Hi there, I am Yash, First full-time hire at Pinterest. I was hired when Pinterest was just an idea in an apartment with 3 people thinking about it and Ben (founder, Pinterest) was looking for a product engineer. From going to 3 users to 70M users and 1 employee to 500+ employees, it has been one interesting journey. Before that I worked briefly at Symantec and a Design studio. AskmeAnything about my career journey!
In the early days how did you encourage users to install “Pin it” button and use it regularly. Was it solely on the ‘Pin it forward program’?
It is extremely hard for startups to gain the first momentum and make user create content on their networks. It is Chicken- -and-eggs problem. Some startup I know even pay someone to write the content on their platform.
In the early days the first set of users were our friends and family. All of the user base graciously volunteered to use the product and provide feedback. Upon registration we congrtulated the user and encouraged the user to install the bookmarklet. Apart from that I dont remember doing anything special to promote the bookmarket. Once in few weeks I ran some numbers comparing the pins created via bookmarklet to repins and uploaded pins. The numbers were small but healthy. Ben reached out to every user personally and got feedback. People loved the product, we got lucky. Pin it forward was a major campaign that brought a new set of users that we did not know directly. Yes this user base created a lot of pins since the product fit into their life style. We gave 5 invites to every user to invite people that that had taste in a field. Things naturally evolved. Very true. Its extremely hard. We suffered the same for about 8-9 months. Things were slow. The campaign was a game changer for us. The campaign brought the right set of users to our doors. Ben made a very smart call to go after the demographic that would fetch us power users. Every startup needs to figure out how to reach their target demographic. You can use Facebook ads and target your reach to the right audience but it costs $$$. Some startups pay and create initial content. Which works too. "Fake it till you make it. Nothing wrong". Its hard but has to be done. Its slow and frustrating but once you persevere you made history.
How did you manage to decide on the starting point or solving the problem that Pinterest currently solves? From bootstrapping to scaling up, did you have a Product Manager? I am interested in knowing about the process you used to narrow down to the one use case you perfected and built the product ground up.
