$3 Million - Need a Craigslist Clone

$3M SOCIAL NETWORKS MEET THE TOWN CRIER
WHO: Jim Lussier, Norwest Venture Partners, Palo Alto
WHO HE IS: A former exec at Accenture and Beyond.com, Lussier handles software and services for Norwest, which manages $1.8 billion in venture funds and won big with investments in PeopleSoft (PSFT) and Tivoli Systems. Lussier led recent deals with travel-services company G2 Switchworks and P2P radio broadcaster Mercora.
WHAT HE WANTS: A kind of souped-up Craigslist for every neighborhood, everywhere. Just type in a zip code, and this website will present not just garage sale listings and classified ads, but headlines and photos from dozens of local news sites run by busybodies willing to provide free content and keep it constantly updated.
WHY IT'S SMART: The idea taps into the same social-networking allure that helped make Flickr a $35 million Yahoo (YHOO) acquisition -- that is, user-driven content, organized so that all visitors get a slick stage to showcase their stuff. In this case, the stuff isn't just photos but local knowledge: updates on a rash of burglaries, say, or a ranking of preschools. (The most popular contributors might receive a small percentage of ad revenue.) The site could also offer a marketplace for everything from baby-sitting to tree trimming. Sure, a number of regional websites already offer something similar, but this site would aggregate the content under one umbrella and provide a platform to scale it across the nation. If all goes as planned, Lussier says, paid ads could bring in as much as $100 million a year.
WHAT HE WANTS FROM YOU: A website template finished within six months on a $500,000 budget. (Lussier estimates that a team of two or three can do the job.) If it shows promise, Norwest will provide another $2.5 million to tackle the real challenge: developing a core group of users who can light the viral fire. "Building that community happens when people get value out of the service," Lussier says. "They need to feel compensated for their time by the information they get back out."
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Source: Business2.0

Posting it here just in case there is some able team out there who can make use of this offer. G'luck.

Warm Regards,
Kavs

 

Hmmmm....sounds kinda like Tribe.net.

 

lol - how about one week for a team of one. People in the valley have such an absurd sense of cost. After all these years...

 

That's really exciting...

 

Venture funded startups are my bread and butter...and believe me they WON'T listen when I talk to them about how they can save money.

 

scary, i was just thinking it would be pretty easy to develop the underlying CMS for a craigslist type site. Of course this isnt taking into account the content or the servers etc.

Someone point crazy people with too much money in my direction please

 

I have worked with some really large VC funds and I have found them to be pretty frugal with their money - meaning they want a big piece of the pie for as little money as possible. They are much more interested in enormous growth than making a profit or saving money. They usually won't fund something that they don't think they can return 20X on their dollar as they know their overall failure rate is pretty high. The key to getting money from a VC firm is having management on board which has a successful track record. They will fund a mediocre idea with good management long before they will consider a great idea that has management without a track record.