From 5,000 to 442 million users – Journey of Pinterest!
2 min read
Founded in 2010 by Ben Silbermann and his team, Pinterest had only 5,000 users till August of 2010 which today has reached 442 million just in a decade! With everyone in the family in the field of medicine, Ben Silbermann also started off with medicine till his junior year when he decided to get into business!
He started as a business consultant and later got into an IT department because that’s where the vacancy was. Ben looked up to entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney. Once while watching Pirates of Silicon Valley he got inspired to move to Valley especially by the quote in the movie saying – “There might be something going on in California.”
He was in love with the place and found it fascinating that everyone was creating something there. He got a job in Google in Customer Support and loved their working environment. Later he had an idea that he wanted to develop at Google, but they did not let him do it. Listening to his girlfriend he quit his job and was on his way to start his entrepreneurial journey but then the 2008 financial crisis happened!!
It was hard to find investors as everyone was now investing in gold. He soon teamed up with a college friend – Paul Sciarra and started with Tote a catalog on phone. Days into investor meetings fetched the duo with just NOs. Ben while checking with one of the many investors, who was also supposed to say no, said “You’re going to miss out, this is a hot deal” and it changed everything.
After fetching their first investment the duo was no more interested in Tote and that’s when Pinterest came into existence. Visiting a friend in New York, Ben met Evan Sharp who shared the same ideas as Ben. Later in 2009, Evan came up with some grid layouts and in 2010 Pinterest was launched! Ben sent an email to 200 of his friends telling them about Pinterest and most of them didn’t get it. Getting only 5,000 users by August, the future of Pinterest did seem difficult, but Ben refused to quit. Later in May 2010, a lady named Victoria organized a program named ‘Pin it Forward’ among bloggers asking them to exchange a pinboard about what home meant to them.
Soon in 2011 Pinterest was named one of the top 10 social media networking websites and it started booming! Today Pinterest is listed on NYSE trading at $65+ (200% above its IPO) with a market cap of $40 billion+ and users at 442 million by August of 2020.
Source – Business Insider
