How Pinterest Started
Pinterest is one of the to 10 most visited websites in the world. and when Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp had the idea It was just a big unimaginable dream. Ben Silbermann was studying medicine and training to become a doctor when realized this was not the career path he wanted to take. So he switched to business where he would become a consultant and work on financial spreadsheets and reports. but again he just realized that he just wasn't enjoying himself.
Silbermann really wanted to build a product, so he pick up and moved to Silicon Valley where he would work for Google but again he was in the consulting position and he didn't enjoy himself so he left again. But this time he learned his lesson and he went after his dream. He teamed up with his friend, Paul Sciarra in New York and together they created an iPhone app called Tote which was for mobile shopping.
The app flopped, and they struggled to make any money, so they decided to pivot and focus in on something they both loved doing. collecting things. They really believed that the things you collect say so much about yourself. Then, Silbermann met an architect named Evan Sharp who quickly joined the team of trying to think of a platform of collecting things. They finally landed on collecting photos and in December 2009, they began working on Pinterest and released a beta version in 2010.
It was a slow start and Silbermann even hand wrote personal letters to the first 5,000 users giving them his own phone number and even having meetings with some of them to gage their interest and feedback. They say the first 100 to a thousand users on your platform are incredibly valuable and to take them really seriously. you see this done by airbnb as with their first 100 to a thousand users they were going door to door trying to gage their customer feedback. and after 9 months they still didn't have a breakthrough. They had about 10k users but the were steadily growing and gaining momentum. Eventually, the site grew and grew and tech blogs started to pick it up and write about it.
And it was in 2011 when they really started to gain popularity because the iPhone app released and today 80% of Pinterest users are on a mobile device. In that December of 2011, the Pinterest became a top 10 social media platform with over 11Million people on their platform per week. And in its latest funding in 2017, Pinterest was valued at $12.3Billion And in September of 2018, Pinterest announced that they had 250 million monthly active users, and the majority of growth is coming from the outside of the US.
And that's how pinterest got started!