Airbnb can give local service businesses a global audience

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 10:16

   What do you see the biggest opportunity for small businesses who are trying to build to plug into your system? Let's pretend I'm a masseuse. I'm a masseuse in Tulum, Mexico. I'm just making a random place up. Right now, how do I get business? I only get business from locals who know about me, but how would I, if a trial works, how would I get business? I probably wouldn't be able to get business. Maybe I have to go work at a resort and they have to give me business.

2. 10:39

   Now I can have my own business. I can broadcast an Airbnb and all the travelers coming to Tulum, if anyone wants a massage, they can go on Airbnb and they can book the massage with me. So kind of like the original Airbnb be where I had a home, but no one knew about my home and we gave them a distribution platform and they could basically get an audience. Kind of like the way social media gives everyone an audience.

3. 11:02

   We can give all these small business audiences and we give them a global audience of travelers. And so this is really, really difficult for somebody. I'm a photographer in Paris and I take photos of families in front of the Eiffel Tower. A lot of people want to get their photos. How do you get your photo in front of the Eiffel Tower? Or if you're a parent, one of you is not in the photo. Or you give the camera to someone else and they're like being bothered.

4. 11:26

   And it's just like an iPhone photo. Now you can have like amazing professional photos in 30 minutes. It's not too expensive. And you'll remember those photos forever. This photographer would never have known how to broadcast to all these guests from around the world. We really feel like there's a whole economy of service providers. whether there's masseuses, chefs, photographers, companies that deal with equipment or baby gear or laundry or cleaning service, car rental, welcome pickups, picking up the airport, anything you imagine.

5. 11:57

   In other words, now you can be more than just a home. You can be anything. And you were testing all of these, I imagine, before launching. Can you talk to me about all the tests and what's the decision making criteria? For everything we launch, we're probably testing like many, many more things. And we have dozens of services underway. So like ski equipment. I'm not a giant skier, but I ski a little bit.

6. 13:13

   I don't ski enough to have my own skis. I don't ski enough to have my own boots, my own helmet. So everywhere I go, I have to rent equipment. And it's always like, I don't even know where to go. Do I go to the mountain to rent equipment? Do I have to wait in line? I have to wait for someone to size me. It's so much more convenient if I were to get to the Airbnb. They know my boot size, they know my ski size, and they just have everything for me.

7. 13:35

   So that is something that we're testing. I think the test isn't in Italy, but we're going to hopefully bring this to ski mountains all over the world. And they're these ski rental companies. And they would love to be able to bring the equipment to you rather than you have to wait in line at the store, which is potentially really inconvenient. Surfing equipment. You know, a professional surfer probably will travel with their own surfboard, but it's pretty hard to bring a surfboard and an airplane.

8. 13:58

   And a lot of people aren't going to travel with a surfboard. And so they're gonna have to rent this equipment. What if in the house waiting for you was this equipment? Or you knew exactly where to go to get the equipment. So these are kind of the ideas. So we're trying to test, you know, we usually do a test in one market, one city. If it works, then we bring it to other markets. And everything we announced today, we've been testing.

9. 14:20

   So we have a lot of other services coming. There's literally hundreds, by the way. The thing that's exciting is the long tail. It's like, there's so many different services. and no one's service maybe is big enough to be a giant business that you've heard of that has an app. So that's the challenge. Like ride sharing, there's an app, Uber. Food delivery, there's an app, Uber Eats DoorDash. But most other services aren't big enough to have a global brand where you know where to go.

10. 14:47

    And even if they do have an app, they're not integrated with Airbnb. And so it's pretty difficult. Like Instacart, they got an app, but now you can get groceries at your Airbnb and you have an option where you can order of the Instacart groceries through the Airbnb app. It already knows your address. It already knows how many guests and the food can be sent to the house and the host can open the door and have the food put in the fridge. So it's stock for you. It's just much more convenient.

11. 15:09

    So what is the criteria for launching? I wonder if you have like internal metrics. Is it like, I don't know, 10% of guests are using the service. I'm just trying to translate this for people who are thinking about different business ideas when they don't have access to data like yours. How do they know that idea is viable to launch? It's a great question. I mean, we started with the most popular services, the most common ones, chef, masseuse, photography, car rental, airport pickup, luggage storage. But increasingly, the power of Airbnb is the idea that we want you to be able to provide anything you can imagine. So my hope is anything you offer, if it could be useful just to a couple people visiting your city, then we would love to hear from you.

12. 15:52

    And I think just contact Airbnb. I think you can, there's a contact button on the bottom of our page and we try to intake as many ideas as possible. So we have like a services platform. If you go to list, you know, you can go to become a host, there's a button. You can basically apply to become a services host. We might tell you that this is coming soon, but we take every single lead. So let's say you do like floral arrangements.

13. 16:17

    This is a use case. People are on vacation. They're maybe on a romantic trip. They want to get flowers in the listing. Maybe they want flowers in the listing. They want to get flowers for the romantic significant other. That's a service we're launching. And people can apply. We don't have it in every city. But if you have this idea, if you have an idea like that, just apply. And if we aren't ready to launch it now, we will eventually.

14. 16:38

    And so it's just a matter of getting to them. But we want every idea. I wouldn't want to tell people what ideas to apply with because some of the best ideas are ones I don't even think of. But if you have something you think is valuable to somebody else, you just need an audience. And hopefully we can give you that audience. I love that.