The rise and fall

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This video is sponsored by Near — hire great full-time talent in Latin America and save 60–70% vs. US salaries, with no language barrier and no time zone problems. → https://links.girdley.com/near-jul1 Learn more about Compound Conference: https://compoundconference.com/ At its peak, Craigslist was generating over $1 billion a year with around 30 employees — outperforming Google and Facebook on revenue per employee by a factor of 10 to 20. Founder Craig Newmark turned down VC billions, refused to run ads, and demoted himself to head of customer service. Then the company lost more than 70% of its revenue. This is the rise and fall of Craigslist. Get the 2-minute cheat sheet for this video → https://girdley.com/youtube 👇 SUBSCRIBE for more business breakdowns https://www.youtube.com/@Michael-Girdley?sub_confirmation=1 ------------------------------------------------------------------ ► Get my weekly letter to business owners: essential insights to run, grow, and stay ahead in your business → https://links.girdley.com/newsletter-yt ► For sponsorships or inquiries please reach out to: Contact@girdley.com ► Do you have a hat I should wear in a video? Send it to us: Contact@girdley.com ► Free events on all things small business: https://links.girdley.com/lectures-yt ► Deep dives on businesses for sale: https://www.youtube.com/@AcquisitionsAnonymousPodcast ► Follow me on Twitter/X: https://x.com/girdley ------------------------------------------------------------------ Craig Newmark started Craigslist in 1995 as a simple email list sharing events in San Francisco. By 1996 it had moved to a website he built himself — plain, ugly, and effective. The network effect took over from there. No marketing spend ever. What happened to Craigslist is a story about a founder who built a business around his own values instead of investor expectations. Craig kept 99% of the site free, ran a crew of around 30 employees, and when Davos elites grilled CEO Jim Buckmaster about leaving money on the table, his response was: why would we do that? For a long time, that worked. The cracks came from every direction at once. The Craigslist killer case in 2009 damaged the brand's safety reputation. Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016 — mobile-native, tied to real identities. Vertical specialists finished the job: Indeed for jobs, Zillow for apartments, CarGurus for cars. The same minimalism and refusal to change that built the moat became the liability. Revenue fell more than 70% from its $1B peak to roughly $300M by the early 2020s. The rise and fall of Craigslist is what happens when a business outlives the era it was built for.