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James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months

November 25, 2025

“Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes.

Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this.

“I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.”

James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago:

“It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.”

He continues:

“What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.”

James gives another example:

“We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.”