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How does one go about upsetting this giant in the marketplace? Everyone wants a better craigslist, but it's useless if they don't have the content.
by doorty 11y ago
How does one go about upsetting this giant in the marketplace? Everyone wants a better craigslist, but it's useless if they don't have the content.
- 55555 11y agoStart super niche and expand in concentric circles, I guess. It's tough because people don't exactly look for new houses every single day so coming up in their brain as the app/site of choice when they do need a new house/apt is difficult. I would hate to do a "better apartment finder" startup in this space (airbnb excluded). I think craigslist grew pretty slowly over the course of a decade, right? Not sure there's a recipe for overtaking them quickly that doesn't involve using their data/userbase in one form or another.
- prawn 11y agoYou might almost need to loss lead for years, paying people in some fashion to bring content. e.g., dress up listings similar to the way Airbnb sends out their photographer to shoot your place professionally, or Uber is subsidising drivers to establish a foothold. If you did car sales (as a bad example), you could handle the entire process for customers - sending out a photographer, building the listing and researching an appropriate list price. Wear the costs until you have the brand established and can start to make money. That would probably be attractive to people who don't have time or aren't confident enough to do it all themselves.
- git-fucked 11y agoPart of what attracts people to places like craigslist/gumtree is that you do it all yourself, though - it's easy to just take a couple of photos and provide a few details to advertise a car or house sale without a third party. If I wanted to have professionals take care of it I'd go to a sales garage or an estate agent.
- prawn 11y agoPeople do it themselves because the garage or agent charges a fee. I'm saying that to tackle an incumbent, you could offer that service (and better) for free to win customers across. I disagree that it's easy to take decent photos and then deal with a sales process (fielding calls, negotiating, etc). I have dozens of things I could sell but don't because it's too much effort and I don't have time.
- extc 11y agohttps://www.beepi.com/ https://www.beepi.com/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- imauld 11y agoI built a small CL scraper for a school project. I only used it a couple of times to make sure it worked before submitting it. A few months later my whole class, including the instructor, received cease and desist letters from CL. They had found our code on Github and demanded we take it lest we face legal consequences. So apparently it's quite easy to piss of CL.
- mindslight 11y agoOpen data. Convincing people to put stuff in your closed database just makes it so you will eventually become the incumbent villain. It also creates a legal target, as demonstrated by this story. Imagine if anyone could download an extension that would scrape a little bit of craigslist, copying that information into a public shared database that wasn't even centrally hosted.