Word: craigslists
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...those wondering whether Silicon Valley idealism went on sale with Google's first share of stock, look no further than Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the men behind the online bulletin board Craigslist. Here's Newmark, its founder, on success: "Once you make a comfortable living, how much extra stuff do you need?" Here's Buckmaster, its CEO, on strategy: "We're not setting out for global domination. We're just looking to provide our service to people who need it. If it's not needed, that's fine." Not surprisingly, Craigslist has no marketing department...
...that Craigslist has become one of the Web's Top 20 portals, with 5.3 million visitors a month to its job and real estate listings, for-sale postings and personals? How has it grown exponentially from a narrow base in San Francisco and New York City to 45 cities, from Orlando, Fla., to St. Louis, Mo., to Fresno, Calif.? How has it managed to spread its wings abroad in Canada and Britain, with Australia next on its horizon? How has it managed to do all that--when other, more capitalized businesses have withered away...
...answer is basic and profound. By focusing on what their customers want instead of what's good for the Craigslist brand, Newmark and Buckmaster are beating the online giants at their own game. Using only open-source software and a plain-text site without fancy logos or graphics, Craigslist is supremely efficient. "Virtually no users are requesting that we dress the site up," Buckmaster explains. As a result, the site runs 1 billion page views a month--as many as Amazon.com--with just 14 employees. Instead of doing market research to plot strategy, Newmark and Buckmaster rely on customer feedback...
Newmark, a paunchy 51-year-old programmer with a fondness for science fiction, started Craigslist in 1995 as an informal list of Bay Area social events. He waxes poetic about Craigslist's unusual business mission to create a commons that the company maintains rather than a product that it sells. Buckmaster, an intense, analytical Spock to Newmark's Captain Kirk, is the implementer of that vision. He and Newmark use the word customer to describe Craigslist's users, but no one has ever paid a dime to use the site. Craigslist's only revenue, projected to be as much...
...something up.” Within an hour I received a handful of responses, and within a week I had accumulated over 50 replies from men ranging from ages 21 to 42. From law students to artists to sugar-daddy businessmen, it seemed everyone was using Craigslist to find that perfect one-night stand. Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I posted a similar entry, this time pretending to be a male Harvard student looking for a woman. I did not receive a single reply for that post...