I just read a cool blog post over at the Big Marketing for Small Business blog.  It’s about Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist.org.  Just in case you haven’t heard of it Craigslist is a community website featuring free classifieds advertisements among other things.  It was founded in the mid 90’s and is now officially in the top 10 most trafficked websites in the U.S. with an astounding 5 billion (yep billion) page views per month.

Now the founder of Craigslists seems like a really genuine guy.  I have seen him quite a few times on TV and everytime I do I am inspired by how the simple notion of putting the user (customer) first really does work.  Craigslist and Craig Newmark are the perfect examples of this.  The blog I mentioned above goes on to say that on his business card Craig has as his title “Full-Time Customer Service Representative”.  Here is a guy running one of the largest websites in the world that when compared to the traffic of sites like YouTube when sold could make many billions of dollars.  Despite this success he still has the humility to consider himself as a Customer Service Representative.

While the rest of the world is doing everything they can to make as much money as they can here is a wonderful example of somone who’s set his mission (and his companies’) to something more honorable.  Furthermore Craig is following it to the letter even when he could so easily sell-out and go live on his own island somewhere.

I find that very inspiring.

Thanks
Adam.