[Sitting next to Craig Newmark while waiting for a delayed flight.] I’d heard Craig say in interviews that he was basically just “head of customer service” for Craigslist but I always thought that was a throwaway self-deprecating joke…But sitting next to him, I got a whole new appreciation for what he does. He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point “Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums”. He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem, sometimes it seemed to take half an hour to get spammers dealt with. He was totally engrossed in his work, looking up IP addresses, answering questions best he could, and doing the kind of thankless work I’d never seen anyone else do with so much enthusiasm.
David Andersen
on 10 Jan 11If you actually, genuinely care that other people aren’t having great experiences with your product/service, this is the sort of thing that happens.
Matt Haughey
on 10 Jan 11Yeah, I left the most important point unsaid: it helps to have bucketloads of empathy for your users and customers and care about whether or not they are having a good experience, but the day-to-day nuts-and-bolts of how that happens is the thankless labor of doing things like tracking down and removing abusive dolts on your forum.
Anonymous Coward
on 10 Jan 11It’s also interesting to note that Craig uses the old school email client “Pine” to respond to emails.
It’s terminal based. It finds a keyboard driven application, as opposed needing a mouse, is MUCH faster when dealing with lots of email responses.
EH
on 10 Jan 11Yep. I learned this almost 10 years ago when Craig called me to complain about a rental joe-job that an employee was posting.
David Andersen
on 10 Jan 11@Matt H – Definitely the nuts and bolts is tedious labor and I think the empathy is essential to see it through. I think having a strong desire to work hard for excellence also matters. It’s got to be about way more than simply making a lot of money. The money is simply the frosting. Many people think great success comes from great ideas. It really comes from good ideas executed really well.
GregT
on 10 Jan 11Hmmm. I guess one person’s “customer service hero” is another person’s “guy with a total inability to delegate”. Maybe he should put some of that energy into making his web site look like it was designed by a >2 year old.
Mathew Patterson
on 11 Jan 11Greg, I guess that depends if you prioritise design over service.
Craig clearly sees customer service as the most important thing he can do for his business and hence what he should spend his time on.
So many companies endlessly promote themselves as customer focused and caring, but their actions expose the lie.
Sherwood
on 11 Jan 11Greg, I agree with your first point: Newmark should be hiring a team to filter spammers, not placating himself with his own personal contribution. CL is absolutely overrun with spam, and they refuse to employ the simplest filters to reduce dupe listings and e-mail harvesting.
I’d love to see Markus Frind take a crack at this market.
Michael
on 11 Jan 11Markus Frind would lose.
Robbie Abed
on 11 Jan 11@Greg. I agree with you, but honestly. Nobody cares. Would a redesign bring more people to the site? Absolutely not. I find a category to post into; I post, and then I sit and wait for replies. yeah, it’s ugly. Ugly AND Functional!
GregT – You’re assuming he doesnt have people to do that for him. I’m sure he does, but SPAM is probably the most important for him at that moment and he wants to show his team that it is important. Remember, this was an OVERHEARD conversation at an airport and not a day in the life of Craig.Steve jobs replies back to emails from the public. Is your recommendation for Steve to “delegate” those responses like every other CEO in the world?
Phil
on 11 Jan 11I think Craig is a unique person. Eschewing potentially millions (billions?) of dollars so he personally can run a website manually, presumably because he loves his mission or his work.
The main beef I have with this philosophy is the one that 37signals often preaches about. By not charging people, and having tons of traffic, Craigslist essentially killed the paid classified ad on the Internet (and in RL). I know this because we had to change the entire business model of our used car site when Craigslist became a household name. It doesn’t matter that we provided more value to customers and actively helped them sell their car. Craigslist is free, has a ton of traffic, and a dead simple UI so details like search don’t matter to your average joe. Or the fact that if you’re looking for a used car there you have to spend an hour scanning listings instead of just creating an alert.
So while I truly think Craig Newmark is a great guy who believes in his mission, he’s essentially killed off a billion+ dollar market in pursuit of this dream.
David Andersen
on 11 Jan 11Did Craig kill it Phil or did the consumer? He put something out there and enough people prefer it to whatever else is offered. And used car sites still thrive, so maybe the problem isn’t CList.
Anonymous Coward
on 11 Jan 11That begs the question—how important is design really? CL is ugly, but it “just works”. I’m not even talking about bells & whistles either. If a competing site charged a nominal fee for an ad – say $1 – would a better (whatever that means) design be enough to draw customers away from something that is “good enough”, or would you need to offer something more? Has CL taken “Getting Real” to the ultimate extreme of underdoing the competition?
Phil
on 11 Jan 11David, you’ll find very few cars for sale by owner’s on the car sites out there today. Almost everything is dealer inventory.
Consumers are absolutely the ones responsible, of course the free market economy sends people to where they spend the least amount of money. It would just be nice if when Craig takes this business he added some more value. It’s an absolute nightmare to search for cars for sale by owner now.
David Andersen
on 11 Jan 11“It would just be nice if when Craig takes this business he added some more value. It’s an absolute nightmare to search for cars for sale by owner now.”
He added value of one kind (made it cost no $$ to list) but not the sort you are looking for.
So apparently used car buyers are either willing to wade through CL to find what they want ( I agree that it’s not easy to find things on CL) or they are buying more used cars from dealers and ignoring CL.
Maybe there’s a market for low cost but not free listings that are easier to use? I gotta believe that CL could be competed with head to head if someone was willing to try. It doesn’t have to be a choice between free or expensive (newspapers). It can be marginally more expensive and marginally (or more) better. At the very least it would force CL to be better.
Sherwood
on 12 Jan 11If a competing site charged a nominal fee for an ad – say $1 – would a better (whatever that means) design be enough to draw customers away from something that is “good enough”, or would you need to offer something more?
That something more would have to be the ability to sell a car faster. That’s what sellers want above all else. If a non-free CL competitor could sell a car faster than CL, they could charge $1. Or $10.
The problem is that free attracts volume (both sellers and buyers) and volume moves product.
Sherwood
on 12 Jan 11@Phil, nice looking site btw. But trying it out made me realize that one of CL’s annoyances is also part of the draw: you can browse through the firehose of listings. I don’t need to have a specific car in mind to walk the lot, and that’s valuable for buyers that don’t know all the nameplates.
If you’re looking for a game changer, switch to free listings. Then offer built-in Carfax look-ups as an option – and label the listings with “carfax” just like CL does with “img.” The added reassurance will draw buyers to those listings, and convince sellers to pony-up.
anthony barba
on 13 Jan 11Looking up IP addresses for spammers is taking it to a whole new level.
This discussion is closed.