Craigslist model

January. 1. 2012 by lawnz –  Category: Business, Internet, Work (No Comments)

I am working for a high tech company, the founder owns one patent for our product, we have a great team of engineers including some with PhD degree, one of my coworkers is still in graduate school, he probably knows more than most of his professors, our products consist of both hardware and software, especially very sophisticated software, many of us could not figure out why we have only one customer for the last year, I remember one time in the meeting, someone in marketing said she has hard time to tell people what our product is, because this is a new innovative product. today I was thinking what about Craigslist, when they started business, it sounded like non-profit organization, all posts were free, their web software supported very limited features, not the greatest software to me, developers could not even parse URL links correctly, sometimes URLs are clickable, sometimes not, till now the website doesn’t support UTF-8, no international characters support yet, so why their business is successful, I think they had a killer app and knew how to enter the market, with only product features that users want to use,  simply to use for all computer users, continue adding advanced features useful for users, another interesting thing is Craigslist never did any advertisement for themselves, their marketing is done mouth by mouth, many high level managers overlook a model like Craigslist, in my opinion we can learn a lot of things in business from Craigslist model.