How many barbeques have you actually thrown?
Of the barbeques you have thrown, how many of those have led to mutually beneficial arrangements?
Of those that have led to mutually beneficial arrangments, how many per BBQ?
Now how much time have you put in to arranging those BBQ vs Value gotten from those BBQs?
I don't know about your answer, but for me (substituting BBQ for dinner party) the answers respectively are probably about 10, 3, less than one, and WAYYY TO MUCH (if these types of arrangments were my only justification for throwing dinner parties.)
Now contrast this to how much time I've spent going through the free stuff offered on craigslist, vs the value I've gotten from it. The effort/value ratio is probably inverse. I think a startup that takes the "free services/free stuff" part of craigslist, but solves the unique problems of that segment (similar to what AirBNB has done for housing) could offer significant value.
I didn't do mere BBQs but threw full-on parties with the neighbors (who I didn't know at all) and other friends. Later two shared apartments in the same house combined held a huge party that spanned the house and included many of the neighbors. Many good friendships came out of that, and a couple of us moved in together later.
The BBQ idea is just a low-threshold variant of that which doesn't require copious amounts of alcohol.
For free stuff, we just have a place in the staircase where people drop things that are still good but not needed by their previous owner (mostly books). This works with zero explicit coordination.
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