PINTEREST

Founders: Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, Ben Silbermann
Employees: 800+ employees
Pinterest is a web and mobile application startup that operates a software system designed to discover information on the World Wide Web. Registration is required for use. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann summarized the company as a “catalog of ideas,” rather than as a social network, that inspires users to “go out and do that thing.”

History

2009-2011: Founding

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta. Pinterest allows users to save images and categorize them on different boards. They can follow other users’ boards if they have similar tastes. The evolution of Pinterest is based on the shared interest of its users and relies on its members to produce the content. The most popular categories, as of March 2012, were home, arts and crafts, style/fashion, and food. Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site’s first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users.

Pinterest’s early growth wasn’t as Silbermann has expected. Four months after being launched, Pinterest only had a few thousand users. Comparing to Instagram which had about 1 million users after that same amount of time.

Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011. Early in 2010, the company’s investors and co-founder Ben Silbermann tried to encourage a New York-based magazine publishing company to buy Pinterest but the publisher declined to meet with the founders.

Nine months after the launch the website had 10,000 users. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011, brought in a more than expected number of downloads. The app would later be updated in March 2013. The Pinterest iPad app was launched August 2011. Pinterest Mobile, launched the following month, is a version of the website for non-iPhone users.

On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites of 2011” article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. The next month, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+. The same month, the company was named the best new startup of 2011 by TechCrunch. Noted entrepreneurs and investors includ e: Jack Abraham, Michael Birch, Scott Belsky, Brian Cohen, Shana Fisher, Ron Conway, FirstMark Capital, Kevin Hartz, Jeremy Stoppelman, Hank Vigil, and Fritz Lanman.

Initially, there were several ways to register a new Pinterest account. Potential users could either receive an invitation from an already registered friend, or they could request an invitation directly from the Pinterest website that could take some time to receive. An account can also be created and accessed by linking Pinterest to a Facebook or Twitter profile. When a user re-posts or re-pins an image to their own board, they have the option of notifying their Facebook and Twitter followers. This feature can be managed on the settings page.

2012-2017: Growth

For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. comScore recorded a unique users moving average growth of 85% from mid-January to mid-February and a 17% growth from mid-February to mid-March. At the South By Southwest Interactive conference in March 2012, Silbermann announced revamped profile pages were being developed and would be implemented soon. On 23 March 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users’ content. The terms would go into effect April 6. According to Experian Hitwise, the site became the third largest social network in the United States in March 2012, behind Facebook and Twitter.

On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered their policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. In addition, the Pinterest app for Android and iPad was also launched on August 14, 2012. On September 20, 2012 Pinterest announced the hiring of its new head of engineering, Jon Jenkins. Jenkins came from Amazon, where he spent eight years as an engineering lead and was also a director of develop tools, platform analysis and website platform.

In October 2012, Pinterest announced a new feature that would allow users to report others for negative and offensive activity or block other users if they do not want to view their content. Pinterest said they want to keep their community “positive and respectful.”Also in October, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts, or start from scratch.

Much of the service’s early user base consisted of infrequent contributors. The site’s user growth, which slowed in March 2012, could pick up as the site’s user base solidifies around dedicated users according to a comScore representative. In August 2012, Pinterest overtook competing micro-blogging site Tumblr for the first time in terms of unique monthly visitors, clocking in at just under 25 million.

In February 2013, Reuters and ComScore stated that Pinterest had 48.7 million users globally. A study released in July 2013 by French social media agency Semiocast revealed the website had 70 million users worldwide.

In 2014, Pinterest generated its first revenue, when it began charging advertisers to promote their wares to the site’s millions of hobbyists, vacation planners, and do-it-yourselfers. Ads on the site could generate as much as $500 million in 2016, estimates Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.

In October 2016, Pinterest announced 150 million monthly active users, 70 million in the U.S. and 80 million outside the U.S.Then in April 2017, they announced 175 million monthly active users, with 3x year over year growth in Germany and Brazil and 2x year over year growth in France and Japan.  

2013-2017: Acquisitions

In March 2013, Pinterest acquired Livestar. Terms were not disclosed. In early October 2013, Pinterest acquired Hackermeter. The company’s co-founders, Lucas Baker and Frost Li, joined Pinterest as engineers.

In late October 2013, Pinterest won a $225 million round of equity funding that valued the website at $3.8 billion.

In April 2015, Pinterest acquired team from Hike Labs, which had been developing a mobile publishing application called Drafty.

In June 2015, Pinterest unveiled “buyable pins”. Rich Pins – pins which have more information than a normal link – will get a new button that allows users to purchase things directly from partners that it’s working for. Users will see prices, be able to select specific types of a product (like the color), and then they can tap the button to buy the product. The item will arrive at the user’s door.

In December 2015, Pinterest launched a new way for users to monitor price drops on buyable pins. “When users save pins, they’ll get a heads up when a price drops in the form of an in-app notification and an email. They can then jump straight to that pin and make the purchase.”

In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site. On August 23, 2016, Pinterest announced that it would be acquiring the team behind Instapaper, which will continue operating as a separate app. The

Instapaper team will both work on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper. On March 8, 2017, Pinterest said it had acquired Jelly Industries, a small search-engine company founded by Biz Stone.