Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9Find 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 ...