Business Week - Photobucket: One Big Under the Radar Startup
Photobucket: One Big Under the Radar Startup
Heather Green
This week, I met with Photobucket. Until a month ago, I had never heard of them. But their name started to bubble up among the conversations I was having with VCs, and then they came into town.
Photobucket is a company that has bootstrapped its way into attracting aroung 14 million users. And they're adding 2 million users a month. Founded in 2003, the company says its cash flow positive and has in total raised $2.5 million in venture money.
What they do is pretty simple: They do image and video hosting. Essentially, people upload photos, animations, and now videos, to Photobucket, and then they use a little bit of code to put the bits and pieces of their lives on blogs, eBay, Neopets, or 60,000 other sites that work with Photobucket.
There is one thing I found interesting and another thing that I think is confusing. Photobucket decided early on to be a tool, not a community. So they just follow people around, through their lives, as they move from site to site, without worrying about what's hot or not.
Comments