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While Karp attracted investor enthusiasm and raised capital from the get-go, he was explicit about his focus being less on business and monetization and more on what he called the product. “I didn’t care how the bills got paid, or about facilities or H.R. stuff,” Karp is cited as saying in the New York Times (Walker 2012). Karp’s vision for tumblr seemed to stand on the three pillars of ease of use, design, and creativity. tumblr’s public facing texts (e.g., About page, FAQ, press clippings posted on the site) highlighted simplicity, customizability, interest-driven community, and creative self-expression. tumblr was positioned as making it easy to share “everything you find, love, hate or create” (tumblr 2007), an “effortless” way to “share” and “express yourself,” because “everything” is customizable (tumblr 2008). In 2012, corporate rhetoric shifted toward prioritizing creativity. A “what tumblr is for” segment was added to the Guidelines, stating: “Tumblr celebrates creativity. We want you to express yourself freely and use Tumblr to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, witness, and believe” (tumblr 2012). In 2015, “witness, and believe” was changed to “standing for” but other than that the mission statement has, to date, remained unchanged. The tagline, too, was updated in 2012 to “Follow the world’s creators” and has not been changed since. Karp’s interviews during the period focused on ease of use and creativity. In 2009, he is cited as saying that “the world would be a better place if more people could find, love and create things more easily” (Dannen 2009).

Karp wanted tumblr to be “a product-orientated company” (Cheshire 2012) like Google or Apple, rather than a social graph-driven one like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Those, he claimed: “are not tools built for creative expression,” adding that “nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook” (Schonfeld 2011). Trade journalists and the experts they interviewed seem largely to accept Karp’s vision of the period – tumblr was typically described by third parties as a stunningly simple, beautifully designed place for intelligent social networking and original self-expression. In terms of business, it was often called an investor darling guided by feeling. This focus on “product” paid off in terms of the site’s popularity with users. Numbers grew rapidly, reaching a point that Karp described as “we made it on the map” by 2010 (Schawbel 2013).