running. That bridge money kept them alive until they joined the startup accelerator Y Combinator in early 2009.
Why did they pitch small bloggers instead of big news outlets?
Small bloggers are easier to reach, quicker to say yes, and hungry for a fun scoop. Once several of them had written about Airbnb housing the convention, larger editors saw social proof and felt safer covering it. It was a ladder, with each small mention making the next, bigger mention more likely.
Did Airbnb ever sell cereal again?
No, it was a one-time fundraiser tied to the 2008 election. The company kept a few unopened boxes as souvenirs, and those boxes have since sold at auction as startup memorabilia. Airbnb itself moved on to its core business of booking rooms and homes.