[oldandboring]

The article describes an idea that there are startup opportunities to be found by identifying horizontal platforms (e.g. Craigslist) that cover a lot of ground and build something that handles just one use case (e.g. job posts) covered by that platform. The article calls it "unbundling".

A while ago I was involved in a startup that attempted to compete with a dominant horizontal platform in this manner (Craigslist, in fact). The ideas were fine, the people were good, but we had a lot of trouble getting traction. Turns out, Craigslist is where the people are, and if you want to build a marketplace, you need people. Features turn out to be secondary. It's unsurprising to me that, in the end, the best competition for Craigslist came from another big horizontal platform with tons of people: Facebook.

I'm not actually trying to say that "unbundling" can't ever work. Maybe Zapier is ripe for it, as the author suggests. This is just what happened to come to mind when I read this story.

Interesting overall. Thanks for the post OP!

[hikerrrr]

Facebook is not the largest 'classifieds' marketplace, at least not everywhere, and it did not disrupt craigslist everywhere.

There are multiple other successes to replicate the classified/craigslist model:

Other good notable and successful local models offerup, maybe somewhat ebay.

FB Marketplace only began to overtake craigslist if there was not another dominant space in the area.

Here in Utah, the dominant newsmedia made a brilliant use of their traffic to bundle their news traffic with a more reputable and useful classifieds. They are still more dominant than FB marketplace in Utah, though used about equal now.

Most local newspapers had the right classifieds model before craigslist became a behemoth, though without exception local papers struggled to capitalize on their traffic and keep the flow towards their classifieds.

Classifieds were always the extra cash that gave pure profit to newspapers for a large part of their lifetimes. News and stuff sorta went hand in hand there for awhile, too bad its random BS FB news that's bundled with classifieds now instead of real reputable news sources.

[claudiulodro]

I think the canonical example of 'unbundling' is every startup that does a thing that could be done via Excel and streamlining the experience around one use-case: time tracking for freelancers, inventory management, etc. I hear there's been a bunch of money made around making SaaS out of things that used to be done in Excel sheets.

[georgesequeira]

Totally, outside of people trying to make a "smarter" excel like Airtable or Rows, different business units will make some "template" that lets them run their orgs in excel. Those "templates" could certainly be better products.

Packy talks more about how this is also a platform being unbundled: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?s=r

[joshmlewis]

I feel like Facebook Marketplace was really the only way to disrupt Craigslist because it is where the users are. There were lots of products that tried over the years with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. I'm not saying it is a better replacement either, but as far as I can tell it's effectively stolen most of Craigslists utility. I joked the other day that the only people left on Craigslist now are scammers and older people.

[skeeter2020]

Disruption is still very regional. Where I live Kijiji (Ebay) is dominant, in other locales it's still Craigslist. FB Marketplace is still an "and also" player but not dominate here