Airbnb was founded in 2007 in San Francisco, California, by cofounders Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia. I decided to take a look at their AirBed&Breakfast Pitch Deck from 2008.
The Problem:
Airbnb’s pitch deck is pretty simple. It lays out 3 main problems: price matters to customers, hotels disconnect customers from culture, and it is hard to book a room with locals. The problem slide lacks evidence, but it plants the seed for the problems that later slides support.
The Market:
The Airbnb pitch has two slides on Market Validation and Market Size. It uses large text and graphics to show a 2 billion+ TAM, 560M SAM, and 84M SOM. The slide cites the larger market numbers, but the 84M SOM is based on a 15% market share that the pitch doesn’t justify at any point. The simple, intuitive graphics do a great job of conveying the market opportunity.
What An Investor Would Ask:
After reviewing the slides, I think an investor would immediately ask about the 15% of Available Market and how they actually plan to reach that share as they scale. They’d also ask how people trust random strangers to stay in their homes. This was before it was normal to get into a stranger’s car and get an Uber, so how would Airbnb get customers and hosts to trust it?
What I would steal:
I like the idea of keeping slides simple and focusing on one idea at a time. Presenting these numbers in graphics, one by one, helps build a story and keep it easily digestible. I appreciated the customer evidence most. It would also be nice to include longer testimonials and some background on the kinds of hosts and customers using the platform. I think the story focused on the product’s benefits rather than the software’s technology, which is important because it helps explain what the product aims to solve rather than the technology built to support it.
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