Next Door Chores -Buy, Sell or Trade With Your Neighbours

Ed: Mmmm I have been seeing a lot of these local services, classifieds and goods exchanges for the last year.

Unfortunately this is a double sided market, people only use the service if they know they will find enough other people there buying or selling, usually there are only a few winners per category per country and they gain critical mass and accelerate paste all the competitors. Craigslist already owns this market in a big way and everyone is trying to create their own niche play for each Craigslist section.

Based on my experience of looking around their site and the way their listings are shown, Im not convinced Next Door Chores is going to be one of the winners.

If I look at how the most successful companies have kick started these campaigns, it often involved an enormous amount of manual slog work, stealing listings and customers from whatever platform they were using previously.

In the case of Airbnb, allegedly they were masters of getting Craigslist listings to convert onto their platform.

In the case of online cars, jobs and real estate, older readers may recall when these sites first started launching, it was common after placing an ad in the classifieds to receive 3-4 calls to get you to list your ad on new online platforms. It was not uncommon to have new entrants scrape listings from other sites.

Most of these local plays get the platform launched, but have no idea how to get the listings….

If Next Door Chores wants traction, it needs to work out how to get 10000s of listings per town when advertising is not cost effective, its not a trivial exercise.