Reddit is awesome. And sometimes terrible. But mostly it's awesome.Why? Because it's authentic.Besides being maybe the most authentic place on the internet, it has other incredible upsides that many people seem to be unaware of.This brief story of Imgur will show what I mean.How Imgur came aboutReddit is the only reason why the image hosting service Imgur was built - a company that got up to a billion page views per month, makes millions in revenue, and raised around $60M over the course of its existence.Around 12 years ago, Reddit had a huge problem. Millions of users wanted to share images on the platform, but Reddit didn't provide enough capacities for that.At the time, this was a much discussed issue on Reddit, and there seemed to be no solution in sight. Well, only until one community member decided to take matters into his own hands and found Imgur (check out Alan Schaaf's historic post announcing Imgur)At the core, Imgur provided exactly what Reddit didn’t: storage capacities. In doing that, it solved a specific problem for a specific group of people. But that alone does not explain the incredible growth it has seen basically from day 1.What made Imgur special?As a company that emerged from the Reddit community (for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend there is just one Reddit community), it had some incredible competitive advantages that I want to discuss.Here’s what we can learn from Imgur’s story:Demand: There are many reasons why 90% of start-ups fail. Making stuff that nobody needs is certainly one of them. As a company that responded to the existing demand from a community, Imgur did not struggle with this problem at all.Audience: Even if you build something that solves existing problems, you might fail to distribute and market your product. As a member of the community he built for, Schaaf had a direct link to his customers, as well as an understanding of the community’s structure and culture.Authenticity: Companies often face people's skepticism. Often times they are seen as outsiders that want to profit off people's needs and problems. Since Schaaf was a community member, he was rightly seen as an insider who actually wants to help and solve a problem that he himself was facing.Empathy: Profit wasn’t Schaaf’s main motivation. He wanted to solve a problem for his own community. According to his own statement, his “irrational attention” to what people want at the expense of what's good for him and the company is what made Imgur so successful in the long run.The overall point here is that building a business around a community can lead to incredible success.Interestingly, I find more and more people who argue that genuinely putting customers and community first is a much better path to long-term success than just taking a short-term profitability perspective, generally speaking. The emphasis here is on genuinely, since basically every company claims to put customers first.Ultimately, there is much more to say about the lessons from Imgur, but I want to keep this short.I write about communities and business opportunities every week, so check out CommunityValidated if you find this stuff interesting. If you want to conduct your own community research, I can highly recommend the tool GummySearch.What do you guys think about Imgur’s story? Is that something that resonates with your own experiences? see hubwealthy.com/wealthy
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