Dave Gooden, a bootstrapped founder who writes about startup lessons, saying no, launch pages, and how Airbnb grew.
HN links it mainly for his 2011 post on how Airbnb became a billion-dollar company, including its use of Craigslist to get early listings.
>But the larger company has done some really sketchy things where they mislead users in the name of growth. They also have policies that help entrench it beyond what is fair.
This could be the story of literally any large tech company today. Airbnb got its start by spamming people offering vacation homes for rent on Craigslist [1]. According to The Facebook Effect [2], Facebook was almost entirely dependent on its contact importer/spammer for its growth in its early days. On days when Hotmail blocked them for spamming, new user sign ups dropped by 80%; it was only after they cut a deal with Microsoft that included an agreement to not spam-box their emails that they continued to grow.
When you look behind the curtain of successful modern startups, virtually all of them were built on mountains of spam and bad/unethical/illegal behavior, which they then publicly decry and block on their own platforms after they become influential enough to do so. If you have issues with this, Silicon Valley probably isn't the place for you. There are plenty of tech jobs in other areas - but look away from startups, because most are employing/willing to employ extremely aggressive techniques to win.
[1] http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facebook_Effect
Missed a couple big ones from companies they mentioned. Yelp paid professional reviewers to seed cities they wanted to establish themselves in. To my knowledge they were honest reviews, but people were still put off by it.
And the Airbnb spam debacle was left out as well. (http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/)
For the record, I use both services frequently, but those are notable omissions.
Really curious how much PayPal dumped into buying eBay items. Doesn't seem like something you could do for long, so I imagine it had to be highly targeted.
There is one part of this explanation that seems weird to me.
If you read through http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/ and look at the links delivered, they don't have any sort of affiliate IDs. Which means that Airbnb had no way to tie this traffic to that advertising campaign, and had no tracking.
It is possible that they legitimately were willing to pay a third party contractor something based on all of their traffic, no questions asked (I've seen that kind of deal with SEO companies before), but it seems odd.
I'd love to see a typeahead especially for games. Then you import a more robust catalog.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_3_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_xbox_360_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games
have you considered more 'black hat' strategies for adoption?
http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/
craiglist is quite the hub for used games where I live.
The only lesson learned by most founders is it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Be it airbnb or reddit almost all companies have employed one shady tactic or another to grow and maybe once the site is pretty popular they maybe take some steps to fix these issues on surface and hopefully people will forget about such things soon (1)
(1) https://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/
Until the link above is fixed, try this article for an overview:
How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/
TLDR: Dave Gooden setup a honeypot on Craigslist to test whether AirBnB staff were creating fake Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist users & suggest they should post their vacation house listings on AirBnB instead.