Choosing the right work, and how Flickr found it
Flickr started as a feature inside a game nobody remembers. The right thing turned up while the team worked hard on the wrong one.
Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
In 2002 Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield were building Game Neverending, an online game played in a web browser, at their small company Ludicorp in Vancouver. Among the tools inside the game was a way for players to share photos. The photo tool drew more interest than the game, and the team set the game aside and turned the tool into Flickr, which launched in 2004 and was bought by Yahoo the following year.
The line is often quoted with a sentence in front of it about how often people work hard at the wrong thing; the version here keeps only the conclusion. Its practical meaning is about direction. Hours spent on a product nobody wants are lost however well they are spent, and a team working at a steady pace on the right thing will overtake one working nights on the wrong one. The dot-com years left plenty of examples: fast, carefully engineered sites for businesses that never had enough customers, where the effort was real and entirely wasted. The hard question for a founder each week is less about effort and more about whether the current work is still aimed at the most promising target.
Flickr supports that, and it also complicates it. The team found the right thing because they were working hard on something else. Nobody would have predicted photo sharing from a planning session; it showed up as a side effect of a busy product with real users. Choosing the right work often depends on doing a lot of work first, some of it on the wrong thing, and watching closely what happens.
That is why the word “probably” deserves attention. Fake did not claim that effort is irrelevant, only that direction usually matters more. A team that stops working hard while it waits to be sure of the right thing will seldom find out what the right thing is.
The useful habit sits between the two. Work hard, and review regularly what the work is showing, ready to drop the original plan when something else is clearly pulling harder.