Craig’s Way to Build a Digital Business – Make it FREE!
Users on the internet want content and services provided for free. A self-proclaimed nerd named Craig Newmark understood this when he created his email list back in 1995. Craig used his email list to share news about important events in the San Francisco area. Over time, Craig found that his email list wouldn’t scale for the users that wanted to receive his list and so he built a list serve and later a web-site, which his friends convinced him to call Craig’s List.
I was able to catch Craig’s keynote address at the DMA conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. Craig’s address was full of humor, but also important lessons that he has learned throughout his days supporting users and a business.
Craig chose to develop a for profit business in 1999. His commitment to users led to his hiring an outside CEO so he could continue to focus on his role as a customer support representative. Craig, to this day, literally supports dozens of customer support inquiries from his loyal following, as well as from authorities looking to investigate serious allegations of harassment and misconduct by users of the popular web service. He went so far as to sharing his email address with all the conference goers at the DMA conference (craig@craigslist.org) to which he tries to answer most, if not all, of the inquiries.
Here is my list of important points I heard Craig make regarding his success:
- Doesn’t consider Craig’s List to serve a noble cause. The business is as simple as pleasing consumers and making sure clients that work with their business understand and share the same values. He doesn’t feel he has a vision at all; he just listens to the customers.
- It is simple Web 0.1. They have chosen, out of necessity, to sacrifice the bells and whistles of the latest and greatest popular internet features to focus on scaling the bare bones features required to support their 50M monthly visitors.
- Despite earning less revenue than other leading players, they are able to provide the features a user needs at a lower cost (free in most categories).
- Treat people like you want to be treated. Often companies (like IBM, where he once worked) say they value customer support, but they really just value large customers.
- He thinks people have, for thousands of years, gone to the marketplace to talk business (mall, flea market, etc.). He says that face-to-face is better than digital, but it doesn’t scale.
- Views customer service as a form of marketing and that too much marketing is from the top down and not the bottom up.
- When speaking to business partners, they start off with their values. They do have commercial relationships with business partners who post paid ads in select Craig’s List categories and this has proven to be a big money maker for the service today.
- Users flag classified ads for removal.
- Need to consider whether your service should be open to anonymous users or requires some type of authentication.
I am a fan of Craig’s List; however, I must admit I still spend more time on eBay both as a merchant and as a user. I am an eBay junkie. The simplicity of Craig’s List is appealing, and “FREE” has its draw. However, I find myself willing to pay the price on eBay for the features I have grown to love. I am not a coupon clipper, but I do believe in supporting free services for consumers and use Craig’s List for this very reason. I hope Craig’s List continues to offer its free service but hope it can find more value-added, revenue-producing business partners so that they can make further improvements in the features of their website. It doesn’t need all the bells and whistles for me to switch from eBay. I might even settle for a website redesign.
To learn more about W3i’s value-added advertising solutions in support of free content and services please visit our website at www.w3i.com.
Ryan Weber, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Co-Founder, W3i Holdings, LLC
Ryan is an Internet marketing pioneer with over eight, profitable years evolving W3i (owner of Freeze.com) in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.
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