
Startups Rival Craigslist for Online Classifieds Market Share - erin_bury
http://betakit.com/2012/07/14/startups-rival-craigslist-for-online-classifieds-market-share
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sixQuarks
In order to have a chance at fighting Craigslist, these services need to start
hyperlocal first. There's nothing worse than going to one of these sites,
entering your zip code and finding there's no listings.

It's much easier to market to a small geographic area first. One great tip I
heard in a Mixergy podcast came from the founder of GrubWithUs. To get
started, they printed 10,000 flyers and went around stuffing them into the
free daily papers in their hometown.

Once you get going in a small area, then you can expand out. This is the only
way to win against craigslist.

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tudorw
Cracking the on-line classifieds 'thing' has been an 'idea' since day one of
the Internet, literally thousands have attempted it, getting traction seems to
be the consistent issue, why do people use Craigslist, well, mainly because
people are using Craigslist, certainly not because it has function X or does Y
or looks hip, as a market it's worth a massive shed load of cash, one time an
anecdote was that it was worth more than TV/Radio and Newspaper combined, am I
showing my age...

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sedev
This article seems to miss a very important point: Craigslist basically
operates like a nonprofit. Anyone who wants to compete with Craigslist has to
have a compelling answer to the question "how do I compete with a company that
_does not care_ about profit?" in addition to the normal questions a startup
has to answer.

(for the record, I think that the way Craigslist runs things is both admirable
and idiosyncratic: it works very well for them, it wouldn't necessarily work
well for others)

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dredmorbius
Craigslist cares about profit.

It also realizes that sustained profitability is achieved by leaving so much
money on the table that any possible competitor is going to have a really hard
time covering expenses.

Generating positive social goodwill isn't a bad side-effect either.

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sedev
That's also a helpful way to look at it, yes. I would say that given Mr.
Newmark's personal statements, "Craigslist doesn't care about profit" is an
acceptable oversimplification, and is how a competitor should probably view
the situation for purposes of trying to profitably compete with Craigslist.

