Bootstrapping a startup with Craigslist arbitrage
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @danecjensen details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 31 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 26 comments
I appreciate the post, but in the end it just isn't that useful. It's like "I did all this stuff to sell MacBooks and didn't really make any money, so I started this startup."
Obviously you can't do it for long if you're not making coin, but either a more in-depth analysis of how many you sold for what prices, or any success / fail stories, would make this a more useful post for readers. Instead it's all the build-up of an objective study with no real payoff.
Hopefully this comes across as a useful critique and not something that's personally attacking. I like the idea, I just want something more out of a post like this.
Properly speaking, this is not arbitrage. There are two criteria for arbitrage, it has to be riskless and self-financing. Looking at an item and saying, I should be able to sell that for more is not an arbitrage. If you were able to locate a buyer willing to pay a certain price prior to purchasing the item, and then buy an under priced item and sell it to your buyer for more money, that would be arbitrage. Arbitrage is a sexy three dollar word that people like to throw around, but if you are risking loss in order to hopefully make a profit, then plain and simple it is not arbitrage.
Drawing a straight line through loosely correlated data doesn't "prove" anything.
So a more appropriate title for this post would have been "Failing to bootstrap a startup with Craigslist arbitrage"?
Then that's just another variable. Not intuition like the author claims. Intuition would be in recognizing the important variables.
Find a deal with the data and intuition on Craigslist. Then, meet in person and barter at least $50 off the asking price.
You mean, agree to $X over email and then demand it for $X-50 when you meet in person? That's really, really tacky.