The bar for success in our industry is too low

Re:The bar for success in our industry is too low by timr on Thursday September 03, 2009 @05:10PM (#803564)

You've missed the point: Craigslist is so far and away the exception to the rule, it's practically non-reproducible. And for what it's worth, they're also not nearly as profitable as either Amazon or EBay, regardless of their traffic.

There's simply nothing about Craigslist that you can count on reproducing. If you're creating an internet company today, and you're aiming for hundreds of millions in revenue, it's 99% probable that you will need to spend more money than they do.

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Re:The bar for success in our industry is too low by puredemo on Thursday September 03, 2009 @07:00PM (#803785)

The thing that is reproducible about Craigslist is their simple, functional layout and organic, community-centric growth. Much like HN.

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Re:The bar for success in our industry is too low by timr on Friday September 04, 2009 @12:58AM (#804301)

Well, of course you can reproduce their design. But reproducing their design won't reproduce their success. If it were that simple, every website would look like Craigslist.

Again: you're missing the point. Craigslist is the exception to the rule. It's a product of its time. For any value of X, if you tried to say "this is the way Craigslist did X, therefore I should too," you'd very likely be wrong. And in any case, Craiglist is pretty far from the romantic notion of three guys in a garage. It's an expensive site to run, even if it's more cheaply run than other big sites.

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