Walamu Prepares For Battle
Walamu recently jumped into the college classified coliseum where it’ll have to battle barbarians such as Dorm Item, CollegeMedium, ACollege Trade, and Chegg (Chegg may try to throw eggs, so watch out).
Walamu is a great example of a college classified site (I think I’ll start to call them “CCS”) executed very well for a particular school, Rutgers in NJ. I like Walamu’s one school at a time approach.
Let’s face it, it’s going to be extremely hard for any of these CCS’s to reach a critical mass in thousands of colleges around the country – it’s doable, but it’ll take time and huge marketing campaigns (unless the site is so brilliant that it sparks a word-of-mouth frenzy).
So by focusing on one university at a time, you’re building a strong base of students. If you’re able to build a critical mass at one school, then you know your service is doing something right. Then, obviously, you’d do the same thing at another school and so on… It’s a great approach. Seemingly “slower” but by building strong bases, you can build an army of loyal users.
Walamu’s has a slick design that’s very easy on the eyes. Unlike most of the other CCS’s, they separate the “classified” section from the “marketplace” which may or may not be a good thing.
Students want things to be as simple as possible, they never like a lot of choices. Give a student a lot of choices for your service, and watch them move onto the next service that has less options. Students are known to love simplicity.
So in that light, I’d much rather see “one” listing with various sorting of books, jobs, electronics, etc… In fact, I’m still wondering why all of these sites are still using the words “marketplace” and “classifieds” at all.
Those words are so ebay-ish and craigslist-ish. Wouldn’t it be cool if one of these CCS’s took a new approach and began calling the listings something completely different? I think so. It would make them stand out from the pack immediately. Who has the guts to do it first?
The CCS that is able to be the most creative combined with the simplest features is going to be the winner of this battle. But if sites such as Walamu continue to focus solely on one school at a time, then we’ll see a lot more of “mini-successes” from school to school.
Walamu is off to a great start and if they can get a few thousand consistent users at Rutgers, then they’d be in great shape to enter another university. Vertical growth can prove to be the lifesaver for these services.
2 Comments
Rohail from Walamu
December 13th, 2006 at 1:03 pm
Hey Dave,
Thanks for doing this write-up. You’re absolutely right in that our strategy is to focus on dominating one region before moving on to another so as to make our “product” the best that we can before moving into the limelight.
I agree with you in that seeing the terms “Marketplace” and “Classifieds” flyring around all the time can get to be a bit boring and unoriginal. However, when simplicity is key, we think it’s important for users to know what the site is all about as soon as they hit the page. Replacing these terms with some sort of slang might impair our users, although it could prove to be a bold move in the future.
David Askaripour
December 13th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Keep up the great work, Rohail. I think that your design is rockin’, btw.
Yeah, I’m waiting for someone to come up with a new term. I, agree, it may initially confuse people since they are so used to the traditional words of “classifieds” and “marketplace” but it may prove to be a great marketing play in the future.
Keep at it!
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