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).