I picked this niche because: 1) I am a Nigerian. 2) Most potential competitors won't touch Nigeria. 3) I run a Nigerian forum that gets a lot of unsolicited ads.

The business model is: Adsense when the website becomes popular. It's boring, but really makes sense here.

Besides the obvious jokes about Nigerians and internet solicitation... it looks pretty good. Very fast response for me -- the servers are in Dallas (?). Not sure how that will work for actual Nigerians. They will route through Europe or Brasil. No direct US-Africa links AFAIK.

Once you start scaling up you'll need a search and better drill-down into cities and neighborhoods.

You should also consider services that assist Nigerian expats. I don't know what that might be, but you can probably think of some.

You should add pictures. When people are selling their stuff, pictures can help a lot. And add a thumbnail beside listings that have pictures.

I also find the table layout a bit information overloadish. You should list cities and then give categories. Like this website: http://www.usedvictoria.com/

Wow, after reading a few ads, I like Nigerians better than Americans.

I see that you order the states by number of posts. Won't this inconvenience users of less-popular states since they currently must scroll down?

It got really popular real fast I see. When I last saw it you only had ads in one city, now they are everywhere. This is the first such site for Nigeria, right?

I got a bit frightened when I read this one though: http://www.nairalist.com/overseas/dating/46 :)

Well done. I also love how spontaneous the ads are. This one for example made me laugh out loud: http://www.nairalist.com/lagos/services/136.

I'd suggest providing anonymous email (or phone #s) for your users. This "Craigslist-like feature" makes buying and selling to/from strangers safer and more discreet, and it shouldn't be too hard to set up.

It's clean, fast, and simple. However, I think the start page is a bit too busy. However, if you just list the States people might not bother clicking through. Not sure what the answer to that is! :)

You might want to do is allow people to select the State they want to see by default. Either via a cookie (but if most of your users use Internet cafes that mightn't work well) or by logging in. Or you could try guessing by IP address.

Also, you might not want to let user put their e-mails in a posting (like this one: http://www.nairalist.com/taraba/dating/1). If their address is on a public page it's going to get scraped and used by spammers.

Some work arounds to this might be to do what CraigsList does and allow people to use an anonymous address that you provide (which means you need to host and run your on e-mail server & service. Or use some JavaScript to obfuscate the addresses from e-mail harvesters, and so the actual address only get's assembled in an actual web-browser.

On the jobs section, I'd suggest categories for people to list their jobs under (Construction, IT, ...). It'll make it a little easier for people to search for jobs, especially if you get popular.

Anyway's good job, I hope it's successful, feel free to message me if you want more suggestions. :)

On the software side, I'd say that you'd probably want the ability to specialize the sub-apps (e.g. the columns in that table) over time.

For example, you may want to tweak the dating & jobs applications differently.

Also, on the spirit of psyklic, maybe it'd be better to specify which regions you want to see? A small bitmap is easy to store in a cookie. On the same note, letting people set their sort order (popularity vs alphabetic vs reverse alphabetic) may be useful.

I think it's surprisingly good. The layout seems clean, and very easy to use. I would suggest adding some more subcategories when it grows. For example separate dating into m4w, w4m, m4m, w4w sections.

I also like the fact that one city, Lagos, has the majority of the posts. That should help you get some traction. Right now, if I lived in some of the other cities, I really would not consider using this until it got more traction. But if I was in Lagos, it would be worthwhile for me to use it, and the market penetration for Lagos should bring in ads for other cities.

Since you run a successful Nigerian forum that has a problem with ads, I can really see this website get some decent traction. Traction seems to be the biggest problem with Craigslist clones, so I think this will be successful

seunosewa - Great job! The site is fast, very responsive, with a lot of content.

I see you are trying to keep it minimalistic, is this to change? I don't mean to sound superficial, but personally I never liked the craigslist look and feel. A little color, and a little aesthetics (IMO) go a long way.

Going off topic, I did want to say that this brings back fond memories for me. I spent the first 16 years of my life in Lagos, and browsing around, esp. in the Housing section, I see a few posting from Ilupeju (where I lived). Nigeria is a good country, and Nigerians will always have a special place in my heart. Good times, good times indeed.

I wish you the very best (Also, you might want to extend this to other countries and cities)

Edit - I see sarvesh had the same suggestion. Sorry, wasn't attempting to hijack that thread

We are working on a classified site in germany I found some ideas in http://www.loquo.com/en_us which is a spanish craigslist only much better structured

@Seun

You did a great job with nairaland, which is essentially the number 1 Nigerian website there is right now, So I'm sure you'll be fine with this one too

I might suggest looking into the design. A table isn't necessarily the best use of space. Try making the frequently visited links bigger

What's up with the cars? I read 15 of them, and nobody showed a price. I know that's not you, it's them. Must be a cultural thing.

Nairalists.com is a lot more better and Smarter

Visting Nairalists.com and see that its a lot more better than Nairalist

Beautifully clean design. Looks like it is already quite popular, too!

Looks like the classifieds business is growing in Nigeria. We always knew it would. That's why we created one of the most original classifieds online, Kerawa.com (http://www.kerawa.com).

Impressive! You might want to make it available to other countries and cities as well.

how about this job site listing for just high paying jobs from companies like GE and oracle for jobs in Nigeria

http://www.workforcenigeria.com