Startups Rival Craigslist for Online Classifieds Market Share

In order to have a chance at fighting Craigslist, these services need to start hyperlocal first. There's nothing worse than going to one of these sites, entering your zip code and finding there's no listings.

It's much easier to market to a small geographic area first. One great tip I heard in a Mixergy podcast came from the founder of GrubWithUs. To get started, they printed 10,000 flyers and went around stuffing them into the free daily papers in their hometown.

Once you get going in a small area, then you can expand out. This is the only way to win against craigslist.

Cracking the on-line classifieds 'thing' has been an 'idea' since day one of the Internet, literally thousands have attempted it, getting traction seems to be the consistent issue, why do people use Craigslist, well, mainly because people are using Craigslist, certainly not because it has function X or does Y or looks hip, as a market it's worth a massive shed load of cash, one time an anecdote was that it was worth more than TV/Radio and Newspaper combined, am I showing my age...

This article seems to miss a very important point: Craigslist basically operates like a nonprofit. Anyone who wants to compete with Craigslist has to have a compelling answer to the question "how do I compete with a company that does not care about profit?" in addition to the normal questions a startup has to answer.

(for the record, I think that the way Craigslist runs things is both admirable and idiosyncratic: it works very well for them, it wouldn't necessarily work well for others)