7 ms·

Please Review My Web App: A Nigerian Craigslist

68 points by seunosewa 18y ago

sarvesh 18y ago
Impressive! You might want to make it available to other countries and cities as well.
- seunosewa 18y ago
  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.
  - sarvesh 18y ago
    You can always get a different domain and host your application. Someday there will be a new craigslist and it could turn out to be your software.
  - markessien 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      Thanks for your idea. It's worth a try, but I'm partial to this niche because it's easier to defend.
seunosewa 18y ago
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.
- dfranke 18y ago
  Maybe you could also sell prominent placement for ads, like eBay does with "featured auctions".
  - seunosewa 18y ago
    Great idea, but I figured that if adsense can scale to millions of dollars of revenue a year (Markus of POF), there's really no reason to worry about alternatives.
- zitterbewegung 18y ago
  Not bad. Clean design and easy to use. A great copy of craigslist.
- dantheman 18y ago
  Also, if you have start having a lot of posts in jobs or housing (where people start posting a lot to stay fresh) you can charge for those in areas that are heavily trafficked -- that's how CL does it.
- electromagnetic 18y ago
  It looks like a clean simple design, I hope you do well! Traditionally clones seem to perform quite well, especially when the design is aimed towards its own user base. I mean look at the difference between Japanese forums and imageboards (4chan as the english clone) and English forums. They're vastly different, which helps clones be highly successful and non-competitive.
- yoyoyo 18y ago
  The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.
  - patio11 18y ago
    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!
markessien 18y ago
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 http://www.nairalist.com/overseas/dating/46 :)
- seunosewa 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.
- acangiano 18y ago
  That's because you haven't seen this one: http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 :-P
  - seunosewa 18y ago
    "I am a young man of 23 years of age, male. I am a Christian, am so nice to people around the world. I am 35ft tall and also very much handsome. And I'm every woman's dream in life."
aristus 18y ago
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.
andrewljohnson 18y ago
Wow, after reading a few ads, I like Nigerians better than Americans.
- wumi 18y ago
  what about those of us who are both, heh
  - lallysingh 18y ago
    They cancel each other out :-P j/k. As an Indian who grew up in the US, the posts remind me a bit of my own family.
  - time_management 18y ago
    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 18y ago
      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.
cmars232 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    I agree. Scammers really love anonymous environments.
psyklic 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.
- TooMuchNick 18y ago
  This could also be a pain for users who are used to checking the front page. If the states are listed alphabetically, everyone can find their state every time.
acangiano 18y ago
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 http://www.nairalist.com/lagos/services/136.
robotrout 18y ago
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 18y ago
  It's partly a cultural thing, but a push in the right direction may be what they need.
chris11 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    What's wrong with m4w?
    - markessien 18y ago
      w4w I meant.
lallysingh 18y ago
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.
raju 18y ago
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
elai 18y ago
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/ http://www.usedvictoria.com/
Herring 18y ago
I might suggest looking into the design. A table isn't necessarily the best use of space. Try making the frequently visited links bigger
nanijoe 18y ago
@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 18y ago
  Thanks!
sspencer 18y ago
Beautifully clean design. Looks like it is already quite popular, too!
fbailey 18y ago
We are working on a classified site in germany I found some ideas in http://www.loquo.com/en_us http://www.loquo.com/en_us which is a spanish craigslist only much better structured
mickt 18y ago
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 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. :)
nairalists 18y ago
Nairalists.com is a lot more better and Smarter Visting Nairalists.com and see that its a lot more better than Nairalist
fee 18y ago
Looks like the classifieds business is growing in Nigeria. We always knew it would. That's why we created one of the most original classifieds online, Kerawa.com (http://www.kerawa.com http://www.kerawa.com).
Susanna 18y ago
how about this job site listing for just high paying jobs from companies like GE and oracle for jobs in Nigeria http://www.workforcenigeria.com http://www.workforcenigeria.com

68 points by seunosewa 18y ago

sarvesh 18y ago

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

seunosewa 18y ago
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.
- sarvesh 18y ago
  You can always get a different domain and host your application. Someday there will be a new craigslist and it could turn out to be your software.
- markessien 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    Thanks for your idea. It's worth a try, but I'm partial to this niche because it's easier to defend.

seunosewa 18y ago

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.

dfranke 18y ago
Maybe you could also sell prominent placement for ads, like eBay does with "featured auctions".
- seunosewa 18y ago
  Great idea, but I figured that if adsense can scale to millions of dollars of revenue a year (Markus of POF), there's really no reason to worry about alternatives.
zitterbewegung 18y ago
Not bad. Clean design and easy to use. A great copy of craigslist.
dantheman 18y ago
Also, if you have start having a lot of posts in jobs or housing (where people start posting a lot to stay fresh) you can charge for those in areas that are heavily trafficked -- that's how CL does it.
electromagnetic 18y ago
It looks like a clean simple design, I hope you do well! Traditionally clones seem to perform quite well, especially when the design is aimed towards its own user base. I mean look at the difference between Japanese forums and imageboards (4chan as the english clone) and English forums. They're vastly different, which helps clones be highly successful and non-competitive.
yoyoyo 18y ago
The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.
- patio11 18y ago
  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!

markessien 18y ago

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 http://www.nairalist.com/overseas/dating/46 :)

seunosewa 18y ago
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 18y ago
  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.
acangiano 18y ago
That's because you haven't seen this one: http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 :-P
- seunosewa 18y ago
  "I am a young man of 23 years of age, male. I am a Christian, am so nice to people around the world. I am 35ft tall and also very much handsome. And I'm every woman's dream in life."

aristus 18y ago

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.

andrewljohnson 18y ago

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

wumi 18y ago
what about those of us who are both, heh
- lallysingh 18y ago
  They cancel each other out :-P j/k. As an Indian who grew up in the US, the posts remind me a bit of my own family.
- time_management 18y ago
  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 18y ago
    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.

cmars232 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  I agree. Scammers really love anonymous environments.

psyklic 18y ago

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 18y ago
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.
TooMuchNick 18y ago
This could also be a pain for users who are used to checking the front page. If the states are listed alphabetically, everyone can find their state every time.

acangiano 18y ago

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 http://www.nairalist.com/lagos/services/136.

robotrout 18y ago

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 18y ago
It's partly a cultural thing, but a push in the right direction may be what they need.

chris11 18y ago

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 18y ago
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 18y ago
  What's wrong with m4w?
  - markessien 18y ago
    w4w I meant.

lallysingh 18y ago

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.

raju 18y ago

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

elai 18y ago

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/ http://www.usedvictoria.com/

Herring 18y ago

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

nanijoe 18y ago

@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 18y ago
Thanks!

sspencer 18y ago

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

fbailey 18y ago

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

mickt 18y ago

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 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. :)

nairalists 18y ago

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

fee 18y ago

Looks like the classifieds business is growing in Nigeria. We always knew it would. That's why we created one of the most original classifieds online, Kerawa.com (http://www.kerawa.com http://www.kerawa.com).

Susanna 18y ago

how about this job site listing for just high paying jobs from companies like GE and oracle for jobs in Nigeria http://www.workforcenigeria.com http://www.workforcenigeria.com