Craigslist, monks and Nantucket

I just returned from the 8th annual Nantucket Conference (www.nantucketconference.com), an elite gathering of Boston's VC, CEO and entrepreneurs. As always it was a thought provoking two days and a time to solar charge my batteries with the early summer weather.

Besides the panel I moderated on CEO-Board relationships (:-)), I found Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist the most fascinating panel at the conference. Jim was interviewed by Jessi Hempel, Innovation Editor of Business Week. Craigslist can best be described as a local community bulletin board, operating in hundreds of cities in the US and around the world. 20 million unique visitors visit Craigslist every month. The entire endeavor is run by just 24 people in San Francisco, mostly developers and customer service representatives.

Jim clearly had honed his responses to business journalists over the years and provided to-the-point, almost droll responses to all ofJessi's and the audience's questions. There was this sense of confusion and awe in the audience about the mission of Craigslist, a for-profit organization, not maximizing revenue and profits but serving their users' requests. In fact they generted revenue only when users requested it, for example with paid classifieds in a few cities. Jessi estimated their annual revenue to be $25M, but given their large user base, they could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue annually. Jim kept reiterating that the company was not capital constrained in responding to users' needs and really had no need to generate more revenue.

I went up to Jim afterwards and remarked that the closest organizational parallel to Craigslist I could think of was an order of monks. Like Craigslist monks have a mission to serve their constituents, they raise capital to fullfill that mission (donations, selling homemade jam, etc.) and they can get distracted from that mission by accumulating too much wealth and heirarchy (eg the Catholic Church). Reforming sinners, or spammers in Craiglist's world, is part of that mission. Monks get by with minimal personal comforts and get pleasure in fulfilling their mission, similarly the software developers and customer service people (and Jim and Craig) get the pleasure of peer recognition in satisfying their customers and seem not to be motivated by personal wealth accumulation.

We watched a movie: 24 hours on Craigslist, which provoked another thought. Perhaps online communities like Craigslist could provide analytical fodder for measuring the health of real world communities. Analytical information such as job creation, etc is already being collected from online communities but I am thinking of things such as the mental health of a community. Data on Craigslist's user base in every city could be analyzed by academics for these kind of indicators.

I was having a discussion over lunch with Mark Heesen, President of the National Venture Capital Association (www.nvca.org), Don Dodge of Microsoft (http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/06/microsoft_looki_1.html) and others about this parallel for Craigslist and got quite a discussion going. Mark's observation was that for-profit organizations by focusing on growth generated jobs and that was beneficial to a community and that Craigslist was an aberration. While I am fully in agreement with Mark on job creation, many people, particularly younger people in the US are coming to the realization that personal fullfilment does not come from wealth creation alone. Maybe we should adopt Bhutan's measure of national wealth: GDH or Gross Domestic Happiness instead of GDP!

Comments

[Craigslist Phone Verified Accounts]

Another free advertising source other than craigslist is social bookmarking.

[Bill Selevan]

my 1 message

[Bill Selevan]

My test message no. 1 http://rolingasss.com

[CLBH]

With the exception of Craigslist, does anyone know of any other free advertising sources that are effective?

[Dean]

I am looking for help getting my business idea to the next level and I was wondering if you can help.

I launched my website business on May 1st of this year. To date I have over 415 users. It is a multifaceted website service for the construction industry with endless features to help any sized business advertise, network, find work and much more.

The idea is simple. I am looking for a partner/investor with $50K to $100K to help advertise the website (I know where and how) to get contractors or any other construction related business to join up initially for(FREE). Once we have a large enough following (maybe several thousand users) we can start charging members a small monthly fee ($9.95) to be a member. Basically for a little over a $100 a year, they get free advertising, a free webpage, they can post and view job leads, find new business and much much more. Just 2,000 users paying $9.95 a month will be $240K a year with hardly any overhead to run the website. 4,000 users would be nearly a half million dollars per year. There is NO website like mine. None! Several thousand users could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars per year of positive cash flow. I would put in writing to any investor that he will get his initial money invested back first. In other words, if he invested $75K, the first $75K the website made, would go to him first. After that, its a percentage on all future earnings (to be discussed and negotiated)

Just from google alone (they pay me to advertise there logo's on my website) with more users and increased traffic to the site, could be $1000's or more a month only from google.

With paid advertisements from outside companies, member subscriptions fees, and tying in my other business ideas, this can make high hundreds of thousands of dollars a year easily, or even millions.

If you know anyone who may be interested, we can ALL partner and get things in writing and put a plan together to get massive cash flow from the website. I have a detailed plan already, that can be implemented.

I will meet with anyone and put on a little presentation, and answer any questions for them. Again, there is no other website like this. This is my original thoughts and features and service.

If you create a free account and navigate through the website, you will see its potential. I got 415 members without any paid advertising. Thousands will be easy. Thousand will make us rich.

Let me know what you think, and again, everyone will get a piece of the pie. I will give the investor as much risk free incentive possible.

www.4allcontractors.com
or www.contractor-space.com

What you see is about 50%-60% of what I want to the public to see (the website true potential), the other features and services I want to offer are being kept in my head for safe keeping.

:)

Please let me know.

Dean
888.727.2140