

I'm creating a craigslist alternative - jdefr89
http://www.swippet.com
I am trying to create a craigslist alternative. I have been doing this project all by myself, so I need a little bit of feedback this far. Basic things should be functional , but no where near perfect. I still need to add searching (which I am working on now), and a few other little oddities.
Let me know what you guys think so far. Also tell me if you would like to see a specific feature added.
jdefr89@gmail.com
PS: And if anyone is interested in helping out, also email and let me know! (I don't have funding or anything)
======
mikeryan
I see nothing in this yet that differentiates your product in any way. In fact
there are many ways in which your service seems worse (I purposefully didn't
read the about to see if it says something about this subject in there. I'm
treating this as a first time user)

First you have a paging mechanism to find my city! Que Horror! I realize you
have a filter on there but that's painful craigslist finds out where I should
be by IP geolocation or has the complete list on page one!

Then my city (San Francisco) isn't supported - it is in the list however? I
realize that there is a common theme on HN to put your site out early an
often. But if my city is in the list but is not supported, I'm not coming back
to find out when it is. Say distinctly on your home page that this is a
limited trial for a small set of cities. Both craigslist and Yelp started with
a small geographic area, start with that.

Once I get into a city - there is nothing here that differentiates your
offering from craigslist. Its UI/search doesn't seem revolutionary and you
have none traction. There is no reason yet for me to try to transition to your
service.

Don't just remake craigslist - figure out how you're going to make it better -
and not a little better a _lot_ better. Then go from there. Realize that
taking on craigslist has been done without success numerous times) how are you
going to do better.

~~~
slouch
i agree that there is nothing worse than an empty location or category. it
tells me that your focus isn't on my experience with the site. the pages you
have for philadelphia serve no purpose right now other than demonstrating
feature parity with one of your competitors.

------
jasonkester
Kill the paged list on the homepage right now.

I can't imagine a worse user experience than seeing 10 cities I don't live in,
with the only way to find mine being to randomly select pages in the hope of
landing on the right one. Or, of course I can page through every city you
have.

I never made it as far as finding Seattle, and finally just clicked one at
random because I'm explicitly giving you a shot. Had I found your site while
browsing the web, I would have left and never come back.

So please, stop it. Just give me the whole list and let me pick from it.

~~~
ydant
Agreed. Or a stylized map (some geolocation magic would be nice) that lets you
click in your general area then select the exact city of interest.

The Craigslist city picker is bad, but the paged list is worse.

Keep in mind one of the big Craigslist complaints is the city segregation
making it harder for people in areas between a bunch of cities. This is an
area to improve on, not to mimic.

------
dpcan
Yikes. These sites always start off listing the big cities so that the
MILLIONS of people who live outside these cities come to the site once and
never return. We even get a real bitter taste in our mouth.

You've already shown your hand. It's not about community, people, or the
success of your traders, it's about you being big and YOU making money.
Otherwise, my little town would be listed.

Heck you could have simply downloaded a zip code database with all city names
and started with that. Even then you'd be doing better in my eyes.

Why doesn't it know where I am when I get there? GeoIP stuff is pretty darn
simple to implement these days.

Anyway, I can only see these sites working by starting micro, and VERY SLOWLY
going big.

Start with just your neighborhood or apartment complex. Then, branch it out to
a slightly larger yet still narrow community around you, and let it bleed into
your town from there. Then start adding adjoining cities, and THEN the big
cities, and THEN the small communities as they start to beg for your services.

These are just my own opinions. I actually don't believe the site will work at
all, but there's my 2 cents.

------
gz
I know what Markdown is and yet this turned me off: "Ability to format posts
with Markdown"

If that's a differentiating factor from CL then you have ways to go. Sorry to
be negative - I just don't think any CL user would care. This is a feature
worthy of a footnote.

~~~
Todd
Also, in my experience, average users don't have a clue about markdown or wiki
syntax. Instead, they use their favorite (often syntactically incorrect) dash
trains (for em dashes), exclamation armies, or whatever and end up with broken
formatting.

------
agotterer
About two years ago I asked HN why no one can complete with craigslist. Theres
some really interesting points on there that you might find relevant.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281741>

Two years later it still stands try that you can't beat craigslist with a
better UI and a couple of "cool" features. What makes craigslist so powerful
is the community they created. Post something and in minutes people are
interacting with it.

I think in order to compete you have to create a new approach to classifieds.
Something that vastly changes the landscape. Maybe thats local. Maybe its a
safer experience. Maybe its faster, and I mean faster from post to result not
website speed. Craigslist is a classified monopoly. Try and change the game!

------
AmberShah
This NEEDS to have a post count beside the categories while the site is still
new and largely empty. As soon as I clicked into the first empty category I
left the site, of course. It's silly to expect a user to click around looking
for things when there isn't anything - that will just piss people off. I would
also add a "We're just getting started, post your stuff!" message in each city
and each empty page, to explain to new users what's happening.

------
cmatthias
Boston wasn't in your list of cities so I lost interest pretty quickly. That's
fine, but it looks like there were other cities on your site that are
completely devoid of posts. I can immediately think of two options here to
improve the experience:

1) Explicitly state on your site that you're only launching in one (or a few)
cities, and then actually restrict postings to those cities. You will then
probably need to do lots of creative marketing for your site in those cities
to get initial traction. You could also have a sign-up form for people who
want to express interest in posting in a different city, and then you can
notify them when you open the site up to their area.

2) Find a way to easily (and legally?) populate your site with data from
competing sites like Craigslist. This way you don't have giant empty sections
on the site.

There might be other options as well, but having cities with literally no
posts in them doesn't seem to me like it will attract (or retain) users.

------
troygoode
1) First thing I noticed was that it didn't auto select/suggest the nearest
city for me. Going to craigslist.com automatically redirects me to
washingtondc.craigslist.com (which I can then change if I want to).

2) I went to the last page and found Washington, DC. Upon clicking the text
"Washington DC" in the City column I get the following error:

    
    
      Invalid city
    

3) If I instead click the text "DC" in the State column, it navigates me to
the following URL (which obviously doesn't actually do anything):

    
    
      http://www.swippet.com/#"
    

After that, I gave up.

I think CraigsList is an interesting choice to target. They've been
notoriously slow to adopt new features or update their look/feel. Perhaps this
is the secret to their success, or perhaps it leaves them ripe for the
picking. Either way, good luck and let me know when you've got DC working.

~~~
ydant
The URL gets a ",", but it doesn't work. If you instead go to:

[http://www.swippet.com/swippet-
domain.html?area=Washington%2...](http://www.swippet.com/swippet-
domain.html?area=Washington%20DC)

It works.

~~~
troygoode
Thanks for noticing the error in the URL, your link does allow me to navigate
directly to DC now. Unfortunately if nobody is able to navigate properly to
it, there won't be any content there to look at it anyway if you _do_ manage
to get there. (Of course the other cities aren't exactly content rich yet
either, as other commentors have pointed out.)

------
famousactress
I like thinking about re-implementing craigslist.. It's a good exercise to
think about improving something really simple without making it too
complicated. That said, I have a couple suggestions. First, the view I see
when I click into a city isn't really simpler (or much different) than the CG
pages. Second, I think the biggest challenge you'll have with a site like this
is bootstrapping content. I would consider doing a couple things.. Maybe make
recent posts in any category for a city prominent maybe.. to show activity.
I'd also strongly consider whether or not you can make your tool backward
compatible.. If posting on swippet could cross-post on craigslist for me..
that's a big win, right? Why not use swippet as my portal in that case... The
other way would be handy too.. Show craigslist search results below your own
while you're short on content.

------
alttab
Craigslist is a chicken-egg type of place. Its a destination for
selling/buying because everyone knows its a destination for selling/buying.

This will never gain traction because why use what you have when Craigslist
does the job? People do it to sell/buy, not make a fun webapp.

Your best bet is to change your advertising. Maybe only market to hackers, and
suggest it as a good place to buy used Macs or hardware from other trusted
hackers. Maybe even integrate it with HackerNews identities or something.

Trying to out-craigslist craigslist is an impossible feat. You've probably
learned a lot but considering you're fighting a gorilla with a tack and you're
not making any money from it my guess is you'll lose interest fast unless you
refocus.

------
jasonlbaptiste
Just can't see this iteration doing it. Not discouraging you either, it can
certainly (and almost needs to be done). Here are some things you could focus
on instead:

\- Pick one city and dominate it at first.

\- Try to eliminate the "creepy craigs list" factor somehow. Mobile
authentication?

\- Find a use case within that city that will bring listings/usage
immediately.

\- Focus on user interface that is as "simple" as craigslist, but from 2010,
not 1995.

------
samatman
That isn't how you spell Albuquerque! Since it's at the top of the list, this
seemed worth mentioning.

Taking on Craigslist is an excellent idea. A suggestion: a format that is more
image-intensive by default for things like apartment listings and for sale /
swap searches. A leading thumbnail would go a long way, especially when
looking for items.

------
jeebusroxors
I tried to find my city by clicking on the state. The state took me to a list
of cities (I think in my state), where my city still wasn't listed. I clicked
on display 25 entries and now I have all kinds of cities and states, and home
does not work so I left.

------
Prospect
You may want to check out craiglook.com. They allow you to search craigslist
by distance from zip code. That comes in really handy when looking for
something specific and could be a good feature to build into your site. Good
luck!

------
lionhearted
Brutal honesty:

 _You have around a zero percent chance of winning solely based on technical
merit._

Don't get me wrong - you're going to need to get technical merit down, you're
going to need to offer some great functionality on the technical side.

But if you really want to take Craigslist down, you're going to need to take
over ONE MARKET effectively and branch out from there. You're going to need to
pick one city and walk all around it getting people to use your service,
putting up flyers, doing a radio interview, trying to get the mayor of the
city onboard, convincing college kids to swap their stuff on there or to meet
for board games... you'll have to seed that one city with your own offers,
meetup groups, get your friends to post their resumes or job offers on there,
etc, etc, etc. This almost certainly can't be done from behind a keyboard.

Craigslist isn't winning by its technology - the technology stays out of
Craigslist's way while the site wins by community and network effects. You
need that. You can't get there via technology, you need to take over one city
Craigslist is underserving, then repeat the process a few times until you've
got some solid beachheads in place.

------
ntulip
You need something there for sale.

------
joe_the_user
These are my thought on the many efforts I see here to replace Craigslist.

Craigslist is massive and serves the local ad needs of many nearly-computer-
literate people very well (wikipedia says it has the 33rd highest traffic in
the world). It's html-from-1995 look works perfect and could work for a 1000
years.

Craigslist also _doesn't make that much money_ relative to the traffic it has.
It's run almost as a charity (28 staff people).

This is frustrating to potential entrepreneurs because when they get an idea
for monetizing a need served by Craigslist, they realize that there's no money
to be made because craigslist already fully meets the _perceived_ need in a
free and advertising-free fashion.

I'd say entrepreneurs probably need to not target the least-common-
denominator, least-cash-on-hand group that is craigslist's vast customer base
but rather target more well-healed subgroups (the only way to make money from
craiglist customers is to educate them there's a need they don't yet know
about - but when a large portion also don't have the extra money to pay for
that need, the effort may be in vain).

So... just think, all the web's "disruptions" are about small outfits killing
larger one with more efficiency, higher volume and lower margins. In this
ideal, the margins start to go towards zero, don't they? What then? Craiglist
is one answer but its not an answer that generates jobs, economic activity or
wealth.

You might take notice that the number of people depending on craiglist has to
do with the declining _median_ incomes and lack of higher-paying, higher-
skilled jobs which characterized the US economy even before the recession. You
know the wikipedia page shows Craig Newmark standing with a _hammer_? How's
that for disruption!

The new economy is supposed to create new needs, new jobs and new income. Has
it done so in enough volume to sustain itself? What's your answer here?

~~~
jeffcoat
Craigslist is generating an enormous amount of wealth. Every time it
facilitates a successful exchange between two users -- the sale of a used
lawnmower, a room that gets rented out, a job posting that reaches the right
person -- both sides of that exchange get something they want, and both sides
get richer.

It's hard to see, because there's no centralized accounting totaling up the
cumulative value of all these transactions, but make no mistake: wealth is
certainly being created.

------
hdx
Too bad san francisco is a "Invalid city" :(

------
jasonlotito
No Canada. Cities not working. Cumbersome JS that makes it difficult to use.
Really. Click More, and I see 1 more item. Farming.

Might consider going back and using it. Let me put it this way: swippet should
let me post from the front page to my city. You can do it.

