
A Stroll Through the Craigslist-Crusher Startup Graveyard - inmygarage
http://amandapeyton.com/blog/2012/06/a-stroll-through-the-craigslist-killer-startup-graveyard/
======
cs702
I would be very skeptical of any startup trying to compete against Craigslist
because, in addition to strong network effects, the latter has two difficult-
to-replicate competitive advantages:

* Craigslist’s operating expenses are _ridiculously low_ in relation to its _huge size_ , allowing it to offer most services for free and still earn a profit. According to its public fact sheet, every month the site receives more than 50 million classified ads and serves more than 30 billion web pages.[1] Alexa ranks it as the ninth most-trafficked site in the US.[2] Yet somehow, the company manages to do this with just over 30 employees![1] On a per-year basis, that’s around 20 million classifieds per employee! Infrastructure costs are also _very, very low_ in relation to traffic, as the site’s design, functionality, and interface are all ridiculously light and bare-bones.[3] No startup can match such ultra-low per-classified costs.

* While Craigstlist is technically a for-profit corporation, it operates as a _non-profit_ organization,[1] so it is not seeking to maximize profits; instead, it is seeking only to be financially sustainable. Wealth-seeking entrepreneurs are at a huge disadvantage if they try to compete against a well-established entity that has _both_ an ultra-low-cost advantage and no desire to acquire wealth over time.

In short, Craigslist possesses what Warren Buffett calls the “low-cost
producer” advantage: it can offer a commodity service for less than anyone
else.[4]

[1] <http://www.craigslist.org/about/factsheet>

[2] <http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US>

[3] According to this 2011 presentation, Craiglist, the 9th most-traffic site
in the US, is powered by only ~500 servers located in two data centers:
[http://www.slideshare.net/jzawodn/lessons-learned-
migrating-...](http://www.slideshare.net/jzawodn/lessons-learned-
migrating-2-billion-documents-at-craigslist)

[4] For example, read Buffett's description of GEICO’s competitive advantage
in his 2000 letter to shareholders:
<http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2000ar/2000letter.html>

~~~
jeremymims
Can we put this to rest once and for all? Craigslist is a for-profit company.
From the fact sheet you've apparently cited without reading:

Q: Is craigslist a nonprofit? A: No, craigslist was incorporated as a for-
profit in 1999.

~~~
cs702
jeremymims: technically you're right, but in practice Craigslist operates as a
non-profit. From the same link:

 _Q: Why does craigslist still use a ".org" domain? A: It symbolizes the
relatively non-commercial nature, public service mission, and non-corporate
culture of craigslist._

I updated my comment to reflect this. Thank you for pointing it out!

~~~
herdrick
That 'relatively non-commercial' organization earned > $30 million for the
founder so far. What proportion of wholeheartedly commercial firms have done
that?

You shouldn't take a company's PR at face value.

~~~
cs702
herdrick:

Source? And are those the company's profits, or what the founder, Craig
Newmark, has taken out of the company's profits since its founding 17-18 years
ago? Does that include his salary, or only his pro-rata share of distributions
to all shareholders, or both?

Let's assume for a moment that this is the total amount of money he's received
from the company since inception. It's a relatively paltry amount of money for
a company with that kind of reach. Compare the "$30 million" you say he has
earned cumulatively over nearly two decades to the _billions_ or _hundreds of
millions_ of dollars earned by the founders of most web companies that have
achieved similar scale.

Moreover, that figure is comparable to what CEOs of large non-profit
organizations make per year. Compare $30 million over 17-18 years, or around
$1.7 million per year, to the figures quoted in this article:
[http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2011/09/slideshow-
who...](http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/blog/2011/09/slideshow-who-are-the-
highest-paid.html)

By all accounts, Craigslist behaves a lot more like a non-profit organization
than as a for-profit corporation.

------
51Cards
Up here, "north of the border" in Canada, Kijiji has cut a swath through
Craigslist use. I rarely hear Craigslist anymore but Kijiji is almost
ubiquitous for online classifieds, especially in my non-tech friends. "Throw
it on Kijiji"

I don't know why it took off so strongly here in Canada but the speed at which
it did surprised even me. I have also been surprised it hasn't done the same
in the US since it's not _that_ culturally different when it comes to online
classifieds.

Edit: <http://ontario.kijiji.ca/>

~~~
ilamont
Depends where you are. Vancouver and Toronto Craigslist activity is very
strong in the "For Sale" categories with many thousands of new postings every
day. Maritimes, Quebec and some western cities are quite desolate, except for
ticket-selling bots it seems.

~~~
FigBug
I agree it really depends on where you are. Craigslist was slow to expand past
the major Canadian cities, so in the smaller cities UsedEverywhere or Kijiji
were first and remain more popular.

------
yumraj
I will have to agree with point #1. I don't care about the UI, period, the
end.

I'm so used to typing sfbay.craigslist.org, and just search that I don't even
think about it. Textual list works great for me for most part. If I'm
interested, I send an email, get a response. Done!!

Why do people think that putting a lipstick on a pig will make it more
appealing when all I want is some pork.

Regarding scammers: there will be scammers in every alternate, at least thats
what I think. It is my job to do the due diligence and take care.

~~~
natural219
I can't tell if you're being willfully ignorant or if you legitimately find
Craigslist easy to use. I legitimately cannot think of a single example of
where you would _prefer_ to scroll through pages of links, reading each
classified that _might_ contain the item you're looking for, instead of using
an a UI mechanism to filter and sort the searches.

Have you ever used Craiglist to rent an apartment or to buy a used car?

~~~
glesica
I just used Craigslist to find an apartment about 1.5 months ago. Based on my
experience, I disagree with you. Sure, a slick interface would be cool, but it
could very well change the nature of the site in a bad way.

I agree that it would be awesome to be able to filter listings on Craiglist
through a neat-o UI mechanism ("Hipmunk for apartments maybe").

In fact, I basically spent the entire time I was using the site thinking "if
only more landlords indicated whether the apartment is pet-friendly...". I
ended up calling a ton of landlords just to find out whether they allowed
pets, on the off chance that some of those who had listed no pet policy
actually allowed them.

But is that really a UI problem? For me, Craigslist has already provided the
UI tools I needed (you can search by pet-friendliness). The problem was that
the landlords didn't include that information in their listings in the first
place.

Craigslist is a site for "classified ads". Traditional classifieds (in
newspapers) were usually very short, just a few words. Of course far more is
possible with Craigslist, but a larger ad also requires more effort on the
part of the seller.

As it is now, incomplete information has a cost for sellers (people skip their
ads), but they can choose to bear that cost if they wish, presumably after
comparing it against the cost of providing more complete information. Part of
the reason people use Craigslist is that it is more or less a willy-nilly
market that is friendly to small sellers.

So what would Craigslist have to do to make a new UI worthwhile (for me)?
Enforce data completeness on the sellers. But that would turn people off.
Requiring additional bookkeeping or punishing sellers for "incomplete"
listings just to make a snappy UI practical would harm the community and the
site.

~~~
crazygringo
Craiglist for apartment-hunting in NYC is basically useless. 95% of ads are
spammy ads from brokers who, as soon as you call them, tell you that the
apartment is already gone, but ask you to tell them what you're looking for,
so they can start helping you... There's no deduplication, and you wind up
looking at the same ad fifty times in two weeks. Brokers stuff their ads with
keywords for every neighborhood, so narrowing results by neighborhood is
broken. Price search doesn't work either, because searching for "$2000" gives
you apartments that are $2000 per week, $2000 per month, or $2000 for
completely arbitrary periods of time, like 11 days. 95% of the listings under
"no-fee" actually have fees, 50% of the listings under "sublet" are actually
being shown by brokers, and another 25% are actually just looking for
roommates (posting in the completely wrong section).

There's clearly zero quality control. The user experience for apartment-
hunting is HORRIBLE.

~~~
msellout
Actually, I found that Craigslist was the best resource for apartment hunting
in NYC. None of the other sites (with better UI) had the same quality of
listings. By quality, I mean good deals.

~~~
ficho
+1. I've lived in the city for 5 years and found all places but the last on CL
(last was CL through padmapper). If you manage to get a good workflow you can
find little gems in less than a week.

That's the beauty of its UI, the fact that's it's not so appealing puts some
people off but also rewards those working hard at it. The amount and variety
of offered appartements on CL is huge and much better than what most other
sites would offer. That makes for an experience whose reward can be very high
and this is valuable when looking for a place to live.

~~~
crazygringo
> _the fact that's it's not so appealing puts some people off but also rewards
> those working hard at it_

Right... _why_ would you want to only reward your users who work hard? That's
_idiotic_.

Why wouldn't you want to make the site easy to use, with high-quality data,
for everyone? When that really wouldn't be that hard to do.

When I was apartment-hunting, over the course of weeks, I literally learned
how to recognize particularly spammy brokers by the formatting of their
headlines, so I wouldn't click on them... (Four asterisks at beginning and
end? Ignore. All-caps with a strange abbreviation for bedroom? Ignore. Etc.)
This is a skill I deeply wish I hadn't had to learn. It's ridiculous.

~~~
ficho
it is and its not. the question you're putting fwd in the end is that of a
fully transparent market or not. With cl as it is, the market for broker apts,
new ones etc is fairly transparent as these are listing you'll often find on
all rental sites.

The market for shares / sublets / by owners is much less transparent and in a
city as NY where some places are rent controlled, other have a an amazing
history / layout etc, this is actually interesting.

In a sense it gives anyone a shot at being lucky and finding an amazing place
with a bit of dedication. If it was fully transparent I think the challenge to
achieve the same outcome would be to continuously for long periods of time, be
looking for an apt. Which right now isnt necessary.

That's it. Nevertheless I'd be curious to see this done right and see the
difference.

~~~
crazygringo
> _In a sense it gives anyone a shot at being lucky and finding an amazing
> place with a bit of dedication._

What you're describing is basically anti-market. You're saying, celebrate
market friction and inefficiences, so people who are time-rich but money-poor
can have a shot at finding underpriced properties, kind of like a lottery.

For me, it just means that I wasted probably 20 or 30 hours of my life sifting
through listings that were 99% crappy, in order to find my apartment. I blame
Craig, for not improving the efficiency of the market, which would be _really_
easy for his site to do.

------
minouye
I'd also say that a lot of startups don't do a very good job of competing.
YardSale launched a big press push last week saying that they'd post your
listing to Craigslist for you. The contact link in the Craigslist post goes to
a sign-up form for the Yardsale app. Pretty much useless for selling anything
and mainly just a user acquisition ploy.

I was actually pretty disappointed because I really care about how hard it is
to post to Craigslist. I think that's a huge issue right now and will be for
them going forward. As more people rely on smartphones as their primary
computing device (and selling device for that matter---phone, sms, camera,
email, etc.), there will be more opportunity to create something that takes
casual sellers away (who are also buyers, wink). Obviously at niches at first,
but it's going to be a serious weakness (if an 800lb gorilla can have a
serious weakness). Call me crazy, but their complete disinterest in mobile
(not Mobile, AL - <http://mobile.craigslist.org>) is IMO their Achilles heel.

Payments, reputation, spammers--I agree that none of that matters because it
introduces way too much transaction friction (and annoying things like taxable
income!)

What I do care about is that fact that in 2012, people try to sell their couch
without a photo, when nearly everyone on an Internet-enabled smartphone has
posted a picture to Facebook/Twitter/Instagram without even thinking twice
about it. That's just weird.

~~~
samstave
> _The contact link in the Craigslist post goes to a sign-up form for the
> Yardsale app._

This was a tactic that AIRBnB used and they got some flak for it. CL doesn't
like the middle-man approach.

I don't know though if AIRBnB got any C&D or other imperial entanglements due
to this approach.

~~~
minouye
Yeah Craigslist definitely doesn't like that:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3897379>

------
jawns
Okay, so Craigslist's big advantage over everybody else is its user base,
right?

But at least in my experience, most people who use Craigslist wish that there
were something better that had a large user base. They don't like the UI, they
don't like how many scammers there are, etc. They _tolerate_ Craigslist
because that's where the results are, but they would be happy to jump ship if
they could get those results elsewhere, but with more pros and fewer cons.

It seems like this would be a good case for "conditional commmitment."

Kickstarter is a great example of a service that allows conditional
commitment. Here's the problem it solves: People are reluctant to donate to a
cause unless they know there is enough other support to make the goal viable.
Kickstarter lets them conditionally donate, and their donation is only
collected once some threshold of total pledges have been reached. (Side note:
A Kickstarter for politics would be a great way for a third-party candidate to
make inroads, don't you think?)

In the case of a Craigslist alternative, perhaps one strategy would be to have
people commit to a proposed new service -- on the condition that some
threshold of other people also commit. Once the threshold is reached, boom,
it's like Black Friday, with a line of people at the door waiting to rush in
en masse.

~~~
stfu
I would argue that Kickstarter in its current form is not as scaleable as
Craigslist is. If they would follow an anything-goes policy as Craigslist
does, the same problems would appear i.e. illegal content, scams, etc.

In regards to Kickstarter for politics: Might work better if these were bi-
partisan "internetsy" themes, i.e. ACTA, SOPA. But the problem with politics
is, that there might be not immediate results.

The "moneybombs" many candidates use to drive up cash in certain timeframes
could be seen as somewhat similar to Kickstarter. They are often affiliated
with a specific fund rising goal, some (made up) reason for the "bomb", and
often even list contributor names and messages.

------
lesterman
This article didn't bother to list the contents of the graveyard, so I tried.
But all I can find are success stories:

* Kajiji - popular in Canada (according to another poster)

* OLX - popular in Spain and Latin America [crunchbase]

* okcupid

* AirBnB (mentioned in post)

* StubHub

* Etsy

* Legal Zoom

* Elance

~~~
danso
Is it fair to list okcupid as a direct competitor? I think dating sites, with
the social profile aspect, is almost fundamentally different than a personals
ad.

I guess you could argue that is the case with airbnb, but I don't think the
transaction type is more limited than the kinds that happen in relationships.

Maybe the better comparison would be PlentyOfFish

~~~
iwejfweoifjweif
AFAIK OKCupid has never considered craigslist to be a competitor

------
davidw
"Everyone has their own theory on 2-sided marketplaces and mine is as follows:
if you provide a seller with a pool of qualified buyers, and a transaction
happens, they will continue to sell through you. Otherwise, they will go
elsewhere."

See "positive network externalities", as mentioned here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4152078>

------
freshfunk
It seems like a mistake to compete with Craigslist in its entirety. They had
years to grow their community and brand while maintaining a relatively low
cost structure.

Startups that are concentrating on different pieces of the pie and providing a
better experience seem to be on the right track. AirBnb, OkCupid, and the
other companies listed in the comments here. Even in the jobs space I find
LinkedIn jobs having more and better listings than Craigslist.

It's easy to hate Craigslist because of stories about it "crushing" other
companies. But much of Craigslist's value is in its data and that data being
solely available on its website. If that data was available on competitors,
then it would lose leverage. This is true for many websites out there and they
go to lengths to protect that data (eg. LinkedIn shutting off its API to
third-parties).

------
suresk
I guess I'm not sure _why_ you'd want to try to compete with Craigslist
directly. Besides the network effect, there is also the fact that Craigslist
isn't really making that much money (at least compared to how much they could
be).

This means that anything competing with it with a goal of making money is
going to have an even harder time competing with CL, which is mostly free and
completely free of advertising. Look at eBay, which arguably could have been
improved on quite a bit _and_ charged users fairly high fees - nobody (that I
know of) ever managed to compete with them on a large scale in the auction
space.

Like others have said, I think the value is in competing on very specific
areas. A few that would be possible and profitable:

\- Jobs/contract work. Given the technology we have, I think the internet has
done a poor job of changing the way we find and apply for employment and
short-term work. I've been working on some prototypes for tech-oriented job
sites, and I think there are a lot of other industries that could benefit from
smarter job sites. Plus, there is a considerable amount of money in this area.

\- Housing, especially in places like SF and NYC.

\- Local services.

Lower-end stuff like people selling used couches and Xbox 360 games is
probably not an area worth getting into.

------
angryasian
[http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-
di...](http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-another-product-disrupted-
and-replaced-Craigslist)

but the more important graphic is this one -
[http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qz...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_1280.png)

ill leave this here.

------
crazygringo
This post misses exactly half of the problem.

Amanda talks about Craigslist from the perspective of the seller (new sites
have nobody to sell to).

What about the other half, the buyers? Same problem -- users on new sites have
nobody to buy from.

The whole problem is the network effect. And the reason there aren't
Craigslist killers is because it's insanely hard to overcome this. Your
product may be 100x better, but sellers won't use it until tons of buyers do,
and buyers won't use it until tons of sellers do. Craigslist didn't have this
problem because it was basically the first decent online classifieds site. So
now Craigslist can just sit there and not innovate.

 _This_ is why people are so upset with Craigslist, and why supposed
Craisglist-killers are failing. (It makes normal product competition, like
getting an app to be #1 in the iTunes store, look easy by comparison.)

~~~
saurik
When Craigslist started they had to overcome this problem. They even had to
make the idea of using the Internet for a lot of these kinds of ads something
anyone would even consider. If you look into the backstory, this took many
years of bootstrapping at small scales before it really took off. Why should
we be cheering anyone on who wants to just cheat their way into this space,
piggybacking on all of that hard work and dedication building this market?

~~~
crazygringo
No, Craigslist didn't have to overcome this problem. They merely had to
overcome the problem of building the market in the first place, which was much
easier because nobody else on the Internet was obviously the "default" option.

Nowadays, any site that doesn't _already_ have the same kind of buyer and
seller populations that Craigslist does is at a complete and total
disadvantage in competing, and the point is, it's virtually impossible to
overcome that. Craig today would never get his foot in the door.

> _Why should we be cheering anyone on who wants to just cheat their way into
> this space, piggybacking on all of that hard work and dedication building
> this market?_

Because Craigslist's success is not due 100% to hard work and dedication. It's
probably more like 10% hard work, and 90% being in the right place at the
right time. So the question is, why should Craigslist be forever _rewarded_
for dumb good luck, while competitors who work even harder to create better
products are doomed to fail, because it's impossible for them to attract users
while Craigslist sucks them all up, just because of its network lock-in
effects?

I want to see Craigslist start to have to compete and innovate again, just
like most other companies have to.

~~~
saurik
You drastically underestimate how difficult it was to make people think the
Internet was a reasonable place to look for apartment listings in the first
place.

I was one of those people in 1995 schlepping around town trying to convince
companies that the Internet existed, and that they wanted a website ("yes, I
guess it is kind of like a brochure...").

The entrenched competitor at the time were physical newspaper classified
advertisements. There were great apartment-specific guides you could get. If
you were serious about apartment-hunting, the Internet would have looked
stupid.

Remember, Craigslist started in 1995, and they were an email mailing list of
Craig and his friends. It wasn't until 1999 that they incorporated.

Meanwhile, while their /look/ hasn't changed, their functionality has, and it
has defined entire genres of things people use it for that, as someone only
30, I'm still floored by the success of (as in "people seriously want to use a
website for that?!").

There actually was competition, even among friends, and the user community
seriously stuck with Craig only because he had spent years making them like
him (which is hard work that does not involve code, but instead service:
Craigslist actually does a lot of work behind the scenes on that community,
and does to this day).

The story of bootstrapping Craigslist is actually epic: please read it. There
have been some amazing write ups of the story in various publications. I
recommend Gibson the longest one.

~~~
crazygringo
I'm sure the story of bootstrapping Craigslist is very interesting, I don't
doubt it.

But that's not my point. My point is, their bootstrapping was a challenge just
like any other other startup has to gain users, but it was _possible_ , with
hard work.

Nowadays, if any other startup tries bootstrapping that is even _better_ ,
with even _more_ hard work and dedication, they'll still fail, because
Craigslist wins via network effects. It's now virtually _impossible_.

Resentment towards Craigslist is not because they got to where they are now
easily -- they didn't, it was hard. That gets respect. The resentment comes
because they're _staying_ where they are now, easily, and potentially better
competitors have virtually zero chance, no matter how much they work hard.

~~~
koide
It's a childish complaint. The new startups simply aren't better, because they
don't have the network effects. They may have better looking UI, better text
classification, better customer service, or whatever you want.

But as long as they don't have the users, they are not better.

And don't forget that recent history is filled with companies that were
"virtually impossible to defeat" until they were beaten, and harshly.

~~~
creamyhorror
> But as long as they don't have the users, they are not better.

That's a truism. Crazygringo's point assumes that network effects are excluded
from the measure of a "better" service. I think that's a fair basis for
comparison, since the network effective advantage accrues from an _earlier
period_ in the marketplace's history: it's the prize won by being
better/smarter than previous competitors. But it says nothing about the
dominant service being better than _current_ , newly launched competitors.

If you define "better" as having more users, then that's pretty much ex post
facto reasoning and tells us little.

> And don't forget that recent history is filled with companies that were
> "virtually impossible to defeat" until they were beaten, and harshly.

1\. The number of years that a company dominates _is_ the measure of how much
that company has won. The fact that a company eventually falls to a competitor
doesn't mean that the company didn't profit handsomely for years or decades.

2\. The fact that some large companies have fallen doesn't mean that the
existing behemoths don't derive most of their advantage from network effects.
Maybe we would have seen better, more open social networking startups emerge
and win the market by now if Facebook's network effects were somehow
nullified.

The ultimate point is that network effects are a very significant barrier to
entry, and mitigating them would allow a more dynamic market for startups to
compete in, and higher competition in the market (which is better for
consumers). Imagine if all social networks were interoperable and people could
choose which service they wanted to live on -- then there wouldn't be a
tendency for a 1000-ton gorilla to emerge at the top of the heap.

(Funnily, I have nothing against Craigslist, since they're providing a very
useful service at virtually no cost. They deserve their position, easily;
their market's story is a happy one. Let's hope it happens in more places
soon.)

~~~
koide
You are misunderstanding both of my comments.

Regarding network effects the point is that they do make the service more
useful (read better) for the users, and in a significant way, many times more
significant than a new UI. So, Craiglist's still better now, if only because
they were better before. Unfair? Maybe so, but complaining won't solve the
problem or make it go away. It's just that we've been spoiled about never
having big barriers to entry anymore.

Regarding falling companies was just to counter the parent saying that that
kind of companies are unassailable, when they clearly aren't. Nothing more,
nothing less... profits or their staying alive being due to network effects
are irrelevant to my point.

The ultimate point is that just bitterly complaining about how unfair
Craiglist is because it's using its competitive advantages to its advantage
will not solve the barrier to entry problem, it doesn't even make it clear why
is it a problem, nor posits arguments about what to do (if anything) with it.

------
conipto
And this, everyone, is why Craig's most brilliant move is to not allow
integration. The only way anyone beats them is to "also have that too." In
this case, "that" being the craigslist user base.

------
mistermann
Facebook with public anonymity for your listings would solve most of these
problems, as well as go a long way to reducing fraud.

~~~
abruzzi
Please don't tie Facebook to logins on other sites. It excludes half the
population of the US, more in other countries, and if you add a non Facebook
option, the scammers will just use that.

Craiglist's solution is simple--their exhortations to only deal locally means
that if I'm looking for a house or a car, I will see it before I give money.
The scammers are aiming at people that ignore that rule.

Plenty of people buy and sell long distance on Craigslist, but that is really
a caveat emptor situation outside of how the site is intended to be used.

------
ajones05
For anyone curious about craigslist marketshare and competitors, this is the
best resource I've seen on the topic: [http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-
hasnt-another-product-di...](http://www.quora.com/Craigslist/Why-hasnt-
another-product-disrupted-and-replaced-Craigslist)

In that discussion is reference to this graphic, which does a good job
illustrating many of the would-be craigslist-crushers (although most go after
niches rather than the whole pie):
[http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qz...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwkfi5tqEi1qzqh0wo1_1280.png?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAI6WLSGT7Y3ET7ADQ&Expires=1340750527&Signature=OiMRxp%2FZU1YLGfYJB2JSuv%2Fgd4A%3D)

------
clarky07
That's sort of an interesting thought. Being the buyer for early sellers as a
"user acquisition cost." Clearly this can't be done on a large scale, but I
don't think anyone would plan on doing a national craigslist rollout. I wonder
what kind of budget you'd have to have to do this for 1 small city for a few
months.

Keep in mind you don't have to keep people's stuff, you can always re-sell it
on ebay or craigslist :-) (and re-list it on your mythical new site. now you
have inventory for the buyers and you are the buyer for the sellers)

~~~
jaggederest
That's really an interesting idea, you become the market maker - a monopoly
and a monopsony in one, much like amazon is for electronic books right now.

------
GFischer
I think that most startups that try to compete with Craigslist fail in their
strategy.

I was lucky to have professor Jakki Mohr as a teacher, and she advocated the
"bowling alley" strategy:

[http://wisepreneur.com/innovation-marketing-2/innovation-
mar...](http://wisepreneur.com/innovation-marketing-2/innovation-marketing-
strategy-first-get-a-beachhead)

As the article states, and lesterman shows below, there are several startups
that succeeded in beating Cragislist.. but they all did so by focusing on a
specific niche.

------
mcovey
<http://carsabi.com/> also recently pulled craigslist results:

"June 12th: We no longer include vehicles from Craigslist, as they have
requested that we not index their listings"

Too bad, it is a killer car shopping site, but without the massive craigslist
db of results, they won't have nearly as much to offer.

Craigslist should really introduce a paid API or something, since they seem to
hate being scraped. I think they fear becoming irrelevant.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
That would be great, having a front end to upload and then having a choice of
sites from which to consume the offers.

I wonder if someone hasn't got a site where you can submit on craigslist and
use an addon to simultaneously submit to their site - basically letting the
browser do a multicast of the data.

------
jinushaun
My friends and I had a startup idea in 2007 that competed with Craigslist. (I
didn't follow through, but one of them is still in that space) I can't believe
that five years later, no one has managed to push CL off the top. It was a bad
user in 2007 and still bad now. Everyone I know _tolerates_ CL. No one likes
it. CL refuses to add new features that would improve the user experience and
benefit customers.

~~~
genwin
I like CL as is. (I may be old fashioned. E.g. I still use Notepad for small
lists, instead of logging in to some web app for that.)

~~~
pygorex
Ditto on Notepad. For personal todo lists I just use a text editor. For
collaborative todo lists I use a shared Google doc or Trello.

------
devian
The challenges to compete against Craigslist aren't unique to Craigslist.
Startups that want to compete with any dominate product in the market pretty
much have to face the same challenges. Ebay, Facebook, Google Search, etc. all
share similar challenges, specifically solving the chicken-and-egg problem.

However, I do believe that competing with Craigslist might be a bit easier
given that there is almost no innovation happening in the product. Craigslist
hasn't changed much since I first used it 7 years ago. There is definitely an
opportunity to disrupt Craigslist position and it's a matter of time.

Craigslist is in an amazing position right now and they have a lot of
potential to really continue to dominate. Ultimately, Craigslist's demise will
be through its own undoing of not actually trying to compete and innovate.

------
alextingle
"Why do so many startups focused in the above four areas generally flounder?"

A "flounder" is a fish! She means "founder", which is a verb which roughly
means "sink".

~~~
hobbes
<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/flounder>
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flounder#Verb>

(intransitive) To act clumsily or confused; to struggle or be flustered.

    
    
        "He gave a good speech, but floundered when audience
     members asked questions he could not answer well."

------
JVIDEL
You can have a much nicer UX, better code and extra features

But CL has both traffic and a well-known brand, investor money can't buy that.

Any feature you add is useless when there's no content, and there's no content
because nobody goes to your site, and nobody goes because there's no content,
see how it goes?

And of course CL knows better than letting you "borrow" their ads...

------
onlyup
In Ireland, DoneDeal.ie and Adverts.ie have pretty much killed any Craigslist
usage (although it was never that popular here even though I think most people
would recognise the name)

------
Estragon
Actually, there may be a technical approach: do something like padmapper as a
TOR service, and take payment in bitcoins. :-)

------
ericingram
My thoughts exactly, well put.

