Finding the right niche isn't easy, though. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia should have thought so. I've heard about their story from the book Don't Trust Your Gut. These two roommates in San Francisco first met in art school and were jobless. Their problem were really simple: they were broke and couldn't afford to pay their bills. To solve the money problem, two of them rented their spare air mattresses to attendees of a major design conference when hotels were fully booked.
After stumbling on the idea of air mattress rental and serving breakfast, they had created a website: airbedandbreakfast.com. They were dead wrong. The business wasn't impressive at all. Chesky and Gebbia ended up each accumulating more than 20,000 dollars in credit card debt. They tried their luck elsewhere, where the number of conference guests in Austin might be bigger. But the business remained stagnant, and worse. Ditto for Denver.
As much as Chesky and Gebbia might wish to kickstart their business idea to pay back their debt, they had yet to find the breakthrough.
But – and I'm sure you expected a "but" – the proverbial "aha" moment came after David Rozenblatt, a drummer for American singer Barry Manilow, requested that he be allowed to rent out his whole apartment before going on a tour. The airbedandbreakfast.com founders first said no, noting he would be unable to provide breakfast if David wasn't there. But wait: do they really have to keep sticking to air mattresses and breakfast? The two entrepreneurs then realised the idea of dropping the air mattresses, dropping the breakfast. They could simply ask people to rent apartments when they were out of town.
Airbedandbreakfast.com was rebranded as Airbnb. And the rest is history.
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