Trulia

The Craigslist Unbundling: every category is a billion-dollar startup

Shaan explains the famous 'Craigslist unbundling' diagram: each category on the homepage (shared housing → Airbnb, apartments → Zillow/Trulia) spawned a specialized standalone company. Hundreds of successful businesses were built by taking one Craigslist feature and going deep.

“And so you can just see how many different businesses just realized that, hey, if there was demand for it on Craigslist, maybe we could build a specialized version for— of just that one feature. We could build a whole site of just that one service that it's offering. And there are like hundreds that are in this.”

Steal thisPick one category on a giant horizontal marketplace and build the best specialized vertical version of just that.