“The originator of homestays” Airbnb has been running at the gate of the exchange for 13 years, and finally got its wish in 2020.
On the first day of listing, Airbnb soared 113%, with a total market value of 86.4 billion U.S. dollars, which was on par with the established online accommodation booking company Booking, and surpassed Marriott and Hilton combined.
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>In September last year, Airbnb announced that it was going to IPO, and its valuation of up to $31 billion was bearish by many people. Unexpectedly, a platform that acts as an intermediary for short-term rentals staggered through the year of the epidemic, and even was rumored to be bankrupt in June, but its value in the minds of investors nearly quadrupled.
In the first three quarters of this year, Airbnb’s revenue was US$2.519 billion, down 31.9% year-on-year; net loss was US$689 million. Under the general environment of the epidemic, it is not a very unexpected thing. At best, it can be said that it is not resistant to beatings.
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>What’s more, the investment is the anticipation of the future. It doesn’t matter whether you make money now, the key is the story.
How nice is the Airbnb story?
Like the beginning of many stories, the birth of Airbnb is so dramatic.
In the fall of 2007, Brian Chesky and Joe Jebbia, students of the Rhode Island School of Design who started their business outside, were worried about the rent of the apartment every month. It coincided with a designer conference held in San Francisco, and the supply of nearby hotels was in short supply. The two had a whim: rent out their apartment to designers who could not book a hotel.
At the end of the conference, the two made a small fortune, but saw a big world-online short-term rental. So the two hired a strong man, a friend of Nathan Blachachik who was an engineer, and the three started their own businesses.
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>In April 2009, Airbnb received a $600,000 financing from Sequoia Capital.
When a business opportunity is found, the money is in place, and the rest is how to tell the story to everyone.
Airbnb’s core consumer group is positioned as the “millennial generation”, which mainly focuses on the post-85s and post-90s. They are a generation deeply influenced by the Internet and have gradually become the new main group of production and consumption, and they are also the most individual. a generation.
Closely to this key point, Airbnb did not follow the old path of traditional homestay brands, but sold the concept of “home”, conveyed a new travel lifestyle to the audience, and quickly established a competitive distinction. Even its name is full of tenderness: Airbnb-let love welcome each other. (u1s1, this name is really ugly).
Dickens said that this is the worst age, but it is also the best age.
In this era of information bombardment, boring product promotion messages will only bring numbness and even disgust, but everyone likes to listen to stories.
Therefore, behind all successful brands, there is a “story”.
There is a wolf in Huawei’s story, Apple has a paranoid Jobs, NewBalance tells a story about Li Zongsheng’s “Ingenuity”, Haier smashed a refrigerator is also a story… Airbnb does not have a story, but its users have stories.
Airbnb encourages users to upload their experiences and photos of staying in various places, and encourages them to share their stories, where they are, how they eat, how they live, what stories they have with the landlord, etc. At the same time, Airbnb will also share these stories on Weibo, Zhihu and other platforms as soon as possible to make these stories attract and move more audiences.
The sense of belonging and the human touch are the most fascinating parts of these stories. This strategy method, with the local customs and customs, attracts young people to a large extent.
And Airbnb is talking to investors about the future. For 13 years, Airbnb has owned 4 million hosts and 5.6 million active listings in 100,000 cities around the world. In the future, there is a lot of room for imagination.
As Merton’s self-fulfilling prophecy says: what we think finally becomes what we do.
Airbnb was finally able to step into the door of Nasdaq, which shows that it tells its own story very well. But beyond the ideal, it is more of reality.
Intractable birth defects
In essence, Airbnb is a company that sells lifestyles, and to exaggerate it, it sells dreams.
Taking off Airbnb’s bells and whistles, its business model can be simply boiled down to being a platform intermediary for short-term rentals. Its profit is mainly derived from two aspects: one is to charge tenants 6%-12% of fees, and the other is to charge landlords a 3% surcharge.
But this model is inherently flawed and difficult to solve.
First, the lack of a strong moat.
Airbnb’s model is so simple that you can see through it at a glance, and it’s not difficult to copy, as long as you are willing to burn money.
This is reflected in its financial report. Despite the rapid growth in sales, profits have not been able to continuously improve. The most worrying thing is that this loss is not the pain of the growth period, but reflects the fierce market competition and low customer loyalty.
Without a deep “moat” to guard its business, there is always a question mark hanging over this unicorn’s head: If Airbnb is really worth more than $80 billion after investing only about $6 billion, then its competition Why don’t the opponents continue to try their luck, and why are the established technology giants not attracted?
Second, the quality standards are not uniform.
The listings on the Airbnb platform mainly come from individuals. The diversity of the room structure will give people a sense of freshness, but everything is two-sided. Separate synonyms are not uniform, the room quality is not uniform, and the sanitary conditions are not uniform. Inconsistent, inconsistent service levels…Finally, it depends on the responsibility of the landlord and the cleaning aunt.
No platform will verify the real estate listings on its own platform, and Airbnb is no exception. In the early days, Airbnb would help the landlord design the room and improve the facilities, but later it got bigger and bigger. Thus, the consumer experience is like “Schrödinger’s cat”: you may live in a good room, or you may come back with pleasure.
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>Furthermore, safety and regulatory issues.
Unlike pure trading platforms such as Booking and Ctrip, Airbnb, as an intermediary, needs to be responsible for the risks of providing services.
This is a bit like Didi. Driver assaults and murders have occurred repeatedly, which makes people shudder. Although the follow-up strengthened supervision is still not enough to make people completely relieved.
Of course, Airbnb’s problem is even greater, in addition to worrying about the landlord’s problems, such as privately installing cameras, leaking identity information, and even threatening the safety of renters.
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>They also have to worry about the behavior of the tenants. When the forest grows, there are all kinds of birds. With a little bit of infinite human wisdom, everything can happen. In 2019, the Paris Judicial Police Department stated that the use of short-term homestays provided by the Internet platform to operate prostitution activities accounted for 30% to 40% of the prostitution activities of prostitution groups.
Look, keep pace with the times!
Once such a thing happens, it’s time for wrangling. Generally, the platform will come out to apologize and comfort the victim, promise to strengthen supervision in the future, and ignore the subject of legal liability at all, and the offender can go online in a different vest. So there is a question: if I set a torch to burn the landlord’s house on a whim, and then I go abroad following Jia Yueting, should the platform take responsibility?
500)this.width=500″ align=”center” hspace=”10″ vspace=”10″ rel=”nofollow”/>Information asymmetry and inadequate supervision can easily cause a crisis of trust between buyers and sellers, and this situation is difficult to resolve in a long time.
There is another issue that is not a problem for the time being-monopoly. At present, Airbnb is already a giant in the field of short-term rentals, and it has considerable influence in many countries and regions. As it grows in scale and has a greater right to speak, it will inevitably produce some monopolistic behaviors, including mastering market pricing power, overlord terms, increasing transaction commissions, not paying attention to service quality, or even forcing housing to choose one. “and many more. This means that in the future, it is very reliable to face the anti-monopoly supervision of the local government, such as regulating its business compliance, service standards, and even direct huge fines + restrictions on access like Europe and the United States.
In this way, even if it can maintain rapid growth, the uncertainty of profitability is considerable.
When you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares at you. If the problem can be solved by self-consciousness, then why do you need the police?
If you live in a house and your consumption experience and life safety depend on luck, how long can this business model continue?
When you are in the business style, rapid expansion can cover up many problems, but once you can’t run, the accumulated problems will explode, just like the fake goods problem of an e-commerce platform that year.
Investment, or gambler?
There is a sentence in Airbnb’s prospectus: It may be difficult for us to achieve profitability, but we will try to be clear about the complex organizational model derived from the Internet.
The translation is, I don’t guarantee that I will make money~
Even so, it was fired to the sky. Why is Airbnb, a business model with obvious birth defects, so popular?
There may be a reason for the US stock bubble. The beautiful country opened its gates this year, but liquidity has all entered the asset market, especially the stock market. The Nasdaq has a new high a day. Nowadays, the stock price of any company with a little gimmick is scary and the marginal risk of investment One day is higher than one day, and there is no better place for funds, so the wind blows towards new stocks. Let’s be regarded as an external influence.
The real core lies in-betting on the track.
It is the first time that everyone has done short-term rental business. It may be too early to say that it can happen, but at least it has not been actually falsified. In 2017, Airbnb declared that it had begun to make a profit, which made many people see the hope of this track. After all, not only did the first person to eat the crab didn’t end, he also praised that the crab tasted good, and it was only natural to cause crowds.
These investors are not betting on Airbnb, but on this track, the short-term rental market in the field of sharing mode. If this track is feasible, then it must be Airbnb. Just as Sun Zhengyi bet on Ali, isn’t it the future of China’s e-commerce?
Many times we look at the problem from the perspective of the “rear-view mirror.”
Just like the eggshell apartment, there were no “whistle-blowers” in the early years. I love my former vice president Hu Jinghui resigned for this, but people still rushed in. For another example, no one was optimistic about Pinduoduo’s model back then. Who would have thought that Huang Zheng would rise overnight. Eggshell and Pinduoduo, after the trend, calm down and resume the game. From an outsider’s perspective, the possibility of success on the track of the two is actually very small. The only difference is that the eggshell is dead, and Pinduoduo is not only alive, but also alive. Very good.
It cannot be ruled out that after Airbnb has stabilized, this model can be proved to be real and feasible, but you cannot deny that this is also a small probability event.
However, if investment refers to betting on a small probability event, how is it different from a gambler?
For NIO, fortunately, there is a Hefei government to help, but who can guarantee that when Airbnb is talked about 10 years later, there will be a “Hefei government” in the story.
If you have 100,000 yuan to invest, and the investment period is 5 years, the risk-free project A has a stable income of 1 million, and the project B is risky: 10% chance you will get 10 million yuan, 90% chance you will lose everything. The expectations are the same, how do you choose?
I think many people will choose the latter without hesitation. Won the clubhouse young model, lost to work in the sea.
From Lu Buwei’s bet on his son and another person, to the sharing economy. The outlet for investment has always been imagination.
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