• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • The Famous Blog
    • Blogging
    • Social Media
    • SEO
    • Marketing
    • Design

Famous Bloggers

How To Blog and Start a Business

  • Contribute
    • Submit News
  • Login

Home » The Famous Blog » The History of Pinterest – How One Man Turned His Passion into Social Networking Site

The History of Pinterest – How One Man Turned His Passion into Social Networking Site

September 20, 2012 - Last Modified: September 20, 2012 by James Martell 3,578

The History of Pinterest

While recently perusing status updates from friends and family members on Facebook, I realized that my wife hadn’t signed in for the past four days. When I asked her what she’d been doing with all her online time instead, she said she’d joined this fun new site called Pinterest. And apparently she had something to say to the other social networks; in a fairly good impression of Donald Trump she declared, “They’re fired!” As a scrapbook enthusiast, she’s always looking for online inspiration to enhance both her digital and static books of family memories, and Pinterest seemed the perfect source for that.

Having never heard of the site, I quickly put my internet researching skills to use. In the process I learned that Pinterest is really high in demand right now, and not just by housewives and teenage girls.

Businesses are using Pinterest to boost sales and encourage word-of-mouth advertising. For instance, one company offers access to a special percent-off coupon when one of their pins reaches a certain amount of shares. Sound confusing? I was confused at first, too.

From Bookmarks to Pinboards

As a child in Des Moines, Iowa during the mid-80s and early 1990s, Ben Silbermann loved to collect things. It was his passion. Whether it was a postage stamp steamed from a piece of mail or a unique insect that landed in the back yard, he was always adding something to one of his collections. In his mind, what a person collects says a lot about who they are, deep down inside. Here’s an overview of Silbermann’s career starting from his graduation from college until now.

  • Post-Graduation – An engineer at heart, Silbermann graduated from Yale with a major in political science in 2003 and took a job with a consulting firm in Washington, D.C. Little did he know that while he was reading about the development of sites like Digg and TechCrunch that he’d go on to co-found one of the biggest social networking sites of 2012.
  • Google – Designing products like display ads, Silbermann recalls that he cajoled his way into Google. He saw his fellow employees as smart, and their jobs interesting. Being part of that kind of team made him feel very lucky. While there, he learned to think outside the box and his exposure to people behind some of the most amazing features and products the internet has ever known was priceless.
  • iPhone apps – After resigning from Google, Silbermann took a few months to redefine his goals. Paul Sciarra, a friend from college, reconnected with him and the two used their personal savings to create iPhone apps. While the apps didn’t garner much success, the experience of working on them and dealing with expensive contract developers taught Pinterest’s co-founders a lot of useful things they would need when later developing the social networking site.
  • Pinterest – In the beginning, the future of Pinterest seemed no more stable than those early iPhone apps. In one interview, Silbermann said, “I sent Pinterest to 200 of my friends and I think 100 of them opened the email. It was catastrophically small numbers.” He credits the initial success to the few people who began using Pinterest regularly in the way the co-founders had intended for it to be used.

What kept Silbermann going? His biggest reason for not giving up was fear of failure. He hated the idea of telling everyone who’d heard him sing the praises of Pinterest that it was not the huge success that they’d hoped. And besides, he thought, Google probably wouldn’t take him back a second time around. In his words, “They barely hired me the first time!”

Why Tweet When You Can Pin?

Pinterest was catching on with regularity by June 2011 and it now has more than 20 million users. It is one of the top social network sites, following behind Facebook and one other while coming in far ahead of professional sites like LinkedIn.

But it’s not just people like my wife who are pinning recipes and projects for holiday crafts. Businesses are catching on and pinning links to their websites as a way to showcase items, offer discounts, and a way to advertise their company without breaking their advertising budget. While the growth has been as stressful for Silbermann and his co-founders as it has been exciting, they’re only looking ahead.

ShareTweet

Filed Under: Business, Social Media

About James Martell

Follow @JamesMartell

James Martell is an Internet pioneer who discovered the lucrative world of affiliate marketing in 1999. He is a self-taught Internet entrepreneur and a leading expert in affiliate marketing training, outsourcing and natural search engine optimization. James is also the host of the "Affiliate Buzz", the first and longest running affiliate marketing podcast in the industry (since 2003). Google+ James Martell

Reader Interactions

Related Posts

  • Social Media Makes Sales Enablement Easy By Showing How Smart Business Can Be
  • Pokemon Go to Market Your Business3 Ways to Use Pokemon Go to Market Your Business
  • Whats up bloggers #5What’s Up Bloggers! Roundup #5 with Roxana Nasoi
  • Profound E-Commerce Blog9 Pro Tips for a Profound E-Commerce Blog

{ 8 Responses }

  1. AKS says:
    A great example of converting a hobby into a real business. Do not run after money, do what you like to do and seek for excellence, money and fame will follow. Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, they are all unique concepts and that is why they are working big time.
  2. Jannet says:
    I have been using Pinterest for long now but I wasn't aware that it had such a n inspirtational story behind it. I love it when common people like Ben Silbermann, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg rise from the ashes and give the world a new phenomena. Thanks for sharing this with us James.
  3. Mitz Pantic says:
    Hi james I haven't got on to Pinterest yet but I have some cool original pics to share there.. The only thing is that some people said that once you put the pic on there it is then owned by Pinterest. Is this right?
  4. akhilendra says:
    Thanks for sharing James, it's good to come across these inspirational stories. Pinterest is definitely the new buzzword in social media arena and widely used by all kind of people and not just limited to any particular kind of users.
  5. Kulwinder Singh says:
    Pinterest is best source to get traffic if we have good images in our blog, the interesting thing is that we get a lot of traffic by the images
  6. Gautam says:
    Piniterest is really an awesome Social Networking SIte That Help us make Pins...And It is So Good That Everyone can't wait to use it/............!!
  7. Aditya says:
    Hi James, Its inspirational how people somehow get to know about their dreams and suddenly make their own path on which others start following them.Such real life stories sometimes brings in some kind of motivation to go with the wind.Pinterest is growing at much faster rate than it is previously.And it now comes under on of the top social media sites.What else can anybody want to have at this stage of life.
  8. Ryan Biddulph says:
    Haven't hopped on board yet James but this is the 2nd Pin post in a row I am checking out. Might be another sign, although FB and twitter doing swell for me. Always love inspirational stories of folks chasing their dreams, and what it leads to. Thanks for sharing.

Primary Sidebar

Our Newsletter

Our Newsletter

Join our mailing list to receive the latest news and updates from our blog.

You have Successfully Subscribed!

Popular Articles

  1. Top 10 Sites Where You Can Get Paid to Write 115,651 views
  2. How to Get Targeted Twitter Followers Fast 92,036 views
  3. How to Set Half Rating Scale 1-5 (Poor to Excellent) by Words 86,789 views
  4. 66 Awesome Social Media Quotes 78,368 views
  5. 50 Traffic Sources You Should Milk Like Crazy 75,081 views
Schema Structured Data for wordPress
  • Blog
  • Contribute
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Disclosure Policy

Copyright ©2020 · FamousBloggers - All Rights Are Reserved · Powered by Genesis Framework

  • Login
Forgot Password?
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.
Go to mobile version