10 Building in Public: Unscalable ➡️ Scalable

Airbnb is a $75 billion dollar business. Yes, billion.

But in 2008 they were just a couple scrappy guys in an apartment attempting to scale a nearly impossible business. Think about it, they needed to convince thousands of people to let strangers in their home. Pretty wild.

But here we are. A short decade later and now many of us prefer Airbnbs over Hotels.

How the hell did they scale that quickly?? And more importantly, how did they gain traction in those early innings?

Well, I did some digging. Here’s the story:

Airbnb had a similar problem as HeyCPA. They needed traffic (i.e., site visitors), but in order to get traffic they needed hosts to list their properties. Again, here is “the chicken and the egg” issue. What comes first? Neither, unfortunately.

You must start somewhere though, so Airbnb got creative. At this time a popular area to post short-term rentals was on Craigslist. But the process sucked. The photos were brutal, it wasn’t set-up for short-term rentals, there was inconsistent information provided, and the UX was terrible. (Plus you had no way to verify the listings… creepy).

So, the early employees at Airbnb decided to message owners of these listings on Craigslist and say something along the lines of: “Hey, I want to book your place, but can you post it on Airbnb? It’s much faster and easier!”. AKA they posed as customers in order to get customers... A little greasy? Yes. But did it work? Hell yeah.

This is obviously totally unscalable, but unscalable activities in the beginning stages are the BEST way to gain traction and eventually reach “scale”.

Airbnb wasn’t done there. They began realizing that photos were the game changer, and some of the early listings had terrible photos. So, Brian Chesky (Founder, CEO) started messaging the hosts and offering a “Professional Photographer” to come by and take photos. The catch? Well, the “Professional” was just him and a friend…

This did two things though:

1. The pictures improved. This in turn improved listings and therefore improved conversions.
2. Second, Brian got 1:1 time with his early customers, which was crucial! He learned their pain points, learned what was working, and what wasn’t, and could easily apply this to other hosts.

Win, win!

Anyways, enough of Airbnb. But I love that story (and am still very bullish on Airbnb).

What’s the relevance to HeyCPA?

Well, we ran into the same “chicken and the egg” issue as discussed in our previous newsletter. How do we get traffic with no listings? Well, we follow the Airbnb method of course.

Here’s what we did:

Scour the internet for the best accounting and finance jobs in Vancouver (or Remote), copy the job description, copy important information about their company, create a company profile, and post the job… Did we ask for their permission? No...

But here’s the key point: all traffic is directed back to them. No applications happen on our site (yet), it is all redirected to their website. This creates a perfect storm, because we get to post jobs (and in turn increase traffic), and they get free promotion and traffic for their job posting. Win, win.

However, we were a little nervous in the beginning. (I.e., Is this even legal?) But as a wise person once told me, “if you’re not getting sued, Matt, you’re not pushing hard enough.” Kinda a joke. Kinda not.

So we decided to follow Shannon’s favourite saying and “ask for forgiveness not permission”. Once we posted each job, I’d go on LinkedIn and message the founders of each company. This is the exact template:

“Hey [insert name],

How are ya??

First, love your brand and your story. It's awesome.

I won't waste your time here. I just started a job board for CPAs, and as we get off the ground I wanted to promote accounting jobs with companies I admire (and [Insert Company] is one of them).

So, we've re-posted your [Insert job title] position on our site. We've linked everything back to your site, and didn't change any of the job description.

I wanted to ensure this is something you're okay with??

You can check it out here: https://heycpa.io/

Anyways, appreciate your time!

Thank you,

Matt”

Casual, to the point, clear benefit to them, and not some robot using “sir, madam, kind regards” blah, blah, blah.

The responses?

“Amazing! Thanks so much! All the best.”

“Yes, please!!! Thanks!”

Again, win win.

PS… It WORKED. We got some traffic in the first week and as of Tuesday, we have our first paying customer. $299 big ones. We did not think this would happen until at least July(ish). But hey, we’ll take it. This also means we’ll break-even in May 💰

Anyways, sometimes doing unscalable shit is the way to scale. Never discount it.

And also, don’t be afraid to hustle a little bit with weird tactics. Every company has used them to get off the ground at some point.

Happy Thursday!