As the viral success of Craig’s List–and its replacement of newspaper classified listings–moves forward, we need to remember that one of the things that makes Craig’s List special is, well, Craig. This is a guy who has a laser-focus on his product and its mission, and strong follow-through, a fact this recent story from Brian Dear illustrates.
Brian was looking to hire, and when he posted the job on CL, he got no responses. He checked the servers, figured it was a mail-server problem and emailed Craig. Craig emailed back ASAP. Brian writes:
“I emailed Craig directly at 16:43 to inquire about my email concerns and damn if he didn’t respond within 60 seconds, at 16:44. Talk about superb customer service! He forwarded the issue on to his tech team, and they got back to me at 17:30 saying it sounds like a problem with my company’s server.”
Craig and team fixed the problem, Brian got his post up, and of course he’s a CL user for life.
Moral of story: How many commercial companies really provide that mix of value and service?