I would try Wikipedia. They're usually pretty reliable, and even if they don't give you the exact answer, sometimes they provide links that hold the answer.

What do you mean by your second question? Are you talking about investors or employees?

 

Ah, good question...I've actually wondered that myself on several occassions.

I've come up with a few answers. One of them is to offer an incentive to get them to come aboard in the beginning. Another would be to just keep searching until you find people who are willing to take the chance and join you. In most cases, if it's something like that, they really aren't risking that much.

 

Here is one link I found, http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/travel/shattuck/5204209.html. In the article, they referenced a project called National Leisure Travel Monitor. It might be able to provide more information for you.

As for getting businesses to join you when you do not have the track record yet, do you have any personal relationships with the businesses? Do you have a target niche that they want to tap into or have not yet tapped into?

For example, my husband worked in the music industry for a number of years and established many relationships. When we started our internet business, he relied on those prior relationships to get us going. He wanted to get bigger names for the website but we did not have the numbers they wanted. He was able to negotiate a different strategy where we would sell their imperfect items, where those would have been previously discarded. The imperfections do not affect the quality of the product but it ended up being a win/win for us. We get to carry the bigger names and they get to profit from products that would have been thrown away.

 

You might be able to get data like that from a certain website.

 

As far as how to get your people to your website and give it a try...people will give it a try as long as they see value in your site. Just make your site look respectable and have the proper secruity to protect personal informatin. The upcoming generations want value and information, they will give you a try if you give them that.

 

If you're trying to figure out how sites like ebay and craigslist caught on, it's mostly in the network effects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Building a web business that can leverage network effects can be very powerful (if you have a good idea) or can sink you (if users don't particularly like your idea).

 

Homeaway.com owns VRBO and I don't think they are public, but they could very well have some information for you in press releases etc. Homeaway bought up a lot of vacation rental sites in the past few years..