Today I am presenting another written interview with Diana Conway of TheGoodDeal.com
Check out the interview:
- What gave you the idea to start a classified ad site? Share your story.
We have a bit of a nerdy creation myth, which speaks volumes about who we are as a company, and which we love to tell. The story is, our two founders, Mathias and Alexandre, love to collect Star Wars figurines. They’d been doing it for years, and had amassed such a collection that by 2011 were only interested in the rarest of pieces. They turned to online classified sites to search for these jewels, but quickly grew frustrated with the haphazardness of the sites. They could find a random Yoda here, a lonely Storm Trooper there, but it was impossible to see a seller’s entire collection. And that was the lightbulb moment for the boys. Classified sites should be able to provide sellers a way to show off everything they have for sale. There should be a showcase. A beautiful, elegant, easy to use platform to put all of the items that they want to sell. It should be free. It should be lovely to use for buyers and sellers alike. It should be eye catching and intuitive, and it should work much better than anything the market offered at the time. Thus began Padawan Group.
- How have you gone about promoting the site and bringing new users to the platform?
The first goal was to make the platform into something worth bringing new users to; to design a great site and then populate it with fantastic listings. That was our content acquisition phase, and it went better than we could have hoped. We have over 66 million ads worldwide, and are number one in terms of volume in the UK. Not bad after a year. Now that our site has quality seller content, we’re focused on wooing buyers. Our efforts are mostly online, at the moment. We’re utilizing aggregators, PPC, SEO and of course Social Media. In 2015 we plan to do some marketing offline, which we are really excited for.
- What sets you apart from other popular classified sites?
Padawan sites are designed to be a pleasure to use, for both buyer and seller. To ensure this, we created what we call our showcase feature. The showcase is a really eye-catching online storefront that allows sellers to post all of their items in one easy to find place. On top of that, we’ve provided incredibly straightforward social media integration. It takes three quick clicks to share your showcase, your new items, and your favorite items, with your Facebook friends and your Twitter followers. We know that people would prefer to sell their items to people they already know and trust, and our sharing feature allows them to do that.
- How do you handle scammers and those that try to take advantage of others through platforms like this? I know this has been an issue in the past with craigslist.
We were very aware of the problems that our competitors have faced, and we took some pretty deliberate steps to avoid them. Firstly, all of our ads are manually moderated. We have reviewers that comb through everything, scrutinizing our ads to make sure that we have honest, accurate, quality content. Secondly, we have our ridiculously easy to use social media integration. It’s better and a lot safer to sell to people you already know.
- What are your future plans for 2015 and beyond?
Continued growth. We’ve been in the United States since February, and we’re already number two in terms of volume, but we want to be number one. We’re opening up an LA office and sinking a lot of resources into cracking the American market wide open. In addition, we’re looking to dramatically increase our presence in Asia and Africa. We’re also, as I said, going to be trying out some offline marketing strategies.
