Postlets is certainly one of the companies you can utilize should you wish to syndicate your listings around the web. Asher Matsuda and Raymond Chen started Postlets about 2 years ago as a side project — and are still plugging away with development while continually adding customers. I got the chance to ask Asher several questions via e-mail to better understand the business and where they plan on taking it.

Question: First, what does Postlets do (quickly) and why did you to start the site?

Answer: Postlets is a listing marketing tool. Users upload their listing data and images through easy-to-use forms to create a single-property website. We then help them distribute their listing across the web via syndication and by providing HTML source code, widgets and the like.

We started Postlets because we felt we had a novel idea — build a simple tool that allows anyone to create a stylish, well-formatted ad on craigslist by generating the HTML code for them. This was back in early 2005, before vertical search engines were around, so the original release of the tool was basically a one-trick pony. Then came Oodle, Google Base, Trulia et al, which opened up additional channels through syndication. Since we already had the listings data in a structured form in our database, it was obvious that we could repackage the data and provide additional exposure for our users’ listings.

Question: I believe this is a side project for you now — do you have plans to turn this into a profitable business that would enable you to focus on it full-time?

Answer: Yes, eventually. Working on Postlets part-time and bootstrapping has its challenges, but it does provide certain advantages as well. It’s allowed us to focus on building a solid product and growing the user base and not so much on short-term profit maximization. That said, we recently started charging for our premium listing upgrade called Postlets PLUS so that we can invest more in product development and further scale the business.

Question: What sort of technology is Postlets built with?

Answer: Nothing sexy, just your basic LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The site runs on some dedicated hardware, but we are exploring distributed computing solutions to help us scale more effectively. We also plan to incorporate more Javascript and Flash to enable rich media ads and further improve the user experience.

Question: How many active customers use your service?

Answer: We have around 50,000 users. Growth has been completely organic so far, but we plan to plow some of our revenue into marketing later this year.

Question: Can you share the breakout by percentage of customers that use your service for your three types of classifieds: homes for sale, rentals, and cars & trucks?

Answer: The current mix is roughly 70% real estate for sale, 25% rentals and 5% cars & trucks. It became obvious pretty quickly that the service resonates most with real estate agents and property managers.

Question: What’s your main focus right now — growing your customer base, developing new features, or something else?

Answer: Our primary focus for the past two years has been on building out the core product and acquiring new users. We’ll continue to refine the core functionality and feature set, but we hope to spend more time next year developing new products. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Asher for taking the time to answer my questions. I think it’s great to see two passionate guys building a business while maintaining day jobs. I wish them the best of luck going forward and hope they succeed in creating a sustainable business model in this space so that they won’t have to maintain their day jobs forever.

If you’re curious, here is a table of their existing syndication partners.

* For sale by agent/broker listings only
** For sale by owner listings only