Carsabi Offers Easy Way to Search Craiglist Listings
Carsabi is a recently debuted used car shopping site that combs all of the listings on craiglist.org throughout the United States as well as dealers in California.
I was contacted by its founder Dwight Crow for some feedback on the site, which is based in Southern California, and instead decided to turn the tables on him to find out what Carsabi is all about and how it might help used car buyers make more informed decisions.
As I written in the past, I am not a huge fan of craigslist as a way to buy a used car. I think it's ripe for fraud with too many disreputable dealers posing as private sellers to avoid complying with state and federal laws. Do your due diligence to avoid getting ripped off on craigslist.
What follows is the answers to a series of questions I emailed to him.
Q. What is Carsabi? What was the impetus for starting it? How long did it take to develop it?
A. Carsabi is an attempt to make buying cars easier - specifically, we're building a tool to show all cars for sale in an area instantly regardless of source. We've indexed Craigslist nationally and most dealerships in California.
My friend and I recently purchased automobiles and were pretty frustrated with the experience - it took a long time to try all the local dealers in addition to Craigslist and other classifieds. Even worse, KBB and other sources of pricing didn't seem to reflect what I was seeing in the market, so I had to watch prices on the model I was interested in for about a month to make sure I got a good deal.
Being engineers, we started thinking about what we could do about this - we've been working on the project for about three months now and Carsabi is what resulted. We think its cool enough to share with other people who like good car deals.
Q. Who is behind Carsabi? What are your backgrounds?
A. It's just me and my housemate Chris - we're both nerds so its fun to build things like this. I've worked in network engineering and Chris has done distributed systems and machine learning so he actually had a lot to bring to the table. We only recently decided to work on the idea full time so we can add dealerships nationally - as I mentioned we've already added them in California to check the technical feasibility of crawling the web for cars the way Google crawls the Internet for pages.
Q. Does the Internet need another car-search service like Carsabi? What sets you apart from all of the other choices out there?
A. Sites like Autotrader and eBay Motors have a couple things going against them. First, they don't show the better deals you can be getting on places like Craigslist - which is probably one of the coolest sites on the internet, and is the best place to buy a car if you're willing to put in extra effort to save a few thousand dollars. Secondly, if you do want to buy from a dealership for peace of mind, sites like Autotrader or Ebay simply don't have all the available deals. This is because they need to contact each dealer individually and either sell them on a hefty subscription fee or a $150 per car surcharge - this leads to only a fraction of all dealerships signing up and significant additional costs being passed on to the consumer!
We're hoping to leverage our backgrounds in technology to make all the cars from your local dealers and classifieds instantly searchable, free of charge.
Q. Why associate yourself with craigslist? What was the thinking behind that? Also, why can't somebody just go to craigslist? Why use Carsabi?
A. We started with Craigslist because we thought people would really appreciate an easier way to find good deals on the site, and because places like Autotrader and Cars.com don't cover it at all. I don't know the exact stats, but there's something like 10 million cars listed on Craigslist every year, and we think not enough people know about these offers.
As to why you would use Carsabi instead of going directly to Craigslist - great question. Using Carsabi, you can quickly search for a particular car model filtered by price, location, mileage, transmission, etc with photos included in search results before going to the original listing. However, you'll end up on Craigslist either way, so we think Carsabi just accelerates your ability to find the car you're going to buy regardless of where it is online. This goes for dealerships as well - in California we've had a couple friends that were surprised at the discrepancy between pricing at different franchises when you can check all of them at once.
I was contacted by its founder Dwight Crow for some feedback on the site, which is based in Southern California, and instead decided to turn the tables on him to find out what Carsabi is all about and how it might help used car buyers make more informed decisions.
As I written in the past, I am not a huge fan of craigslist as a way to buy a used car. I think it's ripe for fraud with too many disreputable dealers posing as private sellers to avoid complying with state and federal laws. Do your due diligence to avoid getting ripped off on craigslist.
What follows is the answers to a series of questions I emailed to him.
Q. What is Carsabi? What was the impetus for starting it? How long did it take to develop it?
A. Carsabi is an attempt to make buying cars easier - specifically, we're building a tool to show all cars for sale in an area instantly regardless of source. We've indexed Craigslist nationally and most dealerships in California.
My friend and I recently purchased automobiles and were pretty frustrated with the experience - it took a long time to try all the local dealers in addition to Craigslist and other classifieds. Even worse, KBB and other sources of pricing didn't seem to reflect what I was seeing in the market, so I had to watch prices on the model I was interested in for about a month to make sure I got a good deal.
Being engineers, we started thinking about what we could do about this - we've been working on the project for about three months now and Carsabi is what resulted. We think its cool enough to share with other people who like good car deals.
Q. Who is behind Carsabi? What are your backgrounds?
A. It's just me and my housemate Chris - we're both nerds so its fun to build things like this. I've worked in network engineering and Chris has done distributed systems and machine learning so he actually had a lot to bring to the table. We only recently decided to work on the idea full time so we can add dealerships nationally - as I mentioned we've already added them in California to check the technical feasibility of crawling the web for cars the way Google crawls the Internet for pages.
Q. Does the Internet need another car-search service like Carsabi? What sets you apart from all of the other choices out there?
A. Sites like Autotrader and eBay Motors have a couple things going against them. First, they don't show the better deals you can be getting on places like Craigslist - which is probably one of the coolest sites on the internet, and is the best place to buy a car if you're willing to put in extra effort to save a few thousand dollars. Secondly, if you do want to buy from a dealership for peace of mind, sites like Autotrader or Ebay simply don't have all the available deals. This is because they need to contact each dealer individually and either sell them on a hefty subscription fee or a $150 per car surcharge - this leads to only a fraction of all dealerships signing up and significant additional costs being passed on to the consumer!
We're hoping to leverage our backgrounds in technology to make all the cars from your local dealers and classifieds instantly searchable, free of charge.
Q. Why associate yourself with craigslist? What was the thinking behind that? Also, why can't somebody just go to craigslist? Why use Carsabi?
A. We started with Craigslist because we thought people would really appreciate an easier way to find good deals on the site, and because places like Autotrader and Cars.com don't cover it at all. I don't know the exact stats, but there's something like 10 million cars listed on Craigslist every year, and we think not enough people know about these offers.
As to why you would use Carsabi instead of going directly to Craigslist - great question. Using Carsabi, you can quickly search for a particular car model filtered by price, location, mileage, transmission, etc with photos included in search results before going to the original listing. However, you'll end up on Craigslist either way, so we think Carsabi just accelerates your ability to find the car you're going to buy regardless of where it is online. This goes for dealerships as well - in California we've had a couple friends that were surprised at the discrepancy between pricing at different franchises when you can check all of them at once.