I'm creating a craigslist alternative (swippet.com)

Nice site. It maybe impossible to get traction though. People are mostly happy with Craigslist. It has the volume of ads that buyers want, and the volume of buyers that sellers want. You can't have one without the other.

Judging by the success of Kijiji and backpages(sp?) I'd say you have a nearly impossible task on your hands, but I wish you good luck none the less.

I like thinking about re-implementing craigslist.. It's a good exercise to think about improving something really simple without making it too complicated. That said, I have a couple suggestions. First, the view I see when I click into a city isn't really simpler (or much different) than the CG pages. Second, I think the biggest challenge you'll have with a site like this is bootstrapping content. I would consider doing a couple things.. Maybe make recent posts in any category for a city prominent maybe.. to show activity. I'd also strongly consider whether or not you can make your tool backward compatible.. If posting on swippet could cross-post on craigslist for me.. that's a big win, right? Why not use swippet as my portal in that case... The other way would be handy too.. Show craigslist search results below your own while you're short on content.

1) First thing I noticed was that it didn't auto select/suggest the nearest city for me. Going to craigslist.com automatically redirects me to washingtondc.craigslist.com (which I can then change if I want to).

2) I went to the last page and found Washington, DC. Upon clicking the text "Washington DC" in the City column I get the following error:

  Invalid city

3) If I instead click the text "DC" in the State column, it navigates me to the following URL (which obviously doesn't actually do anything):

  http://www.swippet.com/#"

After that, I gave up.

I think CraigsList is an interesting choice to target. They've been notoriously slow to adopt new features or update their look/feel. Perhaps this is the secret to their success, or perhaps it leaves them ripe for the picking. Either way, good luck and let me know when you've got DC working.

You may want to check out craiglook.com. They allow you to search craigslist by distance from zip code. That comes in really handy when looking for something specific and could be a good feature to build into your site. Good luck!

That isn't how you spell Albuquerque! Since it's at the top of the list, this seemed worth mentioning.

Taking on Craigslist is an excellent idea. A suggestion: a format that is more image-intensive by default for things like apartment listings and for sale / swap searches. A leading thumbnail would go a long way, especially when looking for items.

You need something there for sale.

I see nothing in this yet that differentiates your product in any way. In fact there are many ways in which your service seems worse (I purposefully didn't read the about to see if it says something about this subject in there. I'm treating this as a first time user)

First you have a paging mechanism to find my city! Que Horror! I realize you have a filter on there but that's painful craigslist finds out where I should be by IP geolocation or has the complete list on page one!

Then my city (San Francisco) isn't supported - it is in the list however? I realize that there is a common theme on HN to put your site out early an often. But if my city is in the list but is not supported, I'm not coming back to find out when it is. Say distinctly on your home page that this is a limited trial for a small set of cities. Both craigslist and Yelp started with a small geographic area, start with that.

Once I get into a city - there is nothing here that differentiates your offering from craigslist. Its UI/search doesn't seem revolutionary and you have none traction. There is no reason yet for me to try to transition to your service.

Don't just remake craigslist - figure out how you're going to make it better - and not a little better a lot better. Then go from there. Realize that taking on craigslist has been done without success numerous times) how are you going to do better.

Kill the paged list on the homepage right now.

I can't imagine a worse user experience than seeing 10 cities I don't live in, with the only way to find mine being to randomly select pages in the hope of landing on the right one. Or, of course I can page through every city you have.

I never made it as far as finding Seattle, and finally just clicked one at random because I'm explicitly giving you a shot. Had I found your site while browsing the web, I would have left and never come back.

So please, stop it. Just give me the whole list and let me pick from it.

I know what Markdown is and yet this turned me off: "Ability to format posts with Markdown"

If that's a differentiating factor from CL then you have ways to go. Sorry to be negative - I just don't think any CL user would care. This is a feature worthy of a footnote.

This NEEDS to have a post count beside the categories while the site is still new and largely empty. As soon as I clicked into the first empty category I left the site, of course. It's silly to expect a user to click around looking for things when there isn't anything - that will just piss people off. I would also add a "We're just getting started, post your stuff!" message in each city and each empty page, to explain to new users what's happening.

Craigslist is a chicken-egg type of place. Its a destination for selling/buying because everyone knows its a destination for selling/buying.

This will never gain traction because why use what you have when Craigslist does the job? People do it to sell/buy, not make a fun webapp.

Your best bet is to change your advertising. Maybe only market to hackers, and suggest it as a good place to buy used Macs or hardware from other trusted hackers. Maybe even integrate it with HackerNews identities or something.

Trying to out-craigslist craigslist is an impossible feat. You've probably learned a lot but considering you're fighting a gorilla with a tack and you're not making any money from it my guess is you'll lose interest fast unless you refocus.

Just can't see this iteration doing it. Not discouraging you either, it can certainly (and almost needs to be done). Here are some things you could focus on instead:

- Pick one city and dominate it at first.

- Try to eliminate the "creepy craigs list" factor somehow. Mobile authentication?

- Find a use case within that city that will bring listings/usage immediately.

- Focus on user interface that is as "simple" as craigslist, but from 2010, not 1995.

Brutal honesty:

You have around a zero percent chance of winning solely based on technical merit.

Don't get me wrong - you're going to need to get technical merit down, you're going to need to offer some great functionality on the technical side.

But if you really want to take Craigslist down, you're going to need to take over ONE MARKET effectively and branch out from there. You're going to need to pick one city and walk all around it getting people to use your service, putting up flyers, doing a radio interview, trying to get the mayor of the city onboard, convincing college kids to swap their stuff on there or to meet for board games... you'll have to seed that one city with your own offers, meetup groups, get your friends to post their resumes or job offers on there, etc, etc, etc. This almost certainly can't be done from behind a keyboard.

Craigslist isn't winning by its technology - the technology stays out of Craigslist's way while the site wins by community and network effects. You need that. You can't get there via technology, you need to take over one city Craigslist is underserving, then repeat the process a few times until you've got some solid beachheads in place.

These are my thought on the many efforts I see here to replace Craigslist.

Craigslist is massive and serves the local ad needs of many nearly-computer-literate people very well (wikipedia says it has the 33rd highest traffic in the world). It's html-from-1995 look works perfect and could work for a 1000 years.

Craigslist also doesn't make that much money relative to the traffic it has. It's run almost as a charity (28 staff people).

This is frustrating to potential entrepreneurs because when they get an idea for monetizing a need served by Craigslist, they realize that there's no money to be made because craigslist already fully meets the perceived need in a free and advertising-free fashion.

I'd say entrepreneurs probably need to not target the least-common-denominator, least-cash-on-hand group that is craigslist's vast customer base but rather target more well-healed subgroups (the only way to make money from craiglist customers is to educate them there's a need they don't yet know about - but when a large portion also don't have the extra money to pay for that need, the effort may be in vain).

So... just think, all the web's "disruptions" are about small outfits killing larger one with more efficiency, higher volume and lower margins. In this ideal, the margins start to go towards zero, don't they? What then? Craiglist is one answer but its not an answer that generates jobs, economic activity or wealth.

You might take notice that the number of people depending on craiglist has to do with the declining median incomes and lack of higher-paying, higher-skilled jobs which characterized the US economy even before the recession. You know the wikipedia page shows Craig Newmark standing with a hammer? How's that for disruption!

The new economy is supposed to create new needs, new jobs and new income. Has it done so in enough volume to sustain itself? What's your answer here?

About two years ago I asked HN why no one can complete with craigslist. Theres some really interesting points on there that you might find relevant. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=281741

Two years later it still stands try that you can't beat craigslist with a better UI and a couple of "cool" features. What makes craigslist so powerful is the community they created. Post something and in minutes people are interacting with it.

I think in order to compete you have to create a new approach to classifieds. Something that vastly changes the landscape. Maybe thats local. Maybe its a safer experience. Maybe its faster, and I mean faster from post to result not website speed. Craigslist is a classified monopoly. Try and change the game!

I tried to find my city by clicking on the state. The state took me to a list of cities (I think in my state), where my city still wasn't listed. I clicked on display 25 entries and now I have all kinds of cities and states, and home does not work so I left.

No Canada. Cities not working. Cumbersome JS that makes it difficult to use. Really. Click More, and I see 1 more item. Farming.

Might consider going back and using it. Let me put it this way: swippet should let me post from the front page to my city. You can do it.

Yikes. These sites always start off listing the big cities so that the MILLIONS of people who live outside these cities come to the site once and never return. We even get a real bitter taste in our mouth.

You've already shown your hand. It's not about community, people, or the success of your traders, it's about you being big and YOU making money. Otherwise, my little town would be listed.

Heck you could have simply downloaded a zip code database with all city names and started with that. Even then you'd be doing better in my eyes.

Why doesn't it know where I am when I get there? GeoIP stuff is pretty darn simple to implement these days.

Anyway, I can only see these sites working by starting micro, and VERY SLOWLY going big.

Start with just your neighborhood or apartment complex. Then, branch it out to a slightly larger yet still narrow community around you, and let it bleed into your town from there. Then start adding adjoining cities, and THEN the big cities, and THEN the small communities as they start to beg for your services.

These are just my own opinions. I actually don't believe the site will work at all, but there's my 2 cents.

Boston wasn't in your list of cities so I lost interest pretty quickly. That's fine, but it looks like there were other cities on your site that are completely devoid of posts. I can immediately think of two options here to improve the experience:

1) Explicitly state on your site that you're only launching in one (or a few) cities, and then actually restrict postings to those cities. You will then probably need to do lots of creative marketing for your site in those cities to get initial traction. You could also have a sign-up form for people who want to express interest in posting in a different city, and then you can notify them when you open the site up to their area.

2) Find a way to easily (and legally?) populate your site with data from competing sites like Craigslist. This way you don't have giant empty sections on the site.

There might be other options as well, but having cities with literally no posts in them doesn't seem to me like it will attract (or retain) users.

Too bad san francisco is a "Invalid city" :(