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What's a business that when you first heard it, thought it was the dumbest idea in the world, and it turned out to be hugely successful? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by Low-Helicopter-2696@alien.top to c/entrepreneur@indiehackers.space

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Airbnb sounded like a horrible idea to me. Who the heck would rent out a single room? Sounded like a recipe for murder.

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[–] TimeOk8571@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

WeWork’s business model initially made some sense. They recognized that startups didn’t want to get locked into long-term office leases if they didn’t have a sustainable revenue stream yet. So it was better for them to rent month-to-month. Where they saved money was in sharing that workspace with other startups - which made the space cheaper (initially, anyway), and had the added benefit of enabling networking between startups and their employees. Win win for everyone involved.

The big mistake (among others) that WeWork made was in thinking that every company under the sun would want to rent their space. They tried to capture global real estate space that far exceeded their niche target customer (startups) and obviously couldn’t find customers to fill all those spaces.

And this was all before the pandemic hit.

The other mistake was in thinking they were a technology company when in fact they were just a real estate company. They burnt a lot of cash investing in useless tech in order to raise additional dollars in the name of being a “tech company” whereas if they had just owned the fact that they were a real estate company, things might have gone differently. Their founding CEO was (and is) a moron.