Startup watch: Adoos/Habitamos

With high-profile startups like FON getting so much attention, it's easy to miss some other promising startups in Spain. I last profiled a bootstrapped Spanish startup when posting about Trabber. But now I'd like to talk about another cool little gem that's gone under the radar here for a while. Habitamos, now rebranding to Adoos, is an online free classifieds service in the spirit of CraigsList. It's a bootstrapped operation that has grown into a traffic powerhouse, drawing over 700k uniques per month to check its 70k ads. I met Julian, the founder, at the WebDosBeta conference in Madrid about six months ago; since then, he's grown his team (all offshored programmers in Argentina) and expanded his site into Europe and all of Latin America. Although Europe is highly competitive, he's doing very well in Spain, and I think he's got a good shot at dominating the small but growing Latin American market. I think one of the biggest assets he's developed has been a very deep knowledge and understanding of traffic and conversion drivers. We've talked about these topics, and Julain's clearly running a tight ship, with solid analytic control of his business; that competency alone should make him an acquisition gem for any of the web-hopeless media groups around in Europe.

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