#384 2009 · Airbnb (Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia) · Travel / online marketplaceattack-invisible-cost
Airbnb's New York bookings weren't stalled by its algorithm — they were stalled by bad photos, so the founders rented a camera and fixed the listings by hand, one apartment at a time.
the problem
a marketplace's conversion problem is assumed to be a software or matching problem, when the real cause is upstream and unglamorous
background
By 2009, Airbnb had expanded into New York City, one of its most important early markets, but bookings there remained disappointingly flat despite a healthy base of host listings. The founders' first instinct, common in early-stage startups, was to look at the product and algorithm — better search ranking, better filtering, more prominent placement — as the likely fix for a conversion problem.
Instead, the founders flew to New York to look at the actual listings customers were seeing, and found a much simpler cause: most host photos were dim, poorly framed smartphone shots or images lifted from classified ad sites, giving potential guests little confidence in what they'd actually be paying for. No amount of algorithmic improvement could fix a listing that simply looked untrustworthy at a glance.
the move
Rather than write host guidelines asking for better photos, the Airbnb founders rented a professional camera themselves and went door-to-door across New York City, personally photographing host listings to replace the poor-quality originals — a manual, unscalable intervention aimed directly at the actual bottleneck rather than the systems around it.
the payoff
Bookings on the newly re-photographed New York listings roughly doubled, and the company's revenue from the city doubled within about a month of the effort. Airbnb repeated the same door-to-door professional photography approach in other key early markets including Paris, London, Vancouver and Miami with similarly strong results, before eventually formalizing it into Airbnb's ongoing professional photography program for hosts.
what came after
The New York photo effort is one of the most frequently cited examples in startup literature of 'doing things that don't scale' — founders directly diagnosing and manually fixing an unglamorous root cause instead of reaching for a technical or marketing solution — and Airbnb's professional photography program, now offered to hosts at scale, traces its origin directly back to this manual intervention.
references
- [1]How Airbnb Used Pro Photography to Build an EmpireSnappr, 2022snappr.com
- [2]Airbnb doing things that don't scaleAlexander Jarvis, 2020alexanderjarvis.com