
Pinterest’s Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain - motti_s
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/08/pinterest-startup-mountain/
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karpathy
Pinterest is a compelling story. As mentioned in the article, the main source
of their monotonic growth early on was that their users loved the product, and
personally recommended it to their friends. Seeing a product grow all by
itself with little other advertising or marketing is always a good sign.

I actually use Pinterest myself to keep track of cool gadgets, books, and
since I am in academia, papers, research, algorithms and ideas.

I've though about Pinterest's success for a while, and I think its special
sauce has to do with permanence, where as most other sites are currently
focused around recency. Posting an item to Pinterest feels additive: I am
collecting and curating good content, and the entirety of my work is displayed
for all to see in very few clicks. On the other extreme is
Twitter/Facebook/Google+, where I've even stopped posting good content unless
it falls in specific time on a weekday, or I know that it will sink into
oblivion, never to be seen again. The time of a post can easily be the
difference between 0 and 50+ retweets. (I tested this.)

The other major aspect of its success, I believe, is that Pinterest is very
visual. This simple truth is obvious, but rarely executed on: People love
pictures, and they don't like reading too much.

So Pinterest is doing many small things right, but more importantly it's
filling a gap in people's desire to express themselves. Luckily, the team
realized this and stubbornly believed it.

~~~
iusable
fantastic point! ben had spent a ton of time researching the psychology of
collecting and you seem to be highlighting that really well - "Posting an item
to Pinterest feels additive"

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idan
Stories like this give me hope as a bootstrapped founder. One year into
building a thing (skillsapp.com), we have users but no hockey-stick on our
charts. It takes time to refine and refine some more. Pivots aren't always
about solving the same issue a different way. It's unsexy, but sometimes it's
a long learning slog until you hit on the right formula.

Respect to them for having the fortitude and not giving up.

~~~
zxcvb
Your startup scares me. I don't have much viewable to the public therefore you
would rank me pretty low without actually realising that I might be an amazing
programmer who has just spent all of his time being amazing rather than being
part of the scene.

I hope your software is never taken seriously.

~~~
zxcvb
I don't understand why this was down voted? Surely I make a good point? I'm
sure there is a lot of amazing talent that don't spend any time at all working
on stuff that other people will ever get to see beyond the domain of what they
are working on?

Sorry I don't have a github account or a blog but I was too busy making sure
Google search actually works.

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motti_s
Stories like this make you wonder if some companies pivot too quickly.

~~~
ed209
I believe they do. I think we're getting too caught up in this concept of fail
fast, fail early, fail often and we're not sticking with ideas long enough to
see if they could be a success.

After all, sometimes ideas don't fail because of the idea, they fail because
of execution or sales or marketing. In which case moving on to a new idea is
not going to yield any better results. People should stick with their current
idea while learning all the other stuff they need to know to succeed and stop
blaming the idea.

"Don't look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the
opportunity." -Paul Arden

~~~
dageshi
I guess it's because it's easier? If you've done a v1.0 of a startup learnt
some lessons, you look around and see what's "hot" right now, you see what
investors/angels are throwing money at and think "I can take the lessons I
just learnt and apply it to _insert hot market here_ and this time I might
have some money to work with".

~~~
ed209
> I guess it's because it's easier?

I don't think it's easier. It's just that when you're stuck on your current
idea, creating a new idea _seems_ easier - but it's a false economy.

> apply it to insert hot market here

I don't chase what other people are doing, that's for the samwer brothers ;)
(although let's not forget they have multi-millions so they are probably
successful by their own defenition)

