Pinterest SuccessStory

The success story of Pinterest is truly very motivational. It went from being the brainchild of Ben Silbermann to the eye candy of social media within the span of a few years.Pinterest is basically a free online tool or website which helps users to gather, organise and pin things that they discover on blogs and websites that appeal to them. Pinterest users or ‘Pinners’ find this idea very useful as it stores plenty of creative stuff for places to travel, dress patterns, recipes, DIY products and a whole lot more. They can save the ideas that interest them on their own online boards. Pinterest also enables users to follow the boards of fellow Pinterest users they find interesting.Silbermann was originally supposed to become a doctor but somewhere just before his college graduation, he got sucked into the fascinating world of tech blogs. This opened new doors for him. He decided to move to California and meet Paul Sciarra who later became the co-founder of Pinterest.

Benjamin managed to get into Google even though he didn’t have an engineering background. His time at Google taught him to think out of the box and gave him the courage to venture out on his own.During his childhood, Silbermann was interested in collecting different things like stamps and insects. He felt that the things people were interested in could say a lot about their personalities. His childhood hobby sparked the idea for Pinterest. He started developing the portal in 2009 and the site first started operating as an invitation-only open Beta in March 2010.

Initially Silbermann emailed 200 friends and sent them an invitation to use Pinterest. Out of that, about a 100 responded. Even after 9 months, Pinterest attracted about 10,000 users and not all of them used the site every day. The future did look bleak for a while but Silbermann refused to quit.Until 2011, Silbermann and his staff of programmers worked out of a small apartment. In 2011, the idea slowly surged to list among the Top 10 social networking sites with approximately 11 million hits per week. TechCrunch also declared it the ‘Best New Start Up’. It was steadfastly becoming recognized in the world of social media.