Demand is Good (and Tricky)

And things were growing really fast and really well. But the problem we had was that we had way too much demand and not enough supply. So just to sort of provide some context, for every 10 booking requests that we were getting, we could only satisfy one of them at a time. And some of our property owners were taking bookings two years in advance. That was the level of, like, demand and the need that this community had and what a shortage of supply there was. And also at the time, you know, many engineers in the room, and I'm sure that you've come across this when trying to build things. Just as products start to grow, they start to break. And so we were getting a lot of users on the site and trying to build infrastructure to support that growth was beginning to be a really big challenge for us. And we were needing a lot more resource in order to scale much further. So early on in 2017, we'd started a series A funding round. So this is a funding round just after seed stage, where you usually look to raise sort of between 2 and 3 million in order to take sort of initial kind of a product that has early product market fit to scale it to a much larger area. And for us as well, we were very driven and passionate about taking this solution that we had sort of prototyped and being able to take it to a much global audience. And I think from the get go, we started this because we wanted to help people and wanted to solve this problem for people with disabilities so they could travel everywhere. So we would ask this question to ourselves, how do we take this to a much more global level? So we started this funding round and very early on, some of my advisors and investors said, hey, why don't you talk to the big travel platforms and see whether, you know, there could be some tie up or whether the infrastructure you need could be sourced from a big player like Airbnb, for instance. And so one of my investors made an introduction to somebody at C Senior at Airbnb. I came out here in the summer of 2017 and started a whole series of conversations with a completely open mind. We had no, you know, we didn't really have a goal as to what any kind of partnership or collaboration could be. But very quickly the conversation moved towards, on the Airbnb side, actually, if we want to take this solution and be able to scale it to a global audience, the best thing would be to acquire Accommodable and my team to work at Airbnb. And so in November 2017, we closed the acquisition. So Accomable was acquired by Airbnb with very much the mindset that we would infuse accessibility within Airbnb on a much global level. And I would move from London to San Francisco to build out this new team and group. So I was the only one from my team that moved to San Francisco. The rest are still in London working on other parts of accessibility at Airbnb.