The growth hacking minset | Justin Wu

So as we know, Airbnb is probably, I don't know, like $15, $20 billion valuation. And they really kind of started— their story was they're eating cereal, they're selling other products before they even built their businesses, but they somehow just exploded with growth. And people don't really know how they did. And in order— what they did was a combination— and you see here's a growth chart. Literally came out of nowhere. 2009, growing steadily. 2010, then all of a sudden, literally almost vertical, going to the moon or whatever, going to crazy valuations. And how did they do this exactly? Well, they had the first issue. It was the chicken and egg issue with any marketplace where they couldn't get users into the door and they couldn't get hosts, right? So what did they do? They first went to a platform like Craigslist And most of the Airbnb stories you hear out there, they're gonna tell you, oh yeah, all they did was just contacted people on Craigslist and brought them over. They did more than that. They did— there's a lot of stuff that they don't talk about, and nobody really wants to get into the specifics, 'cause one is there's a lot of like black hat level stuff, and also a lot of kind of dirty tactics they did at scale. And I'm really gonna talk about that to really highlight kind of more of the technical execution. I mean, these guys went to YC, so they're all definitely— Hackers and a hacker background. But what they did first though was went to a place like Craigslist and just manually looked at the website and they identified that there are people doing transactions, hosting houses and purchasing houses. So no technology involved right now. They just looked at it manually and then what they did was they saw that people were posting out their emails and then also responding back, especially in the vacation rental section and the whole housing section. And so what they did was they started pushing out ads on Craigslist. And then from there, they linked it all back to Airbnb. OK, so now they're bringing in consumers. But what they did now was— so then now they scaled that up by using their software. They first did it manually by hand. Then they wrote a software script to then just start posting ads out. So as you can imagine, you do this nonstop. Every single second, every single state in the US, you're just getting millions and millions of traffic coming to your site. And because of that, you know, what it looks like is this. They're pushing out an ad, Airbnb, and then traffic's just coming through, like nonstop, at scale, automated. And that cost them $0 because back then a lot of the housing sections didn't cost a lot of money. But what they also noticed is the 2-site marketplace where they're getting a lot of traffic, but they didn't have enough supply to meet the demand. So what did they notice? They went back out on Craigslist and noticed that they had the email addresses before they were publicly available to everybody. And they're like, how can we get these people to the door? Well, we know that these people are directly homeowners, so let's go out and outreach to them. And so they did. They did an outreach kind of spammy related campaign, but they did it in a much more special message and copy to those individuals saying, hey, we saw your listing on Craigslist, but guess what? I made way more money off of Airbnb. Come check it out. And then they just took that message and went back to Craigslist and messaged everybody that had listings on Craigslist and then kept pushing that out. And then at that point, homeowners and people who were trying to list their houses were coming in and actually listing it on their location too.

So here's the thing. That 3 million, is it true? Was it true or?

Which one?

The site already has 3 million pages.

So, I mean, I'm not sure when exactly this email was pulled from, from theirs, but it could have been fake, could have been real. But at this point, you're like, you're curious. I've seen other, other copies too where they're guaranteed money. Like, we got, we got 20% more increase. And whenever you're doing kind of any crafty email like this, it comes down to the copy and message. And in this case, they knew how to pull on the strings of the owners, of the homeowners. And in this case, they're just throwing some big social proof stats, in this case 3 million visits or big dollar amounts, to really try to convince these people to save, go beyond that Oh, we don't have just this platform, it's gonna give you X amount of results too. So that's where the— I'm not sure exactly when this date— this was in 2009. So looking back at their growth curve, I don't think they had that much. But maybe they could have had that at that moment too, 'cause they were just jam-packing all the emails. And so again, they just did that at scale. So they did both postings and also outbound emails. to then just draw them back to the website. And so because of that, again, like, this just kind of goes back to highlight with growth hacking, and I think Airbnb is like, that's the ultimate example. Like, there's other types of examples of growth hacking, but this is a— that technique is not something that even a business person themselves could have performed because they wouldn't have the software automation skills or ways to kind of build those scripts and just grow. And this is something that not like a software developer could necessarily think about if they didn't know how to understand the business implications. So it's not necessarily one-sided where just a pure software developer who's just good at writing code, not in tune with the business and the user and not looking at the data to bring those people in, they would not have been able to solve that. But being able to truly understand all the 3 segments, they were able to execute their large kind of growth hack. But I'll say though that that's an extreme example of growth hacks, and in the case where that's the best example where growth hacking sometimes crosses some ethical boundaries, they would say that it's not necessarily illegal because it's just against the terms of service of Craigslist, but then at this point they were a startup, they were hungry and they wanted to win, and now they're worth $20 billion, so they're like, come sue me. So they're playing the game of that, but not all growth hacking has to be That extreme, but there are tactics that kind of span down in between all that. But just wanted to really highlight you— highlight all that to give you— get into the right mindset when thinking about kind of growth in general.