Flickr Trivia from Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake
January 2nd, 2007
From Inc.com’s How We Did It series comes a great little interview with Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, the founders of Flickr:
The original plan had been to create an online game. But they were just about out of money. And then Butterfield had this crazy vision of building a photo-sharing website, and before you knew it Flickr was a cultural phenomenon.
…
Butterfield: In February 2004, we launched Flickr.
Fake: George Oates [a Flickr employee] and I would spend 24 hours, seven days a week, greeting every single person who came to the site. We introduced them to people, we chatted with them. This is a social product. People are putting things they love–photographs of their whole lives–into it. All of these people are your potential evangelists. You need to show those people love.
We did all kinds of dumb, stupid things. But our unofficial slogan was, “F— up fast.” Make mistakes rapidly, learn from them, and move past them.
(Note: You can meet Stewart Butterfield at the upcoming UIE Web App Summit in Monterey, CA on January 21-23. He’ll be talking about Flickr’s experience with building web-based applications, along with Sean Kane from Netflix, Jim Whitney from Whiteboard Labs, Christian Rohr from eBay, and many others. If you develop web apps, you don’t want to miss this event. There are a few seats still available.)
