Making It
I like this little story on Quora from Stewart Butterfield, one of the co-founders of Flickr. In response to why the company dropped the “e”, he explains it was because the guy who owned the flicker.com domain wouldn’t sell. But then he goes on to give this extra anecdote:
Bonus story: for a long time when I searched Google for “flickr” I got a “Did you mean flicker?” suggestion. I knew we’d have “made it” when that stopped. Eventually that message did stop showing up … and by 2005 or 2006 the search results page even asked “Did you mean flickr?” when searching for “flicker”. That’s when I knew it was big! (Google seems to have stopped doing that since.)
It would be great to collect the stories from all the founders who saw their products go big about when they knew they had “made it”.