The List Here Blog
I've talked about not wanting to have investors in List Here in the past, and laid out the reasons behind it in semi-deep detail. One big negative about not having an awesome bank roll behind you, aside from a slower growth trajectory, is getting things done in a timely fashion. When you work a 9-5 job and then go home to work on the side business, you're not exactly working at 100%. How great would it be to get paid a salary to do List Here 9-5 as the CEO with a nice fat salary? To not have to worry about bankrolling the project, getting the full time job done, and also making the site a success? Yeah, that would be sweet.
It would also mean that I'd have to give up a lot of control over my "baby" as it were. I'm much more apt to having complete control over the success or failure of the project, and also being culpable for how quickly that happens. It's easy to say that life would be nice in a 9-5 job, but in this case the choice is to work hard and make it happen in order to keep my vision alive.
The big downside is that I'm much more apt to feel really lazy when little things don't get done. There's always something to be done to make the site better, to grow traffic, to get new advertisers, and so on. There will always be opportunities to blog, to guest blog, to get on Twitter and Facebook and promote, to design a new mailer. Being realistic though, there are only so many hours in a day, and since I've made the decision to self fund and see where it takes me, that means figuring out a work-life balance that doesn't burn me out and throw everything off the tracks.
Probably the best way I've come to terms with this is by using lists. I'm a lazy person by nature - I'd much rather sit around reading Reddit or playing video games than doing something productive. Without a list, without something goading me into action, I end up doing just that 99% of the time - nothing. That said, the lists have to be realistic, so I usually end up splitting them into pieces:
- Monthly Goals: These are the larger projects that I can't just bust out during a given day. Things like planning a new paid search campaign that will go to a microsite to sign up new advertisers. There are a lot of moving pieces that need to be taken into account, so for these I give myself a deadline based on months, e.g., 'By the end of November, I damn well better have all of this done.'
- Weekly Goals: Sometimes these fit into the monthly category as a larger piece, but I usually try to make these smaller bits in addition to the big monthly items. Things like building links for natural search, or writing X amount of blog posts fall into this category.
- Daily Goals: These are the little victories that make me feel not so much like a piece of @#$%. Sure, they may take up only 1-2 hours in a day, but it's enough time to make something happen, even if it's only a minor incremental gain.
I do sometimes wish I could be more productive, be like those people that are able to somehow not go insane after working 80 hours a week, but it's just not going to happen. Instead I've figured out what I think is at least a passable way of getting things done, while also getting to indulge in things like video games, vacations, etc.
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There's been some interesting development going on with List Here in the past few months, so I figured it would be worthwhile to write about some of the new-fangled stuff that we've done.
First and foremost, we've added custom forms for automotive and real estate oriented categories. In English, this means that you can now sell your car on ListHere.com with specific information captured about that ad. It's a pretty cool new feature, and we're happy to allow people to add information about their make, model, year, mileage, doors, transmission, and a bunch of other stuff. On the real estate side of things, we've gone and done the same thing. That means that you can now post your house/condo/apartment for rent or for sale, and include specific information like square footage, type of house, bedrooms, bathrooms, and more.
We'll be doing another push to get job listings going, followed by some cool development for services and restaurants by the end of the year! Very exciting stuff.
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Self financing any type of business has its ups and downs. On the upside, you have complete control over what you're doing - no one can tell you what to do, how to do it, or when to do it. That's a pretty cool thing when you think about it. No investors pushing for silly development. No executive trouble makers forcing change that just doesn't matter. The list can go on, but you get the idea. On the other hand, being self funded has one big drawback - the funding. Unless you have plenty of expendable income or were born wealthy, you have to be really careful about what you do with your money. You don't have VC pumping millions of dollars your way, so you can't simultaneously advertise everywhere you want to be while also paying a team of developers to kick ass for you.
List Here is in that spot right now where tough choices need to be made. Now, this isn't rocket science, so I suppose it's not really that hard. The site needs some definite development love to clean things up, tighten up the process, and make it a better experience overall. The trade off is that there isn't a lot of "cheddar" (I'm so gangsta!) left over to drive more users to the site. This is really tough when you consider that at its core, List Here is a classified service. This was a problem that I envisioned early on, a true "chicken or the egg" scenario: If you don't have listings on your site, why will people visit and ultimiately come back? Conversely, if people aren't visiting the site, why in the hell would they post their stuff for sale?
It's been a damn tricky thing to balance. The good thing is that the updates I mentioned a few weeks back are right around the corner, and at that time there will be some actual marketing of the site! There's a little bit of that right now, but not a whole lot - and that's going to change. Hooray for progress, even if it's painfully slow!
On another note, I am reminded of some of my interactive counterparts that I've talked to over the past months, and I realize how many of them need to be slapped. "Why not just make a service that's so social-media-integrated, so blindingly awesome, so "ahead of the curve" that you will instantly be blessed with kazillions of visits?!?!" they ask in exasperation. Apparently, to be a successful business these days, most people think that you need a huge Facebook icon, you need to re-tweet crap to Charlie Sheen, and then do a viral video that goes crazy on YouTube, while simultaneously being embraced by the likes of Reddit and Digg. The reality is this - a lot of businesses, even those online, are kind of boring when you think about it. I consider Craigslist, eBay Classifieds, and Oodle to be competitors (I'm sure they don't think the same of me), and they're pretty boring businesses. No shiny, no awe, no social awesomeness. Just a solid business that can be done better.
So to all of those weirdos who were flabbergasted at the lack of a List Here iPhone application, or the site not having the ability to send to Twitter, or whatever other stupid things they suggested, suck it - List Here is growing bitches!
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It's really hard to believe that we've been working on List Here for almost two years now. In that time news of countless start-up companies funded by huge angel investors and venture groups have come and gone, and during this entire time ListHere.com has been a completely self funded venture. The reasons why we're never wanted to go out for funding is because we wanted complete control of our site. We didn't want to design by committee, or waste money doing a lot of silly things that some start-up companies do.
The cost for this has been a much longer time line for development. We're not millionaires or anywhere close, so all funds come from our own hard work on other projects. While it's nice to think about the 'what if' of List Here being done long ago, the loss of ownership and control just isn't worth it to the team.
All of that said, I am excited to announce some awesome upcoming functionality changes on the site! We're reworking entire areas of the site to allow you to post automotive, real estate, and job listings with specific inputs for things like year, make, and model; bedrooms, bathroom, square feet; title, salary, company, and much more! This will also mean that our business users will be able to more easily offer their goods on what we believe to be one of the greatest free online classifieds online.
Stay tuned for a firm release date - right now it looks like we'll be getting something out in the next couple of weeks.
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We finally decided to get serious about our blogging efforts, and have setup http://blog.listhere.com to do so. We’ll be sharing updates about new feature releases on List Here, sharing some of the coolest posts we can find, and just generally talking about the business side of things.