🪄 Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire? Spamming Craigslist

Hey,

The Startup Maester is here!

Welcome to the 6th issue.

Today's topics:

1. Secret behind Airbnb's Billion-Dollar Empire

2. A tool to find awesome lists on all kinds of interesting topics

3. One recommended video on how to social engineer your way into anything

Secret behind Airbnb's Billon Dollar Empire

Airbnb definitely has one of the most impressive growth stories but most people don't know how Airbnb actually started.

Silicon Valley wants you to believe that their unicorn startups succeeded doing things legally.

But that couldn't be far from truth.

For starters, Airbnb used multiple Gmail accounts to spam Craigslist.

At one point in time, Craigslist was used for everything from Dating Sites known as Personals to Vacation Listings like Airbnb before they were unbundled one-by-one by Silicon Valley's startups like Tinder, Airbnb and many more.

The Game of Blackhat is a cat-and-mouse game.

You need a lot of guardrails to protect yourself from people using your Social Site by spamming their products.

Craigslist is a small team of 30 people.

There's stuff AI can automate now with such a small team but back then, it wasn't possible.

Airbnb used Craigslist as its playground to spam Craigslist visitors to grow their supply-side.

In a 2-sided marketplace, growing both supply and demand is very important. And both must grow at the same time for the marketplace to work.

These findings were discovered by a Blackhat himself with proof as he set a mouse-trap on Craigslist.

What he did was create a new test site to get vacation rental owners to sign-up so that he can test his Airbnb theory.

He grabbed their real email-addresses (not Craigslist anonymous addresses) via Craigslist by specifically targeting those who were advertising their vacation rentals on Craigslist.

He skipped over the other categories that were directly related to AirBnB's business model because they didn't fit with the test site he built.

Once he got 1000+ sign-ups, he then took it upon himself to post it to the advertising section on Craigslist.

He did the same in Week 2 and Week 3 to test if it wasn't a one-time thing.

Surely, it wasn't a fluke.

After posting 4 ads on Craigslist in 3 weeks, he received 5 identical emails from 2 ladies who were raving fans of AirBnB and spent their days emailing Craigslist advertisers.

This is one of the greatest blackhat strategies used in the real world to build a billion-dollar marketplace by growing the supply-side with pure blackhat.

These strategies are not mentioned in Press Interviews, Media, or any Founder stories but this is probably the most important piece of the puzzle. Without it, Airbnb probably wouldn't have survived.

Nobody would've found out what Airbnb did if it weren't for Dave's findings.

I'm wondering how many startups have employed similar strategies in their early days that aren't mentioned in any book nor will it get any coverage? Only the founders and the early marketers would know.

The conversation on Hacker News about this topic has interesting insights as it violates CAN-SPAM.

> "CAN-SPAM, sending from a fake address (illegal headers). CA has a specific law that pre-empts CAN-SPAM that definitely makes this illegal if sent from CA."

> "It's commercial email 100%. Probably a fake sender name (illegal), against gmail ToS, against CL ToS and no unsubscribe link and no one even subscribed in the first place. 100% against CAN-SPAM."

A few months back, I was checking Twitter when I came across these 2 interesting tweets:

These hacks are exploited more in Games or Social Apps.

A tool to find awesome lists on all kinds of interesting topics

Awesome.re is an incredible tool to find awesome resources in any kind of topic of your choice.

Tons of links are overwhelming but if you know the topic you are looking for and want all the awesome resources around that topic, then type awesome.re in your browser and hit Enter.

One recommended video on how to social engineer your way into anything

Proof-of-work is the best way to get anyone to take you seriously.

And Heather Graham has proof-of-work.

She with her husband stole $4.5 billion in Crypto. Yep, she's currently in jail.

Her skillset included Social Engineering.

Social Engineering is how you subtly get information from strangers or your competitors, without them knowing.

In our day-to-day lives, we give so much information to strangers by talking too much.

3 innocent questions by a stranger and bam, they can get all the info they need on you pretty easily.

You can get someone's phone number, their address, their bank account or literally anything you want.

I recommend watching this unlisted video by Heather Graham where she gives a basic rundown on how she did Social Engineering. You can't search it through YouTube since its unlisted so make sure to add it to Watch Later if you can't watch it right now.

If you want to watch the best movie scene on Social Engineering, watch this 3 mins video from the German movie "Who Am I?" (2014). The movie is great too.

Rabbit Hole Reads

1. The 80-hour Myth - Do you really need to work 80 hours? Or is there an alternative?

2. £45 million in 12 months 👀 - Marketing in an industry that is very bad at marketing.

3. The chocolate that goes viral every day - A chocolate brand that is best-suited for TikTok. Classic case of platform-product fit.

More Startup Spells 🪄

1. AI x Affiliates = $100k mrr in 223 days (LINK)

2. One Avatar, One Product, One Channel (LINK)

3. YouTube Thumbnail Playbook - The Easiest $10k per month side-hustle in 15 mins of work per day (LINK)