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You have arrived at the web home of Noah Brier. This is mostly an archive of over a decade of blogging and other writing. You can read more about me or get in touch. If you want more recent writing of mine, most of that is at my BrXnd marketing x AI newsletter and Why Is This Interesting?, a daily email for the intellectually omnivorous.

January, 2013

Making It

An anecdote from the co-founder of Flickr about knowing when they had 'made it'.
I like this little story on Quora from Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr. In response to why the company dropped the "e", he explains it was because the guy who owned the flicker.com domain wouldn't sell. But then he goes on to give this extra anecdote:
Bonus story: for a long time when I searched Google for "flickr" I got a "Did you mean flicker?" suggestion. I knew we'd have "made it" when that stopped. Eventually that message did stop showing up … and by 2005 or 2006 the search results page even asked "Did you mean flickr?" when searching for "flicker". That's when I knew it was big! (Google seems to have stopped doing that since.)
It would be great to collect the stories from all the founders who saw their products go big about when they knew they had "made it".
January 8, 2013
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Noah Brier | Thanks for reading. | Don't fake the funk on a nasty dunk.