Sim Whatley and J.C. Butler, Dubizzle

Hi, my name is Sim Whatley, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Dubizzle.com.

My name is J.C. Butler, also Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Dubizzle.com.

So, what’s your story?

Sim: Dubizzle is an online classified service. It is basically taking classifieds that are typically on paper, or historically on paper and bringing them online. So, it has all the benefits of the listings that are in your paper but also of being able to sort through them by price, type of car, type of job, all that sort of stuff.

JC: The story is that Dubizzle was really born out because of necessity. Both Sim and I were here looking for jobs. We had friends that had really found great jobs and set up well here in Dubai and we just found that the whole process was quite difficult. Everything was too expensive. There were lots of people who were coming and going with lots of things to trade and there were tons of jobs out there, but all this was really difficult to find. So, you know we set up Dubizzle to bring transparency to that market - where a lot of people could deal directly with one another and that worked really well. I mean it worked very well for us as customers, as users of our own site and for other people as well, even before we became big.

How easy was it to introduce the concept to this market?

Sim: From what we could find, there wasn't anything like the sites we were used to in the West. We both came from the States and there is a very prominent classified site there called Craigslist. We actually looked to see if Craigslist was available here in Dubai and at that time it was not. Things like Gumtree were in the UK. So, the model existed elsewhere and it is a natural sort of evolution from paper classifieds where you have to read through everything to find what you want, to an online version where it is much easier to find what you are looking for. You have pictures and all that sort of stuff. So, I don’t think the concept itself was arbitrary or foreign to most people.

I think when we were in the early days when we were explaining what Dubizzle was, it was more about explaining the benefits of online. So, the fact that it was free, where the competition in print was paid for; the fact that you could add pictures; you could have an unlimited description; that, not at the time but later on, you could pin it on a map so that people knew exactly where the location was - and that those benefits far outweighed the existing model. So, it took off real well and it took off pretty quickly.

What challenges did you come across when you were setting up?

JC: Yes, there were challenges because it is not like in most western countries, for example, where you just set up your internet start-up in your garage and it cost you no money and all that. There are all sorts of legalities and visa issues and all sorts of things. So, in the beginning we just had to basically not be a company. We just were not a company; we were just a free service that did not need to incorporate because we were not charging any money. Both Sim and I started with $12,000 and that is all we had and we had to live off that as well as fund our little business.

So, yes I mean over time we had to kind of figure out how we could exist as an entity here and get revenue and things such as that on very, very little money. And, you know, we found some clever ways - incorporating overseas and being kind of a department of another company here that allowed having a media representative here and you know doing visa runs and things such as that.

Did you guys come from digital backgrounds?

Sim: JC and I both studied business. Neither of us knew how to code. JC had some design experience that he was able to use in Photoshop to help us out in the early days but the learning curve was very steep. I think that was one of the benefits of us starting our website is that we looked at it purely from an end user perspective. So, we did not look at it from a code perspective and say; "Well that is not possible because it is very difficult to do," or that there are limitations to the code or the infrastructure is not there. When we outsourced the original development to a team we just said; "This is what we want." So we were not limited in that thinking which I think was a benefit to us. Not that the original site was any good because it wasn’t - it was terrible. Which also helped us with iterations. We strongly believe in doing things quickly, learning from those iterations and developing new iterations quickly.

So, I think the first site was up for maybe three months before we redesigned it and redeveloped it, and that one was up for maybe six months before again we redesigned it and redeveloped it. Then when we redesigned it the last time, we finally brought in some developers in-house. But that was the real key learning curve that we needed to happen but it also gave us an advantage of not knowing what our limitations were in being able to learn quickly.

Additionally the limitations of our budget were also of benefit. So while you see many start ups in the West and Silicon Valley getting angel investors or seed start-up of $50,000 or $150,000, $200,000 - we had $12,000. So, it made us think much more lean, it made us get value out of things that other people probably would not have. We bartered a lot in the beginning, you know we tightened our belts and we made it happen.

How did you market Dubizzle when you first launched?

JC: We did do kind of the basic things like Google Adwords, that was kind of just a trickle everyday. Now it is getting, I guess, a bit of a baseline to the side, but what really needed to happen was word-of-mouth. So we tried to get as much press as possible. We would actually go and take photographs of people on nights out and then put them up just to get people into the site. I think that our real philosophy was that we needed to just get people to the website and then ensure that they have a fantastic experience and the word would then spread. I think that really shaped the way that we do things and that really made us have an intense focus on product.

Sim: The buzz word these days is social media and how do we use social media to increase awareness of our brand. I think we were using that before Facebook was big and My Space was sort of big but no one knew how to use it. I remember very early on us thinking; "Who is our target audience, where are they and how do we tell them about Dubizzle?" Because that is what we want and we want them to spread that. So we were using things like discussion forums which were the earlier version of social media.

You think about how users spread word-of-mouth and whether it is over dinner or whether it is through text messaging, through phone, or through email, chat rooms, discussion forums. How do we create discussions, how do we create conversations where people are already talking about what Dubizzle provides? I think we came from a pretty unique place where what we were providing was free, which is always beneficial, and it was more useful than what they were currently using. So we felt very empowered to spread that word because, at the end of the day, we were helping people’s lives become easier.