Yago Paramo

Automotive Entrepreneur

Should auto dealers use upcoming app Letgo?

I had my first introduction to Letgo about a year ago thanks to Seattle’s special finance dealer Curt Bush and it came again in my radar in a recent article in Mashable.com “Marketplace app Letgo raises $175 million in quest to take on Craigslist” by Patrick Kulp. You can use the website https://us.letgo.com in a similar fashion to CraigsList but truly it has been optimized to be used from your phone as an app.

The automotive section, which loads content based on your geo location on both the mobile app and the browser doesn’t have very much for content even in one of the cities claimed by the app as a “top city” Brooklyn, NY. One big difference before anyone gets excited as “we have a new Craigslist” reminiscent of the site’s revolution for automotive lead generation 4+ years ago is that Craigslist had a tremendous traffic that was created organically (never advertised) purely by the usefulness of the site. Letgo is not there yet, but keep an eye on it.

I also want to point out that while leads are no longer coming in waves like those magical first years, Craigslist continues to post amazing user numbers: 60M users, 50B page views/month, 80M ads/month, 1M job listings/month ($45M a month just from this source), 200M post in discussion forums/month. Source: http://tinyurl.com/zl8ars7.

The magic is far from gone from “social” classified sites now that we don’t see waves of leads coming into our CRMs, but that customers have learned that they are not talking to some “cool” seller and that behind the ad there is-just-one of us car sales people trying to offer our product. My point there is that when (if) Letgo gets the automotive section to show some volume of ads and traffic and hopefully give Craigslist a run for its $5/post charge an absurd content restrictions (let us post URLs and HTML), don’t think that it is going to bring back the days of leads by the dozen. The site will succeed or fail based on the number of users and traffic that can muster because the site has failed.