Kitmondo.com

On Timing

by Richard

In the last few days I’ve been considering the timing of our ‘go live’ date. It’s a difficult question to answer. On one hand we are chomping at the bit to start talking with our advertisers and to find buyers for their listings. On the other hand we are super conscious that the site will be less than 100% complete when it does go up.

Kitmondo depends so much on creating and keeping buyer:seller liquidity that the timing of when we become visible to our market is possibly the most important decision we have to make in the early stages. Go too soon and we risk losing credibility with our customers. Wait for perfection and we risk losing momentum and competitive advantage.

I suspect the answer, as ever, lies somewhere in between the two. A couple of sleepless nights and I hope to have it cracked…!

Album of the Week

Maeve's choice...                  

   

Gang of Four's classic post punk album Entertainment!

Countdown

by Richard

Today we got a look at the first few "plumbed in" pages of the Alpha site.

Man, this thing's good...!

Who does it, with what and to whom?

by Eric

Press speculation on the continued positioning of some of the big players in and around the classified field continues to fill the financial columns.

When Google explained somewhat disingenuously that the reasoning behind its’ new $4 billion share issue was “to obtain additional capital”, most people would have been more than a little cynical about the motives when the company was already sitting on over $3 billion of unencumbered cash.

As Times Business points out, there would seem to be no way that $7 billion would be needed for increased revenue and capital expenditure. So there is much conjecture as to what else.

Baidu could well be a target for some of the cash, especially now that Yahoo has shown their cards in China by hooking up with Alibaba. However, it seems fairly clear that they will not let their battle over “who has got the biggest” (search engine of course) rest at that. An extension into other theatres of war seems imminent.

The Sunday Times reports both companies as flirting with Trader Classified Media owner of a wide range of traditional classified newsprint titles, for a tie-up/acquisition. The newspaper goes as far as to say that its’ own parent, News Corporation, had been interested but considered the price too high. Whether this could be considered just “knocking” copy is not particularly clear, but the waters continue to be very muddy.

And where there’s muck there’s brass…

It's complete plants

by Eric

During the early stages of the development of the Kitmondo site it was noticed by an eagle eyed office boy as he made the tea for the really clever people in the office, that they had overlooked the fact that they were, albeit unwittingly, creating a category for buyers and sellers of “used and surplus electronics pants”.

Of course, the really clever people immediately fired off a strong but understanding instruction to their Indian site developers to get their fingers out, pull their socks up and change their used pants.

Alibaba

Each day brings more evidence of China’s arrival as an Internet superpower. The latest hook-up between Yahoo and Alibaba is particularly interesting to us, as we keep a pretty keen eye on Alibaba’s B2B business and see it as something of a bell-weather for our market.

On Alibaba.com they’ve built a large, global community of dealers, wholesalers and small manufacturers who use their platform to list products and generate sales leads. Which is precisely what we are hoping to achieve at Kitmondo, albeit in a different market.

Unusually, they’ve managed to develop a strong consumer brand at the same time. The question is…will the integration of Yahoo’s Chinese consumer websites shift the balance of Alibaba’s focus away from B2B? They have a big battle looming with ebay if they want Taobao to keep a hold on the auction space (and one has to presume a big factor in Yahoo’s investment is their expectancy that Alibaba can replicate Yahoo’s defeat of ebay in Japan). Will this have an effect on their focus on B2B?

It'll be fascinating to see what happens next!

Logo

We have a logo...

 

We asked a UK design agency to work on this for us initially but they didn't produce anything that worked so, running short on ideas, I asked our developer in India to have a go. They came up with some good draft ideas and we refined one of them until we ended up with the above, which is simple and clear as well as eye-catching.

It's interesting that my/our perception was that, happy as we were to let a non-Western team build our site, we couldn't rely on them to interpret our design ideas as well as a Western designer. Wrong. Not only did they come up with better draft concepts and interpretations (and of course final product) they did it in a third of the time at a fifth of the cost.

Dotcomplement

By Jeff

When Richard and I worked on a startup in the dotcom boom years, all our friends and colleagues were enthusiastic. They had to be - they didn't know if we were going to become billionaires and give them some money. But then anyone launching a startup post dotcom crash got laughed at - or very poor VC deals.

Now, when we talk to friends and explain that we have left our jobs to form a dotcom business, the fact that it's dotcom doesn't matter. It's just a business. They don't care it's online. They just want to know: what's the product? Who will use it? Who else is doing it? And all the questions you would ask about any other business. Dotcom is no longer an issue; it's an advantage. It means viral growth, inexpensive, targeted marketing, and is something that everyone understands.

Kitmondo is our Purple Cow.