Seeksquare is Singapore’s anti-Craigslist

Classifieds like Craigslist primarily cater to service providers. If they want to offer something — a house for rent, a job, or a used car —  they can post an ad on the website and wait for queries to flood in.

Seeksquare, a YES! Startup funded company, flips the concept of classifieds upside-down.

Instead of forcing users to manually pour through hundreds of classified ads, Seeksquare lets consumers take the initiative by posting ads about what they are seeking, and wait for service providers to send in quotations to them.

Over 2,000 business providers from sectors like vehicle rental, travel, photography and more are covered, says Angela Poh, brands manager at Seeksquare. About 300 of them are property agents.

So, if John wants to rent a house around a particular area, he can go to Seeksquare to enter his request requirements, contact information, and select the relevant category — property for rent, in this instance.

The request will then be emailed to all the property agents in that category, who can log into the system and send John the quotation.

Seeksquare, from the looks of it, is designed to make the process of seeking and providing services more efficient than what’s out there on the market, at least in theory.

For service seekers, it eliminates the process of trawling through dozens of webpages to look for that apartment or web designer. They don’t need to type in multiple emails or make calls either. It’s like the iPhone’s Siri, except that you need to fill up a request form.

Using Seeksquare is also potentially more effective than blasting your request through social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which is an untargeted approach.

On the other side of the coin, Seeksquare is an additional avenue for service providers to reach out to potential customers. Since its launch in August 2011, the site has seen over 1,000 service requests, with an 80 percent closure rate.

Closures happen when service seekers remove their postings from the website, a rough indication that they’ve found at least one useful quotation.

A quick look at the list of current requests shows that people are actively using the site, with most requests receiving at least one quotation.

Seeksquare is free to list for both service seekers and service providers. The service’s revenue stream comes from a premium membership option as well as a cut of profits made by preferred partners, which would receive more information on consumers.

As a minimum viable product, Seeksquare does display serious potential in making life easier for its target markets.

Further areas to improve on include the overall look and feel of the website, as well as implementing features that would better match a property seeker to a property agent. For example, both parties stand to gain if service seekers have the option of including details like budget, location, and so on into specific fields.

Lastly, whether Seeksquare can succeed as a profitable business depends on its ability to attract a massive amount of new users while keeping existing ones. They will also have to make the premium membership attractive so that power users wouldn’t mind paying for it.

The service is still in its salad days though, so we’ll see how it iterates.

Seeksquare is founded by Damian Sia, a Republic Polytechnic alumnus.

More on Seeksquare:

RP Graduates Create New Hassle Free Shopping Experience
They make life easier for consumers

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