Craigslist CEO reveals secret profit strategy

Business can be a lot simpler than the consultants and MBAs claim. Craigslist, for example, just listens to its customers, then gives them what they want. No wonder they’ve been profitable since day one.

Wait, that can’t be all there is to it, can it? It must be more complicated than that. Nope, not according to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. In a recent Marketplace interview, he said:

“Like a lot of stuff we do, we’ve found it to be very effective and basically fool-proof to just prioritize our activities according to what users are asking for.”

Ryssdal: Seems bizarre in this economy to be so democratic.

Buckmaster: Well, it certainly makes our lives simpler since we just have the one criterion to go on. We don’t have to sit in rooms trying to figure out how to conquer the world because basically we are not trying to achieve any particular market share or world dominance. We’re just trying to follow up on requests that we get from users.

Ryssdal: And yet you have enormous market share and very nearly world dominance.

Buckmaster: … what better way to operate is there than to just follow up on what your customers or users are asking for, and to just block out everything else.”

Via The Consumerist