
Please Review My Web App: A Nigerian Craigslist - seunosewa
http://www.nairalist.com/
======
seunosewa
I picked this niche because: 1) I am a Nigerian. 2) Most potential competitors
won't touch Nigeria. 3) I run a Nigerian forum that gets a lot of unsolicited
ads.

The business model is: Adsense when the website becomes popular. It's boring,
but really makes sense here.

~~~
yoyoyo
The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.

~~~
patio11
This needs to be modded up approximately 27 more times. Every reason which you
have for your competitors not wanting to touch this niche is a reason for
advertisers not wanting to pay to advertise to your users. Can you identify
some local Nigerian companies which are making money, on the Internet,
legitimately, from Nigerians?

If not then your model is to be one step ahead of the banstick on Google. It
is not a pleasant place to be!

~~~
seunosewa
On the flip side, the site doesn't need to make so much money because the cost
of living in Nigeria is relatively low.

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aristus
Besides the obvious jokes about Nigerians and internet solicitation... it
looks pretty good. Very fast response for me -- the servers are in Dallas (?).
Not sure how that will work for actual Nigerians. They will route through
Europe or Brasil. No direct US-Africa links AFAIK.

Once you start scaling up you'll need a search and better drill-down into
cities and neighborhoods.

You should also consider services that assist Nigerian expats. I don't know
what that might be, but you can probably think of some.

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elai
You should add pictures. When people are selling their stuff, pictures can
help a lot. And add a thumbnail beside listings that have pictures.

I also find the table layout a bit information overloadish. You should list
cities and then give categories. Like this website:
<http://www.usedvictoria.com/>

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andrewljohnson
Wow, after reading a few ads, I like Nigerians better than Americans.

~~~
wumi
what about those of us who are both, heh

~~~
time_management
Two months ago, I met a second-generation Nigerian-American woman. She's one
of the most refined, intelligent, and kind-hearted people I've met-- truly a
lady. She's also beautiful.

I'm dating her now. :)

~~~
juliuskelly
i will like to how u find her ever since u got to know her and how is she
responding to Ur needs and so on. in fact i want to let u know that it's quite
interesting to have a Nigerian woman by Ur by side b/c she know what it takes
to run a home.

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psyklic
I see that you order the states by number of posts. Won't this inconvenience
users of less-popular states since they currently must scroll down?

~~~
seunosewa
Thanks. That's true.

I'm considering some possible solutions, such as a feature that remembers the
states viewed by each visitor and moves them to the top of the list during
subsequent views.

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markessien
It got really popular real fast I see. When I last saw it you only had ads in
one city, now they are everywhere. This is the first such site for Nigeria,
right?

I got a bit frightened when I read this one though:
<http://www.nairalist.com/overseas/dating/46> :)

~~~
seunosewa
Yes, it's the first Nigerian site dedicated to classified ads. Some other
websites have sections for this.

About the ad: You initially thought someone's rib was physically stolen,
right? :-)

~~~
markessien
I did. First I thought it was a joke, then I got confused before figuring out
what she meant.

If you're the first, you can certainly take control of the market now.

When studivz was getting popular in germany, what they did was 'seed'
universities with a few people handing out flyers for a couple of days, after
which the viral effect kicked in. You may want to also add a viral effect -
for example, a room-for-rent site in germany I know of allows people to print
out the ad in a way that can easily be hung up on hallways or in schools. This
template points back to the site, which furthers growth.

Another easy way to grow quickly is to allow people send the ad they just
posted to a few email addresses, but this will lead you to a spam problem, as
spammers will use you as a relayer.

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acangiano
Well done. I also love how spontaneous the ads are. This one for example made
me laugh out loud: <http://www.nairalist.com/lagos/services/136>.

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cmars232
I'd suggest providing anonymous email (or phone #s) for your users. This
"Craigslist-like feature" makes buying and selling to/from strangers safer and
more discreet, and it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

~~~
markessien
I don't think that this is a problem for now, and letting the people show
their real phone numbers and email lends to the trust of the site. Even
newspapers in Nigeria print phone numbers of people featured. If the users
complain about it, you should do something, but till then I think that the
current setup works fine. It seems more personal, compared to a totally
anonymous setup.

~~~
seunosewa
I agree. Scammers really love anonymous environments.

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mickt
It's clean, fast, and simple. However, I think the start page is a bit too
busy. However, if you just list the States people might not bother clicking
through. Not sure what the answer to that is! :)

You might want to do is allow people to select the State they want to see by
default. Either via a cookie (but if most of your users use Internet cafes
that mightn't work well) or by logging in. Or you could try guessing by IP
address.

Also, you might not want to let user put their e-mails in a posting (like this
one: <http://www.nairalist.com/taraba/dating/1>). If their address is on a
public page it's going to get scraped and used by spammers.

Some work arounds to this might be to do what CraigsList does and allow people
to use an anonymous address that you provide (which means you need to host and
run your on e-mail server & service. Or use some JavaScript to obfuscate the
addresses from e-mail harvesters, and so the actual address only get's
assembled in an actual web-browser.

On the jobs section, I'd suggest categories for people to list their jobs
under (Construction, IT, ...). It'll make it a little easier for people to
search for jobs, especially if you get popular.

Anyway's good job, I hope it's successful, feel free to message me if you want
more suggestions. :)

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lallysingh
On the software side, I'd say that you'd probably want the ability to
specialize the sub-apps (e.g. the columns in that table) over time.

For example, you may want to tweak the dating & jobs applications differently.

Also, on the spirit of psyklic, maybe it'd be better to specify which regions
you want to see? A small bitmap is easy to store in a cookie. On the same
note, letting people set their sort order (popularity vs alphabetic vs reverse
alphabetic) may be useful.

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chris11
I think it's surprisingly good. The layout seems clean, and very easy to use.
I would suggest adding some more subcategories when it grows. For example
separate dating into m4w, w4m, m4m, w4w sections.

I also like the fact that one city, Lagos, has the majority of the posts. That
should help you get some traction. Right now, if I lived in some of the other
cities, I really would not consider using this until it got more traction. But
if I was in Lagos, it would be worthwhile for me to use it, and the market
penetration for Lagos should bring in ads for other cities.

Since you run a successful Nigerian forum that has a problem with ads, I can
really see this website get some decent traction. Traction seems to be the
biggest problem with Craigslist clones, so I think this will be successful

~~~
markessien
m4m and m4w would not go down very well in Nigeria. The m4w and w4m split
might be useful though. More useful would be photos I'd say.

~~~
kailashbadu
What's wrong with m4w?

~~~
markessien
w4w I meant.

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raju
seunosewa - Great job! The site is fast, very responsive, with a lot of
content.

I see you are trying to keep it minimalistic, is this to change? I don't mean
to sound superficial, but personally I never liked the craigslist look and
feel. A little color, and a little aesthetics (IMO) go a long way.

Going off topic, I did want to say that this brings back fond memories for me.
I spent the first 16 years of my life in Lagos, and browsing around, esp. in
the Housing section, I see a few posting from Ilupeju (where I lived). Nigeria
is a good country, and Nigerians will always have a special place in my heart.
Good times, good times indeed.

I wish you the very best (Also, you might want to extend this to other
countries and cities)

Edit - I see sarvesh had the same suggestion. Sorry, wasn't attempting to
hijack that thread

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fbailey
We are working on a classified site in germany I found some ideas in
<http://www.loquo.com/en_us> which is a spanish craigslist only much better
structured

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nanijoe
@Seun

You did a great job with nairaland, which is essentially the number 1 Nigerian
website there is right now, So I'm sure you'll be fine with this one too

~~~
seunosewa
Thanks!

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Herring
I might suggest looking into the design. A table isn't necessarily the best
use of space. Try making the frequently visited links bigger

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robotrout
What's up with the cars? I read 15 of them, and nobody showed a price. I know
that's not you, it's them. Must be a cultural thing.

~~~
seunosewa
It's partly a cultural thing, but a push in the right direction may be what
they need.

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nairalists
Nairalists.com is a lot more better and Smarter

Visting Nairalists.com and see that its a lot more better than Nairalist

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sspencer
Beautifully clean design. Looks like it is already quite popular, too!

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sarvesh
Impressive! You might want to make it available to other countries and cities
as well.

~~~
seunosewa
Thanks a million for that suggestion.

Most other countries seem to have very strong classified ads websites: a local
craigslist, or a local gumtree, or a local kijiji. But they won't touch
Nigeria for obvious reasons.

~~~
markessien
Can't you just run another site with exactly the same setup, but globally, and
seed it with the _foreign_ users of your forum? I.e, for Nigerians abroad, you
setup a craiglist, such that they can get in contact with each other for
whatever reason. If you keep it generic enough, it could spill over to the
general population and also do well. Of course, it's a lot more admin work for
you for a concept that may not take off, but you never know till you try.

~~~
seunosewa
Thanks for your idea. It's worth a try, but I'm partial to this niche because
it's easier to defend.

