When a young man with a childhood habit of collecting things like insects and stamps combined his passion for design with engineering skills, Pinterest was born. Ben Silberman along with his friends and colleagues Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp started the development of Pinterest in December 2009, and launched the site in March 2010, as a closed beta. This is not after Ben graduated from Yale in 2003, worked with Google in the sales organization department, and designed many iPhone apps which were never launched. Ben and his friends wanted to create a social platform that will allow people to collect their favorite pictures and images and share them with their friends and family.
Working at Google was not all that interesting for Ben, especially when the company wouldn’t allow him to build products. Everyone listened to Ben’s complaints about Google‘s attitude except his girlfriend Divya, who encouraged him to find any means to do whatever his heart wants to do, and he did. He resigns from Google to team up with his college friend, after which they met with Evan – who designed the grid layout in Pinterest. Pinterest was launched just like every other site with most of the early users coming from Des Moines, Iowa – the beautiful city Ben was raised. This aspect of the history of Pinterest is attributed to the fact that Ben’s parents were doctors and his mother had introduced the site to all of her patients.
Initially, there were about 5,000 Pinterest users with numbers growing very slowly and moving towards 9,000 through April and early May 2011. But when a user named Victoria created a chain letter called “pin it forward” that allows bloggers to exchange pin boards about what home meant to them, things instantly changed. People started using Pinterest in ways that not even the inventors would have imagined. Map collections, tour guides, and look-alike boards all started springing up from every corner. By December 2010, Pinterest had grown to 10,000 users. Early in 2010 Ben and the investors in the company decided to sell the network to a magazine publishing company based in New York; the company declined.
The launch of the iPhone app for Pinterest in March 2011 and Pinterest mobile in September 2011 for non-iPhone users resulted in increased popularity and millions of downloads, making the company among “the best 50 websites of the year 2011” in the Times magazine list. In early 2011 the company got $10 million in financing and another $27 million in October 2011 after it was valued at $200 million. This investment really helped the company grow so that by December 2011 Pinterest had become one of the top ten social network sites with more than 11 million visits every week. In January 2012 ComScore, an internet analytics firm reported that Pinterest had about 11.7 million visitors, making it the fastest social site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitors mark.
In March 2012 the company updated the term of service to remove the policy that gives it the right to sell content uploaded by the user, while co-founder Paul Sciarra left Pinterest on April 2012 for a consulting job. The company raised $120 million in funding in May 2012, opened to everyone without request or invitation in August 2012, and by March 2012 the site was valued at a staggering $1.5 billion. In 2022, Pinterest is a publicly traded company valued at $15,7 billion.
10 Interesting Facts About Pinterest
1. Launched in 2010, Pinterest was the fastest-growing website of all time, garnering about 11 million active users within a year after its launch.
2. The platform boasts more than 200 million monthly active users from around the world as of 2020.
3. Pinterest’s user base makes it one of the top 10 most visited websites in the United States.
4. About 80% of user content on Pinterest is created by brands.
5. Nearly half of all U.S. moms are active on Pinterest.
6. The average user spends around 14 minutes per visit on the platform.
7. Pinterest is most popular in the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
8. Pinterest was recently valued at $12 billion.
9. The site helps facilitate over 2 billion searches every month.
10. Over 20 billion ideas have been uploaded to the platform since its inception.
Don’t miss visiting the site here: https://pinterest.com. You can also see our dashboard there at https://pinterest.com/businessideas/the-biggest-business-ideas/
Check some other cool startup articles:
Ning.com – The Start-Up Story Of Mark Andreessen and Gina Bianchini
The Amazing Start Up Story Of Imgur And Alan Schaaf
The Start Up Story Of Craiglist.org And Its Founder Craig Newmark
Alphabet Inc’s (Google) History – The Start Up Story of Sergey Brin And Larry Page
Jerry Yang, David Filo and Yahoo.com’s Start-Up Story
When Did Twitter Start? How Jack Dorsey Founded The Company
How Dropbox Was Founded – The Start-Up Story Of Drew Houston
What Is Mad Mimi’s Start Up Story – An E-mail Marketing Company Started 100% From the Ground