CEO of Craigslist, the online bulletin board that has become a darling of Internet users, will never be mistaken for the hard-charging Arkadi Kuhlmann, the silver-tongued Roy Spence, or the twentysomething version of Marc Andreessen. He is soft-spoken, reserved, and minimalist in his rhetoric and demeanor. But his low-key personality (along with that of founder Craig Newmark) is a perfect fit for the disruptive idea at the heart of this one-of-a-kind company—to provide a no-frills “public service” in an industry filled with overblown claims, intrusive marketing, and a grow-at-all costs mind-set.
“I don’t want to bad-mouth corporations,” Buckmaster says. “We’re a corporation. But there’s room for a lot more diversity in the approach companies take. We’re trying to stake out one modest example for corporate America, for people to see if it’s applicable to what they do.”
Craigslist, based in San Francisco, has attracted worldwide acclaim by virtue of what Buckmaster calls its “nerd values.” The company, which took shape in 1995, operates Web sites from San Francisco (the original) to Sydney, Australia, from Boston to Berlin, from Atlanta to Amsterdam. But there’s no talk here of monetizing eyeballs, maximizing click-throughs, or building a backlog of banner ads—the universal business language of the Internet. On Craigslist, users swap messages, sell goods and services, search for apartments, and look for jobs on a site that charges no monthly fees, accepts no advertising, and uses virtually no graphics.
Its bare-bones form and function give Craigslist a simple, almost simplistic, feel. (One writer cracked that the site has “the visual appeal of a pipe wrench.”) Yet that very simplicity is the heart of a forward-looking business strategy. The company is built around an explicit commitment to serve as an alternative to business-as-usual on the Internet. Craigslist doesn’t have an elaborate mission statement (that would be too showy for this low-key crew), but the site does offer a brief statement of purpose. Craigslist is about “giving each other a break, getting the word out about everyday, real-world stuff.” It is committed to “restoring the human voice to the Internet, in a humane, noncommercial way.” It focuses on “keeping things simple, common sense, down-to-earth, honest, very real.”
But here’s what’s so instructive: these authentically anticommercial values have unleashed a pop-culture sensation and a hot commercial property. Independent filmmaker Michael Ferris made a documentary, 24 Hours on Craigslist, that captures the strange and wonderful passions of the people who rely on the site. (The tagline for one of the trailers for the film: “There are Web sites about films. Now see a film about a Web site.”) USA Today described the Craigslist phenomenon this way: “Some call the site a public forum. Others call it a classified market. Many call it an obsession.”2
Experts on Internet strategy call it something else—one heck of a business. It’s no multibillion-dollar behemoth like Google or Yahoo—and that’s precisely the point. It’s a fabulously successful small company whose reach extends around the world and whose influence extends across the Internet. Craigslist operates 450 Web sites in all 50 states and 50 countries—sites that add 20 million new classified ads and receive more than 7 billion page views from 10 million visitors each month. Financial analysts have estimated that Craigslist, which has never raised a dime of venture capital and employs fewer than 20 people, who work out of a Victorian house in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood, could fetch as much as $100 million if it were put up for sale—a valuation of more than $5 million per employee.*
Fortune magazine, the unofficial voice of the big-business establishment, has marveled at the small company’s hugely impressive business results. In an article titled “Guerrilla Capitalism,” the magazine estimated Craigslist’s 2005 revenues “in the neighborhood” of $20 million, with annual expenses that “cannot possibly run to” more than $5 million. The magazine’s conclusion: “The company that is indifferent to money, therefore, gushes profits.”
CEO Buckmaster revels in his company’s unorthodox path to prosperity—what he calls “the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing, and noncompeting.” Together, these three “ironies” represent sharp (and sharply effective) departures from the commercialism that infects so much of the Web—which is precisely why the site attracts such a fervent following and has become such a strong business. “By paying no attention to these areas—or by trying to do the opposite of what other organizations do—we end up being strong in each of them,” he explains.
Craigslist certainly has an unconventional approach to investing in its brand—it doesn’t. “We pay zero attention to brand,” Buckmaster says. “We never use that word internally. We do zero advertising. We don’t have a logo. We’ve never done a focus group. We don’t care about any of that. And now we’re told we have the strongest brand ever for a company our size. That’s pretty ironic.”
Craigslist has a fresh approach to competition—it doesn’t believe in it. “We have no interest in competing with anyone,” Buckmaster says. “We consider our mission to be one of public service. We’re just trying to create something as useful as possible. If people want to use it, great. If they don’t find it useful, that’s great too. Yet we keep reading that we’re one of the newspaper industry’s deadliest competitors.” Indeed, one respected analyst has estimated that, in the San Francisco area alone, newspapers are losing $50 million to $65 million in annual classified-ad revenue because of Craigslist.
Above all, Craigslist has a distinctive approach to economics—it keeps finding reasons not to charge customers. It imposes modest fees on companies that post job listings in seven major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City. The company also imposed a modest fee for apartment listings in New York City—an effort to pare back on the 500,000 listings it receives per month, many of which are duplicates. Newmark and Buckmaster have also discussed plans to charge for job listings in a few other cities, including Boston, San Diego, and Washington, D. C., in an effort to reduce the number and increase the quality of the posted openings for apartments and jobs. Other than that, though, the site is free. Yet Craigslist generates healthy profits, and Internet titan eBay bought a 25 percent stake in 2004 so it could learn more about the company and its mastery of classifieds.
That’s the ultimate irony of Craigslist—and the powerful logic of strategy as advocacy. By building a company around a unique set of anticommercial values and practices, Craigslist has built a flourishing commercial property. “We have to run a strong business, we have to have cash reserves, we want to be here over the long run,” Buckmaster says. “But we don’t view the Internet as being subject to a ‘land grab’ or ‘first-mover advantage.’ Companies that want to dominate in a hurry—they’re the ones that spend all the money. We’re definitely oddballs in the Internet industry, and we always have been. Lots of people made fun of us, especially at the height of the dot-com boom. Most of those people are out of business now.”
WHAT YOU THINK SHAPES HOW YOU TALK—CREATING A STRATEGIC VOCABULARY
Listen closely to maverick entrepreneurs like Arkadi Kuhlmann and Jim Buckmaster, and you quickly realize that they don’t sound like traditional executives. They almost never use conventional jargon to explain how they do business. They almost always describe their strategies and practices—the ideas that animate their companies—in ways that sound unique, authentic, even a bit strange. How many bankers tout the virtues of “agitating” their customers? How many Internet CEOs discuss “the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing, and noncompeting”?
One sign that a company is pursuing a truly original competitive strategy is that it has created its own vocabulary. Not buzzwords, acronyms, and the other verbal detritus of business-as-usual, but an authentically homegrown language that captures how a company competes, how its people work, why it expects to succeed, and what it means to win.
