Why Airbnb risks being unbundled

Every horizontal platform faces the threat of being unbundled by vertical players.

The Acquired podcast compares Airbnb to eBay: eBay had great network effects, but was slowly unbundled by 1000 niche e-commerce players.

Amazon, in contrast, has fended off all threats of unbundling.

This begs the question? How can a platform like Airbnb prevent the same fate as eBay, and instead be more like Amazon?

The answer I came up with is to: Focus on perfecting the hard-to-perfect "anything-features" that are common among all your supply.

For every product on a platform, there are some features that differ among every product, and some features that are common among all products.

I call these features that are common among all products for "anything-features".

For example:

1. Apple’s anything-features are the iPhone's screen, camera, speakers, and all other physical sensors. Regardless of what website or app I’m interacting with, the iPhone is the best way to do it.

2. Amazon’s anything-features are their fulfillment and logistics services. Regardless of what I need to buy, Amazon is the best way to get it delivered.

Apple and Amazon became great by perfecting the anything-features that are common among all their supply. By being the best

Also, all these companies perfected features that were hard to perfect. It’s really hard to build:

1. Such a perfect phone as Apple, or 2. Such a perfect fulfillment and logistics service as Amazon.

Because these features are hard to perfect, they create a moat that fends off all competitors who try to perfect the same thing.

The anything-features of Airbnb are the photography services, host-guest chats, payments, and reviews.

The photography service is pretty hard to replicate. The review feature isn’t difficult to build in itself, but it’s difficult to get reviews.

Chats and payments, in contrast, are extremely easy to copy.

This is why Airbnb is facing a greater risk of unbundling than Apple, Shopify, Google, or Amazon.

Airbnb hasn’t perfected enough hard-to-perfect anything-features of their supply.

Two hard anything-features that Airbnb could perfect are:

- Cleaning service for hosts - Personalized gifts for guests

If Airbnb offered these anything-features, they might have a better chance to survive than eBay.