This little anecdote provided by Caterina of Flickr/Yahoo helps to illustrate that sometimes when you’re selling yourself, you need to go beyond the conventional means.

Several companies — probably more than a dozen — have approached us to provide printing services for Flickr users, and while we were unable to respond to most of them, given the number of similar requests and other things eating up our time, one company, QOOP, just went ahead and applied for a Commercial API key, which was approved almost immediately, and built a fully-fleshed out service. Then after the fact, business development on our side got in touch, worked out a deal — and the site was built and taking orders while their competitors were still waiting for us to return their emails. QOOP even patrols the discussions on the Flickr boards about their product, and responds and makes adjustments based on what they read there. Now that’s customer service, and BizDev 2.0.

And sometime when you want to do something, just do it and work out the fine details afterwards. This has been a somewhat proven model as illustrated by Napster’s free-for-all file sharing, ringtone businesses not clearing music rights at first, or YouTube’s dominance in video delivery with its sketchy copyright violations, etc.