How to get your startup found on Tumblr
TL;DR
Tumblr is a free blogging and social platform where a startup runs its own blog, posts text, images and video, and gets found through tags and reblogs. Posting costs nothing, and paid Blaze campaigns start at $10. It suits consumer, creative and design startups whose buyers are young and online, and it does little for B2B software.
What is Tumblr?
Tumblr launched in 2007 and has been owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, since 2019. Every account is a blog with its own address (yourname.tumblr.com) and a feed called the dashboard. People follow blogs, like posts and reblog them: a reblog copies your post onto another blog with a credit back to you, so a good post keeps travelling long after you publish it.
The audience skews young. In 2025 Tumblr told Business Insider that Gen Z made up half of its monthly active users and 60% of new sign-ups. The culture runs on fandoms, art, writing, humour and niche hobbies, and users are quick to mock posts that read like ads.
The domain authority of 86 shown here belongs to tumblr.com. Treat a Tumblr blog as a place to find readers and fans, and keep your SEO work on your own website.
Who should post on Tumblr?
Good fit:
- Consumer brands with a visual product: games, fashion, art supplies, books, stationery, music.
- Creative tools and apps whose users already share their work online.
Skip it:
- B2B and enterprise software, since buyers do not look for vendors on Tumblr.
- Teams that want to repost press releases and leave. Tumblr users ignore or ridicule that style.
How much does Tumblr cost?
- Account, blog and posting: free.
- Blaze puts a post in front of more people as a sponsored post. Packages cost $10 for about 2,500 people, $25 for about 7,000, $65 for about 20,000 and $150 for about 50,000, and you must be 18 or older (Blaze help).
- Tumblr Premium is an optional subscription that removes ads, raises posting limits and includes one free Blaze post per month (Premium help).
How do you share your startup on Tumblr?
- Sign up at tumblr.com and pick a blog name that matches your startup. The first blog you create becomes your main blog and its name becomes your address.
- Fill in the blog title, description, avatar and header image, and add a link to your website in the description.
- Publish posts that people want to reblog: a sketch from your design process, a short comic, a behind-the-scenes photo, a useful list.
- Tag each post accurately. Tags are how people search and follow topics on Tumblr. The User Guidelines treat irrelevant tags, misleading links and blogs built mainly for affiliate marketing as spam.
- Reply to asks and comments, and reblog posts from your community with a comment of your own.
Tips to get more out of Tumblr
- Post native content. Upload the image or video itself so the post works on the dashboard without a click, and put your link in the caption.
- Use five to ten specific tags (#indiegame, #pixelart) over broad ones.
- Post on a steady schedule with the queue so the blog stays active when you are busy.
- Test Blaze with $10 on a post that already earned organic reblogs before you spend more.
- Show the people behind the product. Personality beats polish here.
Our verdict
Tumblr is free, open to any startup and still home to a large young audience that shares what it likes. It pays off for visual, playful consumer products run by founders who post like a person. For B2B software, spend the time elsewhere.
More options: see all founder communities. Planning the launch around this listing? The Fe/male Switch startup game walks women founders from idea to first customers.