Please Review My Web App: A Nigerian Craigslist | Hacker News Reader

Please Review My Web App: A Nigerian Craigslist

nairalist.com

68 pointsseunosewa54 comments

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.

Maybe you could also sell prominent placement for ads, like eBay does with "featured auctions".

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.

Not bad. Clean design and easy to use. A great copy of craigslist.

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.

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.

The eCPC for clicks in Nigeria will be low.

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!

On the flip side, the site doesn't need to make so much money because the cost of living in Nigeria is relatively low.

Maybe he will have a lot of ex-pat users too? Lots of Nigerians outside of Nigeria. Seun, you could subtlety promote the Overseas category.. or you could have a small fee for posting in (parts of?) the Overseas category while leaving the rest free - similar to craigslist's "free except for" policy.

The overseas category was very popular at the time of this post, but it's been de-emphasized a little bit now.

You should have a category for people who need my help getting the remaining $47,500,000 from a recently slain prince's bank account out of the country.

mildly funny...not cool to rain on the guy's parade though

First, I'd make sure there is a cell-phone friendly/SMS version.

http://timbuktuchronicles.blogspot.com/2005/05/nigerian-cell...

Do Freemium for now, with or without adsense. Monetization may later jump out at you. Maybe it won't be real estate or dating or jobs.

Finally, if you don't stay local, then it might also make sense to take the international angle -how many choices does a European or US company have for advertising a product to the Nigerian market?

Good luck!

Simple but functional site! A fine start. As you and others have said first concentrate on the local market. However, you do have a great story to sell, when you go international. I am no PR pro, but the story would be something along the lines: Here's a story of a young man who proved Nigeria can do web right. Do not discount a value of a great story.

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.

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/

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

what about those of us who are both, heh

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.

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. :)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 :)

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? :-)

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.

That's because you haven't seen this one: http://www.nairalist.com/rivers/dating/54 :-P

"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."

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.

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.

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.

I agree. Scammers really love anonymous environments.

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). 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. :)

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.

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

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.

What's wrong with m4w?

w4w I meant.

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

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

@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

Thanks!

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

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.

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

Nairalists.com is a lot more better and Smarter

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Thanks for your idea. It's worth a try, but I'm partial to this niche because it's easier to defend.

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