Pinterest founder kept going to avoid embarassment of failure | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest founder kept going to avoid embarassment of failure

cnn.com

92 pointsacak13 comments

I'm impressed with Pinterest, don't get me wrong - but the article is painting over a much more normal, steady trajectory - a long, quiet bootstrap, followed by a steady rise amplified by the megaphone of VC funding.

The article speaks of a site that "few had heard of six months ago" - but even a simple CrunchBase lookup tells you that enough people had heard of the company six months ago to give them a Series B of 27 million dollars (http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest)

I understand that I'm not the intended audience of this article, and that few "mainstream" folks had heard of it six months ago - but this is hardly a case of sudden and unexpected stardom. On the contrary, it seems the founders decided after some time that this wasn't the sort of idea that they could easily bootstrap to success.

Indeed, TechCrunch hints at this as a possibility in their September article - written a full six months before SXSW, as they started to get traction in the startup community - where they muse that the company seemed to have quietly raised a 10 million round another six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...)

No wonder the public thinks of startups as overnight successes - the press gives them what they want to hear, and the startup itself has no incentive to correct it (lest they lose that publicity.)

I agree, ask any mommy blogger, and they'll tell you that you've been living under a cave if you haven't heard of Pinterest 6 months ago. We in the tech world live in a very different bubble.

That attitude you're referring to is dangerous as well. It makes startup founders uneasy, and worrisome if they don't experience quick success, while we all know it's a long long road that requires patience, and even some luck.

I was curious so I scraped my "new follower" emails from Pinterest and graphed them over the last year, separated by gender:

http://a.yfrog.com/img814/1332/r5g.png

It's a pretty small sample size, but at least among my friends it's really taken off in the last couple months.

I met Ben at a coffee shop a few years ago, and he explained Pinterest to me. Going into the meeting, I didn't get it at all. But by the time I left, I knew it would be huge.

His perseverance is impressive. He could have looked at the number of users he had and logically decided to give up anytime over the past few years. However, he believed in his product -- and now everyone does. Good for him.

Lets see how things are going to play. AFAIK they burned $70MM so far and have some issues with copyrights in re to all those pictures "pinned".

Where did you get the $70MM figure? Published reports show half that.

unable to find it now. it was in one of techcrunch articles. 76 to be exact. now it says half of it.

Good on him/them :-) I was one of the early users a couple of years or so ago and both I and my wife used it for a couple of weeks and didn't really "get" it. Now it's going gangbusters and it's actually found its audience.

Finding the right user base can be as time consuming, or even impossible, as finding the right life partner IMHO.

That's partly the reason every founder has kept going.

I stopped telling people alltogether. This way only "I" know of my many failures.

Telling people is a great psychological hack. Once you declare what you're doing, failing is a lot harder. If you keep it under your hat, quitting is easy.

Partly.

Also I think there has to be an understanding, whether it is learned in this process or learned beforehand, that every business fails in the beginning. Every business runs out of money. Every business has to fight to figure out how to keep going. If you are able to be successful, this is a step along the way towards success.

My business, which has been going on for 8 years, is starting slowly to shift from self-employment mode to startup mode (that transition may take the rest of the year). I have run out of money a couple times, had to go up against inlaws who said I wasn't cut out to be in business for myself, etc. There are times when I am so grateful for all the crap I have had to put up with in life (being physically bullied in public school, and much more I don't want to go into here) because these things, more than anything else have given me the confidence and ability to persevere regardless of what everybody else thinks.

But embarrassment has never been a reason I kept going. I kept going because I wanted to succeed eventually, or because I didn't want to go back to a standard job, or because of loyalty to my customers. And of course for me is part of it is plain old-fashioned stubbornness.

I first heard this website from business week a while ago - guess that was when most of the world began to notice it. I would not have been impressed from a tech-crunch article....hmmm...another photo sharing site targeted at a niche market/audience (craft community)

How smart they are! Same photo sharing plus "like", "follow", but they definitely focused on the right community and audience - a group of people who really love they are doing and are passionate of their work, and willing to share with people alike.

And even better, it appears most of the images are actually "pinned" from other web sites (which store and serve the images?), so they are building their pin-board business on top of the whole internet. (how are they spending those millions of dollars?)

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