Business

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky’s One Rule for Remote, Hybrid Work

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Airbnb announced a Live and Work Anywhere remote work policy in April 2022, which allows the company’s global employees to work from home from any location — as long as they meet up in person regularly for team gatherings.

Now Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky is clarifying for the first time what he means by “regular” meetups.

“I have a simple rule: we basically ask people to come to San Francisco one week a month,” Chesky told host Bob Safian on a recent episode of the Masters of Scale Rapid Response podcast. “Some people come for just two or three days. Some people come for the full week.”

^{Brian Chesky. Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for WIRED}

Chesky calls the return-to-office week a “gathering week” when Airbnb coordinates everyone being together in San Francisco. The focus is on collaboration, not on getting people to work harder by having them show up to the office, he says.

“I have not found a huge value in people being in the office all the time,” Chesky said, adding, “What I want is, for the most part, people coming to the San Francisco office, but I can’t get everyone to move here to San Francisco, and I can’t get them to fly here every week.”

Most Airbnb employees are based in San Francisco, Chesky says. Airbnb flies out-of-state or out-of-country employees to the San Francisco office once a month for in-person meetups. Chesky says that the cost is worth it and more affordable than thousands of people coming to work in person five days per week. Even if it was more expensive, he says it would still be worth it.

“I think the output for us is superior,” Chesky said.

Since Airbnb introduced its Live and Work Anywhere, about 20% of employees have relocated to states within the U.S. or abroad. According to Forbes, Airbnb has 6,907 employees.

Chesky also stated in the interview that the way to make a team work harder wasn’t by forcing them to work in person from the office but by setting rigorous milestones.

“If you want a team to work harder, don’t make them come to the office, give them a crazy deadline and check on their progress every week,” Chesky said. “That’s how you get them to work harder, not by being in the office.”

Several large companies have issued return-to-office mandates recently. JPMorgan, for example, announced a mandate last month directing its 300,000-person workforce to work from the office every weekday beginning in March. Gap stated a goal earlier this month of having its corporate employees back in the office five days a week by the fall.

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Business

A Multitasking App That Builds Your Websites and Runs Your Business for Less Than $400

Disclosure: Our goal is to feature products and services that we think you’ll find interesting and useful. If you purchase them, Entrepreneur may get a small share of the revenue from the sale from our commerce partners.

Depending on its complexity, designing a small-business website can cost several thousand dollars. If you’re an entrepreneur in need of creating a website and those figures don’t fit in your budget, let Sellful White Label Website Build and Software help. This white-label website builder and software is on sale for just $399 for a lifetime ERP Agency Plan.

Create a website for a fraction of the average cost

Whether you’re looking to build a simple website or hoping to automate your business, you can set it up in just a few clicks. Websites, landing pages, funnels, and more are all generated automatically with the power of AI. Need to sell physical or digital products? It’s ready to accommodate that for your business as well.

Aside from getting your sites up and running, Sellful also takes on other tasks that would typically cost extra. Let this handy all-in-one app help you interact with customers, tackling marketing by sending out newsletters or interacting with them via an AI assistant and chatbot ready to help them with features on your website.

Need some help internally? No problem. Sellful can help you manage your workforce by tackling employee recruitment, payroll, and leave requests as well. It also serves as an employee, helping businesses track appointments or bookings with a built-in scheduler that customers can use on the site if needed.

Soulful emphasizes efficiency and scalability, so it’s ready to help you take your tiny business to the next level. You don’t have to worry about Sellful growing with you — it provides 100GB of file storage and 50,000 free email sends.

From starting up sites to helping run your business, let Sellful be your right-hand man. It’s just $399 here for a limited time (reg. $23,940).

StackSocial prices subject to change.

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Business

6 Powerful Insights to Reveal Your Customers’ Deepest Desires

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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

We live in a world where so much of our success is determined by superficial things. Whether it’s the car you drive, the house you own or the places you holiday in, there is a belief that what you have to show for yourself indicates your level of worth.

After years of working in the marketing industry, I’d argue that this is far from the case when it comes to business. Sure, how many social media followers, views or likes you have makes a difference – but they are also vanity metrics. What really generates impact is how well your business meets its consumer’s needs.

The secret to lead generation is knowing what your customers really want, getting the right people engaged and nurturing those relationships to make them last. Let’s explore the question of “how?”

Table of Contents

1. Get to know your audience

Knowing what your target audience really wants is the only way to connect with them in a way that will engage them and keep them coming back for more.

2. Capture demand

So many businesses put products out onto the market that flop before they’ve even had a chance to get going. Why? Because there was never a demand for them in the first place.

Examine data and gather information on your target audience to identify their needs and consumption patterns. Research and analysis are the only way to truly understand what your consumers are looking for. Keep up with market trends, use social listening tools and conduct surveys and case studies to capture demand early and save precious time and money.

If you’re an established business, you should review your existing marketing to see what is and isn’t working. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Ads and social media insights to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing. Part of this process also includes analyzing your competitors.

3. Develop a buyer persona

The best way to fail at your marketing strategy is to create content that you like. You are not the target audience. The aim is to determine what your customers want and need from you.

The other thing to keep in mind is that your intention shouldn’t be to please everyone – it is better to have 100 dedicated clients than 10,000 who are slightly interested. This is where it’s crucial to be able to define your ideal customer. Who do you sell to? What are you offering that targets their pain points and solves their problem?

Creating a customer persona can mean drawing a picture of them, giving them a name, and writing down everything about them. From their age to their income, daily routine, and how many pets they have. Write down every single detail you can think of. This will help shape the image of your ideal customer so you know who your product or service is speaking to.

4. Build a list of SEO keywords and popular search topics

You want to know what people are most likely to search for when they’re looking for things related to your industry. With the developments in SEO constantly growing, it is easier than ever to gather this wealth of information. Here are some useful free and subscription-based resources:

5. Create awareness

Once you know what keywords and search terms people will most likely enter into their search engine, you can flood your content with them to gain traction and visibility. People want to know what your brand is all about, so you must create content that people want to see.

One of the best ways to do this is to get recording. Whether you have the best video camera on the market or you’ve set up your iPhone on a tripod, it doesn’t actually matter much. What does matter is that you’re presenting your audience with what they want to see and hear.

Starting with video gives you a goldmine of content opportunities to make from it. What may start as a full-length video piece can then be cut up into 5-10 short-form videos for various social media platforms, used for social media posts, translated into blogs, and even used for ad copy.

Content is everything when it comes to creating awareness; being resourceful with what you create will free up your time for other important tasks.

6. Protect those leads

If you don’t nurture your leads and follow them through, or you fail to remain in the minds of potential or new customers, your success will begin to fall off.

The smartest way to manage leads is to keep the communication flowing. While you don’t want to bombard or nag at consumers, you do want them to know their value and that you haven’t forgotten about them.

Knowing where your leads are coming from is a great way to tailor content and messaging to them directly. Research and analysis also come in handy again here – review your ad campaigns, social media insights, website analytics and anything else you use to generate leads.

A Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM) is one of the best ways to track all your marketing efforts in one place and nurture your leads. Engaging with your customers and using remarketing techniques like email campaigns are also highly effective ways to do just that.

Lead generation is not an overnight job. It takes time, research, consistency and a willingness to measure efforts regularly. Understanding your audience, creating a buzz around your product or service and putting in the work to keep people engaged are the surest ways to foster sustainable business-to-customer (B2C) relationships for the life of your business.

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Business

The AI ‘Black Book’ for Entrepreneurs: 7 Tools to Automate and Dominate

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Most entrepreneurs are barely scratching the surface with AI, missing out on tools that can dramatically boost output and give them a serious competitive edge. This isn’t about basic chatbots or simple content generation — this is about unlocking AI’s hidden power to automate and dominate.

Inside this video, I’m revealing seven under-the-radar AI tools from the “Black Book” — strategies that go way beyond the basics and can transform your business.

What You’ll Learn:

Website optimization and sales booster: Discover a FREE Google AI tool that audits your website like a pro, identifies conversion-killing weaknesses and provides expert feedback to skyrocket sales. (Plus, learn how to use its data analysis features to triple your results!)
Deep competitive analysis hack: Uncover the AI search engine that performs DEEP competitive research, revealing hidden market gaps and the biggest revenue opportunities for your business (without the $200/month price tag).
No-code AI agent builder: Learn how to easily create your own AI agents — without any coding — to automate tasks, make decisions and even learn from interactions, freeing you up to focus on growth.
Instant presentation generator: See how to turn any blog post, video transcript or outline into a professional, shareable presentation in minutes — saving you hours of tedious work.
Social media spy tool: Explore the pre-built AI bot that scrapes data from social media platforms, letting you spy on competitors, identify trending content and extract valuable insights (posts, likes, comments).
Data analysis powerhouse: Uncover the AI tool used by top universities to transform raw data into actionable reports, graphs and insights — perfect for analyzing competitor strategies and optimizing your own.
The ultimate AI app store: Discover the “Hugging Face” of AI — a massive library of AI apps for everything from voice cloning to sentiment analysis, putting the power of advanced AI at your fingertips.

I’ll walk you through each tool, showing you exactly how to implement these advanced AI strategies, even if you’re not a tech expert. Get ready to unlock a new level of efficiency and competitive advantage.

Download the free “AI Success Kit” (limited time only). And you’ll also get a free chapter from Ben’s brand new book, “The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.”