21st Century Craigslist

Craigslist is an amazing business. They generate hundreds of millions in revenue every year and only have ~30 employees. This type of revenue per employee is enviable even by the most successful of technology companies. One of the most shocking parts about their success is how little they’ve changed their core product as long as I’ve been a user. Blue hyperlinks everywhere, random purple logo, icons with seemingly arbitrary color choices.

On a superficial level, it’s an aesthetic nightmare. However, if you stop and think longer, it’s really a testament to the power of software that is fast, navigable by anyone, and can scale to meet a wide range of use cases. What if we blew all that up and bloated it with UI paradigms from the 21st century?

First of all, Craigslist would need to staff up to do this. It’d likely hurt performance and make users upset. There’s really no winning by changing anything. In a way, Craigslist is the epitome of, “if it an’t broke, don’t fix it.”

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