Internet Startup Advice from Fabrice Grinda

    Posted by Pete Caputa on Jul 29, 2008 5:12:00 AM

    Fabrice Grinda, founder of classifieds site, OLX, answered my business advice interview questions. There's some great advice for any business owner, especially if you're an internet marketing startup or trying to figure out internet marketing for any type of business.  

    When & why did you start your current business?

    I left the last company I had created in November 2005. Once again, I went back to 9 business selection criteria and started looking for new opportunities.

    It struck me that there were 5 big trends in the world:

    • 1. There is a transition from offline media consumption to online media consumption
    • 2. There is a transition from offline advertising, especially print advertising, to online advertising
    • 3. There is a transition online from paid business models to free advertising business models
    • 4. There is emerging market growth with GDP per capita and Internet usage growing faster in the emerging markets than in the developed world
    • 5. There is a massive transition underway in the $100 billion a year classifieds market from paid print classifieds to online print classifieds. This transition is already well underway in the US and Western Europe, but is only in its infancy in the developing world where newspapers continue to dominate classifieds online and offline.

    Given those trends, I created OLX free classifieds in March of 2006 with the objective of building the largest free classifieds site in the world. OLX is essentially Craigslist 2.0 for the world!

    What is your unique selling proposition?

    OLX is the next generation of free online classifieds.

    OLX provides a simple solution to the complications involved in selling, buying, trading, discussing, organizing, and meeting people near you, wherever you may reside.

    First and foremost, while Craigslist is essentially in English all around the world and only covering the main cities in each country, OLX is in the local language with all the major cities of the country covered. OLX is already in 25 languages. We aim to end the year in over 40 languages!

    The second fundamental difference is with regards to the business model. Almost all classified sites charge for jobs and real estate and are only temporarily free with the objective of eventually charging to post a classified. OLX intends to remain free to post forever. We use an advertising business model which we will supplement with featured listings in the future.

    The product is very different as well. OLX has taken all of the major Web 2.0 elements and brought them to classifieds:

    • We have a fantastic mobile classifieds version of our site that lets you do anything you can do on the web on your mobile phone!
    • You can easily design rich colorful listings with pictures and videos
    • You can display your listings on your social networking profile (Facebook, MySpace, ...)

    What do you like most about internet marketing?

    Over the years, I have tried all forms of advertising: TV ads, radio ads, print ads, flyers, banner ads, etc. When promoting online products, search advertising is by far the most cost effective marketing method other than SEO and viral marketing (if your site lends itself to those).

    The users are already online so you don't lose a large percentage of the audience. Moreover, search users are looking for something hence any click is likely to lead to a high conversion rate. Best of all, you can track everything the search users do and can optimize your campaigns to meet your ROI goals.

    We use a fantastic SEM shop called Keyade for all of our keyword buying globally in all languages on all search engines (including Baidu in China).

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