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Comment by jonnathanson | Hacker News Reader

An alternative hypothesis: maybe they reached the limits of the scalable, addressable, growth market for small-batch, handmade goods?

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An alernative hypothesis is that etsy was a predominently female community that (kind of conjecture) used to have a comminty driven social aspect. As it became more of a market place, and less of about discovery and community, most of those people moved to the "better version" of etsy.

Now, pinterest is the best of both worlds, a place full of like minded people driven by discovery of cool things (what etsy was) and the marketplace is like central.

I suppose gender doesn't matter, but it is worth mentioning these sites have a greater population of women and most of the products I have seen are jewelry, clothing or crafts that are made by women and likely bought by their peers.

I suspect, that as it became less trendy and creative, and more of a store, most of the top people left and went to pinterest. When a community has a their top talent leave, and their competitors are more in line with their customers expectations, then thay community is through.

Pinterest isnt something I use, but I have seen some cool designs and for discovery of certain things, it seems great.

Tl; dr, as an outsider, i think thar pinterest out etsy'd etsy

But Etsy was always a marketplace. It was never a curation site per se. Unless I'm missing something here? If anything, I see Etsy and Pinterest as much more complementary than competitive.

I, again never really used them, but I think it was likely a case of Etsy not realizing they were pinterest.

People went to see fashion, crafts and home made cool things. They started their own stores and shared in that experience.

Etsy never cspitalized on this. Pinterest, is the opposite. It was meant as an awesome place to find cool stuff, then, while people are admiring it, they did a deal with stripe.

Now Patrick Collison brings them up sometimes in interviews, and both Collisons did a class with Ben Silberman in Sam Altmans stanford class.

So, point is Pinterest attracted all the people who made cool shit. Etsy attracted all the people who bought it.

Match point.

It's an interesting way to look at it, and I guess I'd never thought of it that way. I'm still not convinced Pinterest and Etsy are substitutes, or at least not that they always have been. But I do agree that (from what I can tell) Pinterest is the more ambitious and strategic company, and that it has Etsy in a corner it can easily choose to close off at this stage in the game.

Or they had too much pressure to grow faster/keep growing fast and so diluted their brand by adding in more mass produced products.

They did, and then they failed to respond properly because their corporate leaders are a bunch of hippies.

Or they did, but there was pressure to keep growing because investors need to cash out of their over valuation. There's nothing wrong with having a company that serves a market and pays all its people a good wage. Unless of course you over valued a company and invested to much money to get paid out in your 5 year time frame then that's a really shitty thing.

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