Hacker News Reader

Comment by alphagrep12345 | Hacker News Reader

Exactly!! I always wondered why it took so many years for someone to figure out a revenue model for couchsurfing ('couchsurfing' website started in 2003 and AirBnB in 2008). AirBnB is just that (atleast at start)

View on HN

Actually there is no fundamental difference between VRBO.com and Airbnb.com, with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except for a more slick execution.

Edit: Per Wikipedia VRBO was launched in 1995.

The folks at the famous ad firm Widen and Kennedy like to say "the best story wins." AirBnB did have one thing different in it's story vs VRBO, which was that it was initially pitched at people's spare bedrooms, not owners of vacation properties. It's a small difference, but meaningful in how the marketing message spread imo, even if AirBnB did come to be dominated by "professional" hosts.

Yes, I agree. So in a way it was a cross between VRBO and couchsurfing - which as you say made a much better story.

> with VRBO predating Airbnb by a lot, except for a more slick execution.

And "the more slick execution" was key. VRBO was until quite recently basically just classified ads - all transactions were done off platform, which was a major PITA and left a huge vector for fraud. I remember back in the late 00s I rented a place in Europe, and the only form of payment the owner would take was cash, so I showed up and paid 1200 euros in cash like I was buying half a kilo of heroin.

AirBnB solved the transaction issue right from the get go, with all payments going through their system and the owner not getting paid until like a day or two after the guest checked in. In addition, AirBnB worked off a commission model, which makes much more sense from a business perspective and which VRBO finally switched to a couple years ago.

Off-topic but this seemed off to me:

> paid 1200 euros in cash like I was buying half a kilo of heroin

and luckily, the UN has some nice historical data on this [1]. Looks like the EU averaged 50 euros per gram or so. You’d have only gotten 25 grams :).

[1] https://dataunodc.un.org/drugs/heroin_and_cocaine_prices_in_...

Same with stackoverflow. I remember thinking when reading Joel saying they were doing this "what's the point, I can find answers on the web already"

Joel said from the beginning that their goal was to kill Experts Exchange, which at the time was a scammy site that used dark patterns to lure people into paying for answers, but still popped up all the time on Google. And although I often found my question posted on other forums, I swear that half the time the only response was "Never mind I figured it out" or "Just Google it."

If you looked at the user experiences of the two sites, they couldn't be more different.

User experience and design matters a lot.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com