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Comment by pgroves | Hacker News Reader

I started my own company to get away from the do-anything-for-a-sale attitude of corporate america. I do not admire or respect AirBnb for this behavior. I don't care that it worked. I don't care if it was legal or not, it was dishonest. I know it's common, but it takes a fundamental lack of respect to lie directly to another human being.

I'll just continue to toil in obscurity; self-respect intact.

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I am not being facetious by this question, but did you make a product that you are selling ?

If so, how did you get your first set of customers ?

Please share.

If you have not made a product that you need to sell yet, I think you will find when you do it, it's MUCH, MUCH more difficult than you ever thought it would be.

Also, selling a service - i.e. web development/design is very different than selling a product.

I have not released the product I am building. I have been supporting myself doing contract work.

My bad experience came when I was the first employee (not founder) at a VC backed startup. I was originally a developer but was promoted to be the technical liason in sales. My job was to sell the incomplete product. We went back and forth between government and enterprise sales while I was there. The company is still around but is doing something completely different now.

In the interest of not burning any bridges, I'll only say that when we would bid on contracts, every vendor from big guys to the other pre-product startups were stretching the truth beyond what I consider simply being optimistic about delivery schedules and ROI.

So yes, I do know what I'm getting into. My plan this time is to build a product that has obvious value to the customer on day 1, and leave selling by 'hustle' to someone else.

If it's niche enough and it works well, it might sell itself. Word of mouth is extremely powerful these days.

This is a FAQ: for your first sale, you sacrifice the price (all the way down to free if you have to). For the next sales, you show your reference customer.

Free is not a sale. You have to charge something to claim them as a customer.

You know what I mean. Even in EDA, having a reference "user", as long as they are using the product, is a major achievement that will be leveraged [to death] with future [paying] customers.

I am not trying to be pedantic. In my experience there is an enormous difference between having a user and having a paying customer. They may be a user before they are a paying customer, but there is a very significant difference.

But you don't have to tell that you first customer doesn't pay you ;).

I've sold products.

I didn't spam. I talked with customers before the product was even finished to make sure we were solving a real problem, to make sure they understood our marketing message, and to make sure we really understood the space.

This led naturally to a situation where I had paying beta customers, and even more customers who signed up and started paying as soon as we launched.

There's a fundamental difference between building a product that doesn't depend on others for its functioning, and a marketplace, where the core function is access to other users.

It is about impossible to get a marketplace going from a standing start. I've commented on it before elsewhere: picking off Craigslist users was always critical for Airbnb to get going. There are dozens of startups trying to build companies off the back of what Craigslist doesn't provide.

I'm sure the Airbnb guys probably started with the honest approach, realized it got them nothing but cease and desist notes, so switched to the craftier fake emails from girls interested in the well-being of vacation renters everywhere. I bet it felt icky at the time, but here they are. And "you know what's cool....?"

There are two-sided networks that have launched without spam, or deceit.

The standard approach would be to pick a city like NYC, and pound the pavement selling the site to every high-influence group you can possibly identify, do that to get a decent inventory built up and then launch with that inventory and start proving the model.

Then, pound the pavement in other high-influence cities, work to get inches in the media, do biz-dev deals with travel/vacation sites, get yourself interviewed on local radio and tv, find every possible way to insert AirBNB into the news stories of the day And frankly, with the real estate crash, there were a lot of possible ways to insert themselves into the news.

Or they could just spam craigslist.

That said, my big question continues to be 'did they disclose this behavior to their investors'.

It's interesting...seems this comment is pretty controversial. Went up a few points, then went back to 1, then went up again, then went down again.

Can anyone explain why this is so controversial ? If you downvoted it, mind explaining why ?

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