If you were to start a company from scratch to take on Craigslist today, what would you do different? And no matter what you do, would it make a difference? A stealth company called iList thinks it has an answer: make selling your crap more of a social app.
Other than that general idea, detail are skimpy at this point. But the company has raised $1.5 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and angel investors Dmitry Shapiro (founder of Veoh) and Alex Bard (founder of Goowy, which was recently sold to AOL). Both Shapiro and Bard also sit on iList’s board of directors.
iList won’t be the first service to enter the social classifieds field. On Facebook alone, there are already plenty of marketplace applications that tap into your social network, including one from Facebook itself (called Marketplace) and one from eBay (eBay Marketplace). There is also Neighborhoods and ShopIt. So the field is pretty crowded, but that is not to say that anyone has cracked the social classifieds nut just yet. (And Craigslist is interestingly absent).
lol craiglist in mob terms are a “MADE MAN”
instant deadpool
I think iList is missing the point here. Craigslist is successful because they did not take outside funding and let a community grow organically. If iList takes vc funding they will have to conform to the ad model or some commercial mess.
Being social is great, but commercial interests should not enter these markets (i.e. edgeio.com).
Respect your community!
Craigslist has a huge audience and their service is really hard to compete against as they seem to not care about the bottom line. For a startup to say they are going after Craigslist can hurt more than it helps. Anyone who goes to the site now will have one question in mind “How is this better than Craigslist?” as opposed to “What can this help me/my business?”.
There’s a business aphorism somewhere that illustrates a Quixotic business plan, similar to people who build “a search engine” and tell people that Google are their competition.
A dead horse: “That’s not cuil.”
@MattL
I totally agree. You can not compete with someone who doesn’t care about the bottom line. Social interests are what Craigslist sees as value; not monetary gain.
B. Ackles – Who says that any market should be free of commercial interests? This is America, it is a free market, and may the best product succeed (the consumer wins in this scenario). Commercial or not, I would take a better version of Craig’s List any day.
@gw
I’m not saying Craigslist is perfect by any means. It could be more social, the UI sucks and there is no way to see other users credibility.
I do however believe that Craig’s vision was more than a money-making venture. It’s about bringing people together in a locally focused venue. In order to accomplish this you need to reduce your commercial influence. Reducing the commercial strangle hold was only possible by resisting the temptation of money grubbing capitalism. Which is often the result of taking VC funding.
I’m a social capitalist myself and believe the mission of Craigslist follows a similar vain.
back @ B. Ackles (good response by the way)
A few points to consider:
— I don’t believe their aim is to take out Craig’s List, just offer something improved.
— Their tag line is more too make people aware that it is a “modern” alternative to Craig’s List. Capitalism is nowhere in their tag line, not that it would be bad if it were.
— Capitalism isn’t a bad thing, in fact it is the reason we have many of the innovative companies we do today. Immediately people are attacking ilist for being “capitalistic” — lets remember that Craigslist makes a huge wad of cash from its job listings.
— Craig’s List needs real competition, if for no other reason than to inspire it to be better. I think the word “monopoly” has a more negative connotation than “capitalism”
— In this age, it is difficult to create a site of this scale without funding. Programmers need money to put food in their stomach. Storage and bandwidth costs can be quite large also.
— For the socialists – who says if ilist is successful that it cannot give back? Google is very capitalistic, but also somewhat generous with its free services.
It’s funny how much you and I actually agree on here. Great points on the capitalist perspective.
I don’t think Craigslist will ever change in a big way (or at all). It’s served the purpose of it’s founders and I don’t think it will adjust in any big way as a sign of impeding competition.
One point I respectfully disagree with is that programmers cannot build a business ‘without (accepting) funding’. Cloud Computing and Moore’s Law are allowing anyone to start a business with next to nothing. Creative business models are the way small companies succeed in the world of the web.
I’m a believer in the visions of two uniquely different visionary perspectives on business and social capital. Maybe his will give insight as to why I’ve came to these conclusions.
1. David Heinemeier Hansson
2. Craig Newmark
I respectfully agree with your disagreement
— many people can start a business on nothing (I’m one of them). However, if you are not yourself a programmer (as are these founders, I am sure), it is difficult for you to see your idea come to fruition without effort from other people (programmers), and such effort is typically not free. Not to mention many people need funding just to survive, if not to grow their business (this is especially true when there are wives, children, and mortgage payments to take care of). I would also speculate that in order to compete with Craigslist this company will need to grow a large user base, which will also probably cost them money (via marketing). I am all for the vc-less startup, but for less lucky people this is not an option.
The civility of you two is nauseating
CL needs competition.
I need better search:
Example 1, I want to find housing in “springfield”, but b/c asshat from “shelbyville” mentions “20 minutes from “springfield” it comes up in my results.
Example 2, I want to find a “toyota camry”, but b/c asshat from selling some beat up 1979 mustang mentions “will trade for camry” it comes up in my results.
Optional reputations, where it is not mandatory, but does give a badge of sorts, for those participating would be helpful.
1) Dipshit sold me some DSL modem that couldn’t lock on the DSL signal
2) Posting for hooker got me arrested b/c it was a sting
CL is big and entrenched enough to add many features, but they refuse. If ilist can just push them to do “something” helpful, I’ll be greatful.
CL doesn’t NEED “competition”, they NEED other companies who share their vision.
That said, I completely agree Craigslist has it’s shortcomings. I’m building a service which should clarify what I see as a viable alternative, yet it’s complementary to the Craigslist vision.
Viva La Craigslist!!
PS: Why do you refuse to follow me (on twitter) and friend me (on Facebook)? I asked you months ago…
Any free service that gains a fair amount of traction will quickly become inundated by spammers, scammers and crooks. I’ve been shopping for a car on my local Craigslit for a few months and approximately 50% of all ads posted are from scammers trying to trick people into buying a car without first seeing/driving it and wiring money overseas. It’s gotten to the point where searching for a vehicle on Craigslist is as bad as getting around all the SEO crap that pollutes Google these days. The signal-to-noise ratio is getting worse every day. I can only hope that by hiring a super-smart person/programmer like Jeremy Zawodny that Craigslist will make some headway into stopping these scammers from ruining Craigslist forever.
And eBay’s Kijiji is no better. I would expect the exact same thing to happen to iList.
Old adage of “Pick your competitors wisely.” comes to mind. Gotta be something under the sheets to warrant the initial investment. Lots o’ luck guys! BTW, who are the founders? (Could that have been the draw?…)
Hmmm yeah I’d agree with saying “Good luck”. They better have something magical up their sleeves…
I see bold claims being made here. Just be sure to have your load balancers on point. Cuil found out the hard way that big claims and publicity via techcrunch can have you looking like a dummy. Personally I wouldn’t take on Craigslist as a whole — I’d rather just break it down into it’s sub parts and target the niches therein. If you do succeed though do have a developer API handy, because Craigslist doesn’t play nice with developers like that.
Why do online listings need to be ’social’? I go to craigslist, search for what I want. If its there, great. If not, oh well. Craigslist isn’t better because they ‘don’t care about the bottom line’. It’s better because it’s easy to use and has a huge audience. If it was a crappy service and their founders were a bunch of hippies who didn’t care about money, guess what? It would still be a crappy service.
I want to start a business that involves me sitting on my ass all day. But I’ll make it ’social’ because idiot VCs think that actually means something.
There are a lot of things that you can do around Craigslist– like Postlets and vFlyer have done.
For example, why hasn’t anyone created a better way for people to respond to ads than the old email… people want to inquire about your car for sale… give them the option to schedule a time to see it.
The key to killing Craigslist is to get people posting their ads on your platform first, then using CL for distribution. Once ad posting fragments away from CL and they don’t have such a massive lead over backpage, Oodle, and others, then consumers will gravitate to the sites with the best search experience, which god knows CL does not have. Then it’s all over for them.
@Jeremy
Good luck on the “killing Craigslist”. Yet, you made a few good points on using Craigslist as source of distribution.
Unless you too can become a verb as craigslist has become, you will surely fail. Don’t kill Craigslist, join them and make it a better service.
Craigslist is a verb?
“Put it on Craigslist” is what most people say.
Not, “Craigslist it!”
I’ve always heard/said “Craigslist it!”
“Craigslist it!” sounds wired
They haven’t even launched yet and already made their first mistake by calling out craigslist. That just shows already they are not a friendly company. Such a noob move by ilist.
That’s probably the only reason they are given a mention on TC.
im a great fan of craigslist, but it seem to be stuck in 90s. there can be a competitor to everybody. all these commentors are same ppl who bashed google during altavista’s times. theres always room for improvement and innovation. sure its an uphill taks to compete with CL’s loyal userbase, but in the end its all about wat ilist can do which CL cant do at the least to say.
Well, it’s nice to see some optimists are still out there.
Now if only someone would fund an eBay competitor with a couple of billion. It would pay itself back in a single quarter.
OLX.com is also trying to be a Craigslist with Google sponsored links and focusing on international market where Craigslist is weak and I think they’re doing ok.
It seems that everybody wants to kill this hippie dream…They should change the tag line to saying “Making a website with no intent to make money is so 1995″.
By the way, “Social” has become a non-sensical marketing word, wait until people will call their website “green”…
There are already “green” sites… the green either comes from some kind of recycle/reuse social angle or the sites energy resources such as servers powered by wind, solar and hydro.
I’ve had my own classified site since 1995. I’ve never really developed it mostly because the first site to succeed stays king of the mountain due to loyal visitors. The notable exceptions are Google vs Yahoo, and Facebook vs MySpace vs Friendster. Even dominant sites like Monster and Hot Jobs lose to Craigslist. It will be very difficult for any listing site to become the dominant listing portal over Craigslist, but where Craigslist has failed is to license or franchise itself. It would be possible for a listing site to form partnerships with social sites to be come a listing service provider under private lable and eventually surpass Craigslist in users.
the opportunity for user engagement classifieds is wide open, its anybodies game. a little classified user engagement can go a long way. video, motion, sound, simple stuff. attention to layout, look, feel. am i jealous of cl? yep, you damn well better believe it. there getting away with murder. putting newspapers to sleep with a geriatric circa. 1996 style website.
got any TC invites left?
Which Free classifieds sites would you say is most effective?
-craig’s list
-OLX
-facebook marketplace
or are there any others?
@Diana
Without a doubt Craigslist
That’s a good point, Facebook is in the unique position to actually go after craigslist better than anyone. As they search for their monetization strategy…
Who cares. Why bother reviewing a beta sign up page? Another vaporware review.
Do they have a chance? We soon fine out.
Well, look, Microsoft was billions yet it can’t take down Google, or even Yahoo. They key is this, once a product is accepted by the public, its very hard to take their move them from Google to live.com. They key is, be yourself, create a Google, create a Paypal, or a Oracle, a Nike, be you. Sometimes all the money in the world, can take down a Western Union.
Well, look, Microsoft has billions yet it can’t take down Google, or even Yahoo. The key is this, once a product is accepted by the public, its very hard to have users move from Google to live.com. The key is, be yourself, create a Google, create a Paypal, or a Oracle, a Nike, be you. Sometimes all the money in the world, can’t take down a Western Union.
What would it take to create a craigslist where all advertisements are legit? No scams or anything, the site and company can ensure everyone’s legality and scammers can be prosecuted? I think that idea alone, if possible, would give an edge over a craigslist replica.
Having users see the value of telephone verification.
http://www2.telesign.com/
Telephone verfications sounds like something that could certainly benefit the validity of a craigslist site. Scams are a huge issue so it would make a difference.
As we has already OpenSocial to bridge social networking sites, can we have OpenLocalList to bridge local list sites?
It is certainly an audacious goal to take on Mr. Newmark, but I have don’t discount the team behind the product. I think they will be very disruptive and inspire others to think about leveraging social networks in new ways.
1.5 Million is not enough to take on craigslsit.com
OLX.com got 26.5 Million and they are still not even close in the ranking.
Trying to be like craigslist will not get you anywhere in a very selective market place.
Look at kijiji 3 Million dollare advertising budget. Who can ever spend so much and and compete.
http://www.shopandsave.com Canada 3rd Largest free local classifieds spends no money on marketing.
If your site can do what craigslist.com and http://www.shopandsave.com can do then you can make your site huge. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising.
Larry? How did you here of http://www.shopandsave.com ?
The website has over 50,000 listings just in Toronto. How do you know that shopandsave does not pay for advertising? How can I view there traffic?
if ilist.com got 1.5 Million in funding and already calling out craigslist then the person that invested 1.5 Million should write off that money now before he gets disapionted.
When I buy and sell on Craig’s list it is to buy and sell, I don’t want to get social with the buyer and know details about their life. Maybe it’s just me, but I hope most people feel the same. I see no value in knowing or having social features on a site about the guy I bought my couch from.
They should of made it more of a niche buy and sell and not try and compete with craigslist. Craigslist isn’t perfect but the functionality of –sell widget get money– is almost perfect and doesn’t need bells and whistles.
The more I think about it, wtf? lol If your life is that bad, where your social network consists of people who bought your GI Joe figurines, the girl who sold you your kid’s car seat and the creepy old man who sold you an original ‘Thriller’ album, then you really need to re-evaluate your life. Maybe they sell them on ilist.
me: So what are you doing this weekend?
creepy old guy: Oh selling stuff, what are you doing?
me: buying stuff and maybe hanging out at the mall thinking about what I should sell or maybe buy.
GET A F*CKING LIFE! lol
I’m really doubtful. Craigslist has a base, though “youngsters” are adaptable… i guess.
1.5 Million and you think you can take on craigslist.
http://www.Kijiji spent over 150 Million and in Canada they just took over craigslist Canada.
http://www.shopandsave.com is coming to the USA in 2008/9. I think they will take the older market share and the younger market will stick to craiglist.com
kijiji owned by ebay will contunie wasting money on advertising.
In reply to the comment here:
http://www.tech...comment-2443289
> The civility of you two is nauseating
> CL needs competition.
> I need better search:
One word: Oodle.
> Example 1, I want to find housing in “springfield”,
> but b/c asshat from “shelbyville” mentions “20 minutes
> from “springfield” it comes up in my results.
Easy. Single family homes, only in Springfield, IL:
http://springfi...il:springfield/
Drill down on number of bedrooms / bathrooms, specific amenities, even what specific *neighborhood* you want. No crap, no spam.
> Example 2, I want to find a “toyota camry”, but b/c
> asshat from selling some beat up 1979 mustang mentions
> “will trade for camry” it comes up in my results.
Toyota Camrys within 50 miles of Springfield:
http://springfi...pringfield/+50/
Drill down on color, mileage, even whether the car has automatic or manual transmission, even what kind of trim you’re looking for (Camry LE vs. Camry SE). You name it.
Full disclosure: I’m an engineer at Oodle.
I don’t speak for the company here, only myself, but …
Oodle’s original mission was simply to embrace the fact that classifieds are *all* over the web – not just at Craigslist – and that folks really needed a site that would allow them to find all of those. That’s why we developed all the search functionality I listed above.
Lately, though, we’ve broadened that mission out to simply make classifieds *smarter*, period.
That means things like email alerts. Sure, you can hit Refresh over and over and over on a Craigslist results page to find what you want … but the smart thing to do is take 15 seconds to set up an email alert at Oodle and we’ll notify you as soon as someone sells what you’re looking for.
Making classifieds smarter also means making classifieds social. For example, we power classifieds for MySpace now (http://classifieds.myspace.com), and users there can easily see what other MySpace users are selling, with links to their profile to learn more about the person on the other end of the transaction.
You get the point. There are alternatives to Craigslist and some of them are doing some really great stuff. Check them out.
Good luck to iList as they join that crowd!
I think there will always be an audience for Craigslist, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for others who can offer something different.
I run a site called Listasaurus.com where we’re different because we offer video classifieds and video auctions, and we’re also the first classifieds and auctions site to pay users simply for listing their ads.
We’re not hoping to “take over” CL or ebay, just offer something that they don’t, which might be useful for folks.
Of course I wish we had 1.5 million to spend on advertising, it would make things a lot easier!
Why does it have to be to take on Craigslist. I’m no expert but depending on the market size is there room for more than just Craigslist? As long as you have a profitable model that can accomodate your investors you should be fine. Find additional methods of making money, there’s tons of them out there and execute.
Jippidy.com – Video Yellow Pages
Rather than competing on a national level, new classified ad websites should be localized. The website administrator will have a better understanding of the local market, and can also avoid some of the excesses that seem to appear on the national websites. If I had millions to start a new classified ad website, I would use only a small part of that money, and start locally. The money that would be spent, would be for local publicity, and to make sure the website accurately reflects the local marketplace.
CL has apparent weaknesses, not the least of it being the mayor source of its traffic and reluctance to embrace new technologies. However, it has became a brand in itself by the its sheer amount of users, which at the end of the day is the real value of any classified system (to the user).
See ‘browser wars’ and ‘alternative OS’ for strategy.
Looks nice. Good luck guys!
We are also a CL competitor working a slightly different angle than you guys listbite.com.
Best of luck.
Competing against a website like Craigslist.com is quite a challenge. But if you have the necessary funds and the right people then everything is possible.
However as I see regular text classifieds are soon to be forgotten. Video and audio is taking over. Sites like Youtube and Vimeo have shown us the power of videos and that more and more people have the necessary equipment and the ability to make decent quality videos.
The future of classified ads is in video classifieds.
I just got spammed but these guys at iList, directly from a Craigslist ad I posted yesterday. iList sent me one of those “saw your ad, thought you should try our service because it’s better than Craigslist” kind of emails.
It’s offensive and obtrusive marketing, and they certainly ignored my request not to send unsolicited emails. I’ll be making sure I never use iList, and will be telling all my friends to do the same.
Don’t be such a prudish hag. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t have sold my old laptop; I made 900 dollars.
I put my ad on iList, promoted it to twitter, had a friend RT my promo, got to someone on his Twitter who I don’t even know and wham! 900 dollars, easy money. I really dig these guys, I’m hoping they go far.