Airbnb didn't even have a demo, they got funding basically on just an idea. I wanted to at least provide a demo of what it could be, its just v0,1. It is still very early days.
They put together a website that offered short-term living quarters and breakfast for those who were unable to book a hotel in the saturated market. The site Airbedandbreakfast.com officially launched on August 11, 2008. The founders had their first customers in the summer of 2008, during the Industrial Design Conference held by Industrial Designers Society of America, where travelers had a hard time finding lodging in the city.
After the founders raised $30,000 by selling cereal named after the two candidates of the 2008 United States presidential election, Barack Obama and John McCain, mostly at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, computer programmer Paul Graham invited the founders to the January 2009 winter training session of his startup incubator, Y Combinator, which provided them with training and $20,000 in funding in exchange for a 6% interest in the company. With the website already built, they used the Y Combinator investment to fly to New York to meet users and promote the site. They returned to San Francisco with a profitable business model to present to West Coast investors. By March 2009, the site had 10,000 users and 2,500 listings.
---
They had the website built and running well before Y Combinator saw them.
> Airbnb didn't even have a demo, they got funding basically on just an idea.
and
> YC saw them nearly two years after. They started in Oct 2007 and got funded by YC in 2009
These statements are in conflict with each other.
All the info about them that one can find shows that they had something working with some paying customers prior to getting funding from outside sources.
