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How to start an app like Airbnb?

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Jackson’s Answer

Teree: I do not think you are asking the right question. I think you want to ask "how to start a business like Airbnb"? The Airbnb app is only a small part (important part) to help Airbnb to be successful.

If you want to know more about the history of Airbnb, you may find "How I Build This" podcast interesting.
https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i-built-this/e/47942386

If you only want to know how to build mobile app, there are plenty of free courses on edx.org.
https://www.edx.org/learn/mobile-development

Jackson recommends the following next steps:

Listen to the podcast - How I build this with Guy Raz - Airbnb
Sign up free mobile app development courses from edx.org
Thank you comment icon Thank you!! Teree
Thank you comment icon Great answer Jackson and helpful resources shared too, especially for the free courses. Thank you. Melisa Cameron
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Victor’s Answer

If you think about Airbnb as just the application you are missing a big part of it, you need to make a business plan, today pretty much anyone can copy any other application so you need to think what do you really want to achieve with your new application/business, how you will make money, how you will fund it or who will fund it and how much, how will you operate, etc.. entering the market as a competitor of Airbnb without any resources or people helping you will not get you very far.

You can learn how to make something similar by following many of the free courses offered online, but without the help of investors or venture capitalist to raise money will be very difficult to grow that fast, specially if you are looking to enter in an already crowded market, but if you try to make something that no one else have tried before you may have a chance, but if you are not able to grow as fast as you need someone else will copy you and make it bigger if they have more funding/support than you, that's why you will see new start-ups trying to target as many markets as they can with big budget to see if they can succeed, like UBER, AirBnB, etc.
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John’s Answer

This is a tough question to answer without knowing some specifics about the app and business that you want to build. Airbnb specifically involves quite a bit more than just an app to be successful. I have not done a lot of research about how Airbnb started myself, but I imagine it started with an idea, a prototype, a strong business plan, a patent to protect their intellectual property, and a pitch to venture capitalists to fund building the company and logistics, all before the app ever saw the app store.

Something that some of these other answers are not mentioning is that there are thousands of apps on the app store that are very successful that don't necessarily require the same level of behind the scenes infrastructure to support it. If you have a good idea, the barrier to entry to build an app and submit it to the app store is reasonably low. You can learn to build an app from YouTube and if you have your eyes set on building the next billion dollar app company, you should probably learn some of the basics first.
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