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Pinterest Had 9 Users After Launch. Ben Silbermann Went to Craft Fairs to Find the Rest.

By Ben Silbermann · Product & Building · 1 min read

Pinterest launched to nobody. The founder drove around meeting strangers at craft fairs to get his first real users.

Key Points

Ship when you have one thing you are proud of — not when you have a hundred half-baked features
Pinterest found product-market fit by going to craft fairs and watching real people use it
The first iPhone app they built failed because it tried to do too many things at once

I just want to go somewhere and see somebody that I do not know using something that I made and have it be kind of useful.

One Thing Worth Someone is Time

Ben Silbermann and his team built an iPhone app before Pinterest. It flopped.

The problem: they crammed in every feature they could think of. Nothing was special.

The lesson hit hard. Ship when you have one thing you are proud of. One thing that is worthy of someone is time.

Built Something They Wanted to See

Pinterest started from a simple wish. Silbermann wanted to see someone — a stranger — using something he made.

Not millions of users. Not venture scale. Just one person finding it useful.

That tiny ambition built a $40 billion company.

Craft Fairs and Coffee Shops

After launch, almost nobody signed up. The growth charts were flat.

So Silbermann drove around to craft fairs and design meetups. He watched real people use Pinterest in front of him.

That is where product-market fit came from. Not analytics dashboards. Face-to-face feedback.

The Minimum Viable Product Lie

People talk about MVPs like you should ship garbage fast. Silbermann disagrees.

Your MVP should have one thing that makes someone stop and say "this is cool."

That could take a long time. Ship it anyway. But make that one thing perfect.