In October 2007 Brian Chesky drove to San Francisco with roughly a thousand dollars in the bank and moved in with Joe Gebbia, his friend from design school. His share of the rent was more than he had. That same week an international design conference was coming to town and every hotel on the conference site showed as sold out. The two of them owned three inflatable airbeds. In the founder letter he later wrote for Airbnb's IPO filing, Chesky describes what they did next in one sentence: they inflated three airbeds and turned their apartment into an Airbed & Breakfast.

The product was a small website, airbedandbreakfast.com, built by two industrial designers with no engineer on the team. The Internet Archive holds a capture of that site from 11 October 2007. It is a single purpose page aimed at attendees of the IDSA Connecting conference, with a vacancies list carrying three San Francisco airbeds: the founders' own place on Rausch Street plus rooms on Moss Street and Townsend Street. Guests found it through design blogs rather than through any paid channel. Three designers, Michael, Kat and Amol, booked. They paid, they stayed, and the money covered the rent.

A note on the timing anchor used in this record. Chesky states that the idea and the hosting happened around the same conference weekend, Airbnb's own company timeline dates the first guests to October 2007, and the founders' site was already live and archived on 11 October 2007. So this record encodes seven days from idea to first paying customer and dates that milestone to 11 October 2007, the day the site is known to have been live and listing airbeds. That is the shortest part of the story and the most misleading number in it, because what followed was a year of almost nothing.

After the conference weekend, Nathan Blecharczyk joined as the engineer and the three of them tried to turn a rent hack into a company. They launched in March 2008 at SXSW and got two bookings, one of which was Chesky himself. They launched again and nobody noticed. They launched a third time in August 2008 around the Democratic National Convention in Denver, worked their way up from small bloggers to local papers to national press, and took 80 bookings during the convention. Then bookings stopped again.

The funding story from that year is the part people remember. They put credit cards in the plastic sleeves of a baseball card binder and lived off them. When that ran out they printed and sold boxes of election themed breakfast cereal, Obama O's. Chesky's own account is blunt about the result: one year into Airbnb they had no traction, they had launched three times, and many of the people who did notice did not like the idea.

They also tried to raise money. In his post 7 Rejections, Chesky publishes the actual emails and the date. On 26 June 2008 Michael Seibel introduced them to seven prominent Silicon Valley investors. They were asking for $150,000 at a $1.5 million valuation, which is ten percent of Airbnb for $150,000. Five investors said no and two never replied.

The turn came at a Thai restaurant in San Francisco. The Justin.tv team had taken Chesky and Gebbia out to cheer them up. Somewhere between brainstorming the viral coefficient they would need to survive and admitting they were nearly out of options, Justin Kan asked why they did not just apply to Y Combinator. Chesky thought they were too far along for that. Michael Seibel told them they were dying and should apply anyway. They opened a laptop at the table, found that the Winter 2009 deadline had passed that same day, and got an exception. They submitted the application that night after waking Blecharczyk up in Boston, and they were accepted.

The three of them had agreed to decide on Demo Day whether to keep going. They never had that conversation. Traction arrived midway through the batch, they raised an angel round from Sequoia Capital, and growth followed. Airbed & Breakfast became Airbnb in March 2009. The company went public on Nasdaq in December 2020, and for the full year 2025 Airbnb reported $12.2 billion in revenue.

For a database of first revenue stories, Airbnb is a useful outlier in both directions. First revenue was almost trivially fast because the founders solved a dated, local, painful problem for a specific group of people who were already coming to their city. Turning that into a business took a year in which nothing worked, every investor passed, and the honest read on the company was that it was about to die. The seven days and the twelve months belong to the same story.