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Nawal
Entrepreneur | Build... • 2m
"When All You Have is $40 and a Dream: The Crazy Story That Saved Airbnb" 🔥 Imagine this: Your startup is broke. Investors laugh at your idea. Your rent is overdue. You’re eating instant noodles every night. Welcome to Airbnb in 2008. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia weren’t Silicon Valley legends back then, they were two dudes on air mattresses trying not to get evicted. When the world said "no," they didn’t build a new app. They didn’t pivot. They didn’t "network." They made cereal boxes. Yeah, seriously. During the U.S. elections, they launched two fake cereal brands: Obama O’s The Breakfast of Change Cap’n McCain’s A Maverick in Every Bite They slapped the designs onto real cereal boxes, priced them at $40 each, and sold them as collectibles. Result? They made $30,000 in a few weeks. That $30,000? It wasn’t just money. It was their second chance. It paid rent, bought time, and got them into Y Combinator. Fast forward: Airbnb is now worth $90+ BILLION. All because they refused to die quietly. The Real Lesson Nobody Tells You: When nothing makes sense, do something that doesn’t make sense, but moves the needle. Survival is the ultimate growth hack. In startups, the line between crazy and genius is thinner than a cereal box. You don’t need a billion-dollar idea today. You need a stupid, scrappy, "this might actually work" idea that buys you tomorrow. That’s how legends are made 🔥
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