

What We Can Learn From Mess (known as Craigslist) - cwan
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/08/what-we-can-learn-from-mess.html

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adrianwaj
Article headline title should be:

What We Can Learn From _Elegance_

Craigslist also wins by having the right categories, right font size, right
colors. It is fast and the urls are predictable. Also, breadcrumb nav and
search is good.

It was precisely what I was thinking when designing <http://twitya.com> \- a
twitter browser.

When you visit a site every day, it should be as fancy as your arm, not unlike
this site.

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wglb
Content beats presentation? Staying close to the customer rules? No meetings a
big win? Worthy of contemplation.

~~~
apotheon
These are principles many of us have been telling bosses, clients, readership
-- anyone who would listen to us -- for quite a while. They're principles that
get ignored every time they're brought up, though. It's awesome that
Craigslist is demonstrating that they work, and terribly sad that so few
people seem to be taking notice.

~~~
dagw
Extrapolating from "it worked for Craigslist" to "it will work for us" is
highly naive. If someone showed up to a meeting and said, "let's do like
Craigslist" and totally ignored all the ways that our business is very
different from craigslist I'd be sceptical too.

~~~
apotheon
Who said anything about "extrapolating from 'it worked for Craigslist'"? I
didn't say "Some of us have been trying to get our bosses to copy Craigslist
for years!" What I said was that some of use have been aware of such
principles for years, and telling others about them. One hopes that sharing
such principles would involve applying them properly, rather than naively
trying to copy someone else's formula.

Do you just dislike Craigslist, and thus hate anything related to it --
including its principles of success and anyone who happens to be aware of some
of those principles?

I, for one, have never told anyone "You should base your business model on
Craigslist's model!" but I have said "You should probably simplify your
business model. I have some suggestions."

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jacabado
Obligatory reference: <http://www.aperfectmess.com/> a book about the cost of
neatness. And this debate covers a lot of areas. Anyone that trusts science
must recognize the power of emergent patterns, and how they rule the world.
This, the internets, is one of the most interesting examples of it because it
was just born some years ago, world geography and big cities are as
interesting but much more afflicting examples. Will there be a science of
disorder? In the case of enterprise architecture and Craiglist, what are the
principles? Are they embodied in Craig Newmark? Or there will never be a
science of disorder, and rest of us will be left with the social sciences
which try to explain how we value neatness and hoping more enlinghtned people
like Craig Newmark will rule the world?

There is a breach in the Master & Commander pattern of today enterprises
waiting to be opened.

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sehender
Another wildly successful example of "What We Can Learn From A Mess" can be
found at Plenty of Fish, where they are doing the same thing in the online
dating world.

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-
rol...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-
in.html)

"Today, according to the research firm Hitwise, his creation is the largest
dating website in the U.S. and quite possibly the world. Its traffic is four
times that of the dating pioneer Match, which has annual revenue of $350
million and a staff that numbers in the hundreds. Until 2007, Frind had a
staff of exactly zero. Today, he employs just three customer service workers,
who check for spam and delete nude images from the Plenty of Fish website
while Frind handles everything else."

~~~
csallen
I find all of this very intriguing. Assuming that both Craigslist and
PlentyOfFish are successful for the same underlying reasons, it's worth
pointing out similarities between the two. Note that while I've been using
Craigslist for years, I have very little real experience with PlentyOfFish, so
feel free to correct any invalid assumptions I make:

1\. Plain user interfaces. The choices of fonts and colors seems very
personal, non-corporate. There's nothing sleek, modern, trendy, creative, or
flashy about either of these sites. That's not to say they're particularly
simple or efficient.

2\. Unchanging user interfaces. When you go to Craigslist, at least, you can
be sure to find the exact same site you were using one, two, three years ago.
No surprises, no re-learning, and no feeling left-behind.

3\. Initial focus on small community, growth through word of mouth. Craigslist
had San Francisco, and PoF had Vancouver I believe? There's something to be
said about making users feel like they are party of a small, exclusive
community. (Look at the beginnings of Facebook.)

4\. Content created almost entirely by users. Craigslist does little more than
categorize users' posts, and PoF is, well, a dating site.

5\. Open: you don't have to know someone or get them to accept a friend
request in order to interact with them. Once again, these sites make
connecting with others easy and direct. (Although the signup process at PoF is
understandably more involved.) When I go to Craigslist Boston I really do feel
like the site represents the entire community.

6\. Pretty much free.

I'm sure I could add more, but the recurrent theme seems to be getting out of
the way and keeping the focus on the people. Neither of these sites rely on
revolutionary tools or features or algorithms, and neither seems particularly
interested in impressing the tech community.

~~~
csallen
Another one to add to the list is CD Baby (www.cdbaby.com), a site owned and
created almost entirely by Derek Sivers. He sold it for $22 million last year.

Looking at the site now, it's a bit sleeker and more up-to-date than both
Craigslist and PlentyOfFish, but not too long ago it looked pretty much like a
link farm:
[http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/original/0004/6518/4...](http://www.crunchbase.com/assets/images/original/0004/6518/46518v1.png)

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karzeem
It seems like people are making the mistake of generalizing from a sample of
one. Craigslist does things in a certain way, and craigslist is a success. The
latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former.

Sure, it's a lean organization, and sure, that's good. They've cut out a lot
of stuff that they can truly get along fine without. But if craigslist didn't
exist and you wanted to launch it today, you would never launch the design
it's famous for. And yet you'd stand a good shot at real success.

So craigslist has been successful in spite of its design. In the face of the
things people like about the site, the design ultimately didn't really matter.
I don't know why people can't just leave it there and instead feel the need to
infer causation.

~~~
josefresco
To infer the opposite truth without investigation or evidence to back it would
be equally wrong.

I would put Craigslist's clean/basic design in the list of reasons why it
succeeded while others failed. It may be a small % but they certainly didn't
succeed _despite_ it.

~~~
karzeem
It is a clean design, and that's good, but there's a really long list of
things that are wrong with it. Things they could fix while retaining a clean,
stripped-down experience. In light of that, I'm confused about why people
ascribe so much of the site's success to its design. A better design doesn't
have to (and shouldn't) mean a heavier one.

It doesn't seem to have hampered craigslist, though, and that's why my best
guess puts it in the "nonfactor" category.

~~~
apotheon
None of what you say Craigslist did _wrong_ obviates the importance of
recognizing what Craigslist did _right_. It seems that what it did right has
proven more important than what it did wrong in this case, in fact, further
attesting to the value of what it did right.

If you want to do a similar job better than Craigslist did, you should
probably do what Craigslist did right, and look for ways to improve it without
undercutting those positives. In short, the fact Craigslist does some things
wrong doesn't mean you can't learn from its example.

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ecq
Craigslist succeeded because there is an ecosystem of people that makes it
useful. buyers/sellers, job hunters/head hunters and so on. The same reason
eBay is successful.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But Craigslist beat others in establishing theirselves as the hub of that
ecosystems; they didn't just buy the domain name and have all those groups of
people there the next day.

~~~
ecq
I agree. first-mover advantage plays a big role as well.

