Keebler/Blog

- Craigslist = #8 website in the world
- started in 1995 as email CC list of cool tech-event listings
- “still work out of the same delapitated shed”, 24 employees total
- try to keep business as simple as we can
- “[the] company itself isn’t trying to get any message out there”
- marketing: “We don’t market and we never really have”
- some company use 90% of their resources selling themselves
- for Craigslist, spend time trying to make site as useful as possible
- spreads through word-of-mouth via success stories
- competition: “I’m not sure exactly why we’ve stayed in the position we’ve stayed in”
- they work on the things people are asking for
- they don’t have meetings focussed on driving metrics up like other companies, often “runs contrary to what users want”
- Mark reading old article he wrote where he says Craigslist should charge for services, monetize
- Why not monetize more? Profitable from 1999, “We’re making enough money for all of our needs”, didn’t want to stop building the site around what users are asking for (more fun than worrying about how to make money)
- Outside investors = less choice in how its monetized
- classifieds: thousands of competitors, newspapers slowly moving more and more online
- newspaper industry: still twice as profitable as other businesses in the US, they are doing better than they let on, their recent layoffs are done to maximize financial metrics, newspapers point fingers to online as a financial strategy
- Craig: splits time between customer service and media things (game shows, late-night television)
- no plans to add a payment recognition, no need for it in their current model
- charge for job ads in 7 cities, brokers in NY city pay fee for apartment rental listings = plenty of revenue
- future: more cities, languages (their pages), improved search, vague mention of other things that “may be in existance”
- trust online: advantage for Craigslist = people meeting online, advantage over purely-online framework, build technology to “insulate ppl who are well-intentioned from ppl who are not well-intentioned”
- underlying technologies: LAMP architecture, 3-tier layer: database, web, caching; compress pages (gzip), maximize page-views per kilowatt-hour (environmental, cost, colocation), 7B page views on 200 servers
- Web 2.0 design: users can be “as creative with their own pages as they like”, only design factors for them: page performance, accessibility
- i.e. ajax: try to stay away from leading edge of technologies, don’t want to exclude older-technology users
- worry about blind, old technology
- one strategy: just build what users are asking for
- “don’t really have meetings”
- “haven’t let a tech person in 12 years”
- “we don’t have any business people” (applause), “no business people in the chain of command”
- charging for categories/cities: Craigs went to the users to ask how to offset costs initially, 2003: NY and LA job boards were flooded with spam, fee = 1/10th of what they would pay elsewhere, discussion board for 1yr about what to do in NY/LA, ended up instituting fees there, didn’t want to harm usability of site, fee: “tool of last resort” to prevent list flooding, “substandard listings magically disappear” without having to find a technical solution
- scaling/growth in new cities: new cities start fairly empty so ppl check in then come back in 6 month, don’t drive staffing needs
- Vancouver site larger than Toronto site, Toronto “growing at tremendous rate”, Toronto in top 30, will probably eclipse Vancouver shortly because it’s a larger market
- once you have enough money, earning more doesn’t really affect your life
- other companies, if you don’t earn more money your investors get upset
- Craiglist: “have never taken outside investment money”
- better metric than money: their success stories, “site…useful for basic human needs”
- he found his current job on Craigslist
- Mark: can start a business without having to attract much capital. Instead of making X can we settle for Y?
- Jim: in the boom there was no need to take on the venture model, internet = costs are so low, never been possible for staff of 24 to make a service used by tens of millions of ppl
- create a “compelling service that ppl like”
- outside money: take you in ways that you might not like
- Ebay silent investor? Ebay acquired a pre-existing stake in the company in 2004, “we’ve collaborated with them on…user protection”
- Video? if enough users are asking for it we’ll facilitate it, but it hasn’t been asked for yet. “We’re not…all things to all people”
- freakiest thing listed? Toronto best of:
- missed connection: girl riding subway near Spadina, “I spilled my grandmother on you”
- lost and found: carton of live crickets, “please call unless your angry and covered in crickets”
- does Craigslist fear anyone/anything? their simplistic approach = we don’t have to worry/do better than other companies, net neutrality is scary for them
- if some other company is better positioned then Craigslist for their users, “our users should migrate over”
- engines of growth: Katrina hurricane: displaced ppl used Craigslist, grow by a factor of 50-100 overnight, located missing persons, offers of housing across US/Canada, waves of offers of jobs and tickets, finding pets
- philantrophy by increasing monetization? yes if we hear that from users, but we don’t have any “special expertise” in distributing money to causes, ppl have that money now