Do More Faster India. Brad Feld

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Chapter 9 Find That One Thing They Love

       Darren Crystal

       Darren was the cofounder and CTO of Photobucket, a photo-sharing company that was acquired by News Corporation in 2007 for about $250 million. He’s been a Techstars mentor since 2007.

      Shortly before Alex Welch and I cofounded Photobucket in 2003, Alex had launched a photo-sharing site in which we noticed that people were doing something that we didn’t want them to do. We had intended them to share photos with one another, but they were embedding their photos on other sites on the Web.

      At first, our natural instinct was to shut this behavior down because it’s not what we wanted our users to do. Luckily, we didn’t act on that instinct. Instead, we started watching what our users were doing, and we discovered that most of them didn’t even care about the photo-sharing site. Instead, our service turned out to be a way for our users to show their photos on sites like eBay, LiveJournal, Craigslist, and social networking sites like MySpace.

Instead of assuming that we knew what our users were doing, we figured it out by carefully monitoring our logs and studying our analytics. Rather than tell our users they couldn’t do certain things, we stepped back and decided that if this is what they love to do with our service, we should make it even easier for them to do it. That’s when we started Photobucket.

      Users were jumping through all kinds of technical hoops to find free sites in which they could host their photos and link to them from other sites. Most of those sites were eventually shutting down that sort of behavior, breaking images on other sites. What a pain. We created Photobucket to make this behavior that we were observing to be dead simple to do and designed the site for this one specific use case.

      Users loved it! We put up a way that users could donate five dollars through Paypal, and these donations started flowing in to cover our costs of maintaining the site. You know you’re on to something when the community starts donating money to make sure it stays alive.

      From there, the growth of Photobucket was staggering. At one point, we were one of the top 25 sites on the Internet in terms of traffic, with over 24 million visitors monthly. We eventually sold the company to Fox Interactive Media, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. All of this happened because we found something users loved and wanted, and then obsessively made it easier for them to do it. If you really pay attention to what your customers love, your path becomes obvious—even when they’re doing something you don’t think you want them to be doing.

      At Techstars, we’re fond of telling each company to look for the one thing that you couldn’t take away from your customers without them screaming at you. Once they find it, we encourage them to make that one thing even better. Photobucket is a great example of a company that did one thing really well, even though it’s not what the founders initially set out to do.

      Techstars 2007 company Intense Debate stumbled across their one thing, too—making blog comments great. Intense Debate originally started as a live, online, real-time debating system. It quickly morphed into the best blog-commenting system on the Web and was adopted by tens of thousands of sites. The company was acquired in 2008 by Automattic. The founders of Intense Debate deserve tremendous credit for focusing on what their users told them to—threading blog comments and enabling bloggers to easily reply to commenters through email. In this case, they found the two things their users love.