Then they realised that poor quality photos were stopping people from being interested in listings, so they went door-to-door in New York taking photographs of the properties. Things began to look up and in April 2009 the company gained a $600,000 seed investment from Sequioa Capital. By 2011, the company was in 89 countries and was valued at $1 billion (£777m). In 2018, a Forbes estimate valued the company at a whopping $31 billion (£24bn).

Read more about Airbnb and how it became a billion-dollar company

From Slack to Instagram, massive companies that started as side hustles