“Every day I was working on it and thinking, ‘Why isn’t it happening faster?’” Chesky says. “When you’re starting a company, it never goes at the pace you want. …You start, you build it, and you think everyone’s going to care. But no one cares, not even your friends.”

When he graduated from college, Blecharczyk wasn’t just a skilled programmer but also the embodiment of a new Silicon Valley hero: the growth hacker. Growth hackers use their engineering chops to find clever, often controversial ways to improve the popularity of their products and services. Blecharczyk’s talents are recognizable behind two of Airbnb’s early, crafty schemes to usurp Craigslist, which had a far larger audience at the time.

But another strategy unquestionably did. A few months after the bulk e-mailing campaign to Craigslist users, Airbnb tried a new tactic. Instead of luring Craigslist users to Airbnb, the company did the opposite: It allowed Airbnb users to take a streamlined version of their elegant listing and cross-post it with a single click on Craigslist. “Reposting your listing from Airbnb to Craigslist increases your earnings by $500 a month on average,” the site informed prospective hosts. “By reposting your listing to Craigslist, you’ll get the benefit of more demand, while still being able to use Airbnb to manage and moderate your inquiries.”

The tool, which Chesky says was originally the idea of adviser Seibel, was a boon for the company. It established Airbnb as a way to create more visually appealing Craigslist ads and, in effect, dropped ubiquitous Airbnb ads into the network of its largest competitor. “It was a kind of a novel approach,” Blecharczyk says. “No other site had that slick an integration. It was quite successful for us.”

— Brad Stone

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2017-uber-airbnb-99-billion-idea/