Ben Silbermann describes how Pinterest launched with just 3,000 accounts and few active users, then grew through grassroots marketing like meetups and blogger campaigns. The team focused on shipping one standout feature and iterating on design starting November 2009.
Chapters
We're just thinking about what would be cool to build, what do we just want to see? And really what we wanted to see was we wanted to see something out there in the world. We just wanted to see somebody using something. Somebody asked me once, what's my big plan? What would make me really happy? When we were starting Pinterest, I was like, geez, I just want to go somewhere and see somebody that I don't know using something that I made and have it be kind of useful. That is what I thought was really exciting. And so we came up with this idea for something that was web based, really simple, something that we would use personally, and that was Pinterest. We learned a lesson from doing the iPhone app. And it was that even though we had all these ideas of all these great features that we're cramming in, we weren't great at one thing. There wasn't one thing that was special about it. People talk a lot about a minimum viable product or when you should ship something. And my advice is you should ship when you have one thing that you're proud of, one thing that is worthy of someone's time. And that could take you a long time and it could take you not very long at all. But if it's not worth their time to check out, you're not going to get any good feedback on whether it's good or not. They're going to see it and they're going to be like, this is crap. Thank you for the feedback. Start again. And we decided that the one thing we had to do really well if we were going to make a website about collections is we had to make it look really cool. If it didn't look cool, then no one is going to make a collection because they don't want to show their friends because this thing that they just made looks really lame. So this is the first version of Pinterest. It didn't look very cool. In November 2009, we started building the basic infrastructure and started really iterating on, on what it could look like. How could we make it look really interesting? So we went through a lot of versions of this vertical grid, horizontal grid, both left side nav, right side nav, top nav, different logos. And we waited until we felt we had something that we thought was really cool. And we would show it to people along the way, we would show them something that we thought was a little bit of an improvement. And when we finally felt ready to launch it, I emailed out to all of my friends, like all my family. I'm like, look at this really cool thing. We were really jazzed about it and basically no one responded. There was basically no response at all. 3,000 accounts, not active users accounts, is pretty bad if you have three people actively pushing it out to every single person they know every day for four months. But there was something that was really positive, and it was that the few people that used it, myself amongst them, actually really loved it. And instead of immediately changing the product, I was like, maybe I can just find more people like me. And that also fits with our current operating strategy, since we don't have very good engineering resources. So we're just going to market this thing. And that's what we started to do. We started to have meetups, and we also marketed online. So we had a campaign with a blogger that I had met named Victoria. And the thing about it that really worked was we found this little group of people that were interested in the same thing, and we showed them how the service could be helpful to them.
