After watching the Airbnb talk, I took away a huge morale booster and some major (a few more obvious than others) pointers.
* When situation worsens, be opportunistic. Survive however you can:
Airbnb pushed their website with media when it was obvious that hotels couldn't facilitate the flood. That got them some drifting traffic while their site was still not the perfect user fit. They went on a tangent with breakfast cereal for presidential campaign candidates just to settle their credit card debt.
* Get in touch with users and prospects. You need to know your audience if you want to speak with it and pivot your product accordingly:
It seems that most of their successful pivots came from interaction and analysis of users. The concept of Bed and Breakfast service morphed into a community marketplace for space after they discovered a user is renting an apartment while they're absent (on a tour with a popular musician). Instead of sanctioning the user, they changed the rules, thus enabling another category of service. Knowing that musicians leave an empty apartment behind when they travel on tours gave them an insight, that probably helped them identify user segments worth communicating the service with.
* Focus on one thing and you will achieve it:
PG gave them a pretty good target for Demo Day, profitability. They did what is a common goal-oriented approach: they hung a graph of their profitability ratio on a clearly visible space they would encounter every day (bathroom mirror). By hands-on engaging with users directly, pivoting the business model as required, they managed to pull off the profitability breakthrough two weeks before Demo Day.
* Dive into payments:
End in end, using an outsourced payment solution proved to be more hassle than it was worth. They started processing payments and charging their 10% provision although they were just three people, and it seemed like a huge responsibility to take. Now it seems logical.
* Persevere:
It took them almost three years of hustling, with more-or less a traffic flatline, credit card debt and dealing with a hopeless horizon, to finally come to an awesome business model, which in retrospect would seem impossible to build.