October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 7. Find That One Thing They Love
Darren Crystal
Darren was the co-founder and CTO of Photobucket, a photo sharing company that was acquired by News Corp in 2007 for about $250 million. He's been a TechStars mentor since 2007.
Shortly before Alex Welch and I co-founded 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 quickly. 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 just 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 ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.