Tumblr Hits 1 Billion Monthly Page Views and I Now See Why

Posted by Jeff Lu on March 9, 2010

I created this blog on wordpress as a platform to share my passion: early stage technology companies, and I encouraged my friends to do the same.  They started blogging with Tumblr about their passion: music, fashion, and art.

Now I always envied how stylish their blogs looked but I was happy with what I have on wordpress and I invested a lot of time in the learning curve.  However, yesterday I was feeling spontaneous and wanted to start blogging about music that I like.  I was going to do some research on how to add a SoundCloud widget onto my WordPress but I thought this would be a perfect chance for me to check out Tumblr.

My God, was it easy to set up.  It was so easy to set up that I accidentally set up 2 domains and couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to delete one of them since I was at work.  The domains are www.jeffreylu.tumblr.com and www.jefflu.tumblr.com and I can’t decide which one I want to keep yet because both of them have music content on it already.  Admittedly, the design isn’t great right now but it literally took me 5 minutes to set up both sites.

To me, Tumblr is like a cross between WordPress and Twitter.  It takes me less than a minute to load songs and videos up.  I have to give the Tumblr team credit in building  a product that’s both extremely stylish and relatively customizable but extremely intuitive and easy to use.  The combination of style and function makes it a very sticky product.  It’s been 2 days and I think I made over over 10 posts already.  Even their landing pages are awesome.  I try to keep these lessons in mind when creating landing pages and calls to action for consumers.

Anyways, I learned this morning from one of Tumblr’s investors that they hit a few major milestones this past month, one being 1 billion page views.  I wrote in an earlier entry, questioning whether a company should focus on building great products first without a business model and try to scale, or build a product with a proven business model and then try to scale.  Tumblr and Twitter are examples where if you focus on scale and succeed, you are inevitably going to hit a home run.

Congrats to hitting these milestones

*Edit* I had an after-thought in terms of monetization. Why doesn’t Tumblr add a “buy” function to their music player and partner with a vendor like Amazon or iTunes? Just a thought.

Use What You Preach!

Posted by Jeff Lu on February 25, 2009

Tweet!

A few of us at Cascadia were working late last night and we had an interesting discussion about investment banking and the sectors we cover.  I said that my favorite part about being an Internet investment banker is that for the most part, I get to actually use and test the products myself.  I “get” it when a Company offers a compelling consumer service because I use these services everyday.

I could read research reports and Techcrunch all day about consumer technologies but there’s no research like first hand research.  Take Twitter for example.  If I was reading a business description of Twitter, it would read something like this: “Twitter is a micro-blogging social network platform that empowers users to constantly and easily communicate with their friends.”  If you could dissect that sales pitch you would think: “why would I want to do that? Doesn’t Facebook or my blog already serve that function?” WAIT! There is more to read… read on »