There is hardly anyone in today’s modern world who doesn’t use social media handles. Gone are the days when social media was considered as a mere source of entertainment. Now, you can learn, grow and build a better community through social media.
Pinterest serves as one of the best examples of a prolific social media platform. It allows the users to exchange and develop ideas on any topic that piques their interest. The platform was founded by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra in 2010.
Let’s delve deeper and know the success of Pinterest and it’s founders.
How did it begin?
Many would say that the launch of Pinterest was nothing but a destiny for its founders because Ben Silbermann was supposed to be a doctor by profession. Everyone in Ben’s family is a doctor and he also believed that he would be one too. However, his interest in the business world and entrepreneurs eventually attracted him towards Silicon Valley. Big techies inspired him in the Bay area. Later, Ben found a job in the world’s biggest search engine giant, Google, as a Product Specialist. But since Ben didn’t have knowledge of the engineering sector, he was not able to grow in the company as a developer.
Finally, with encouragement from his girlfriend, Ben started thinking about launching his own business venture. Therefore, he joined hands with a colleague Paul Sciarra to launch a new tool called Tote. Unfortunately, the company suffered from technical difficulties and the founders faced a huge setback.
Both Ben and Paul struggled hard in finding investors for their brand and when they got one they used those funds to start a new platform called Pinterest. The Beta version of the platform was launched in 2010 and since then the company is consistently enhancing the tool to make it one of the largest in the world.
Obstacles in the road
In the beginning, Pinterest founders were at the received end of criticism. Being a photo-sharing website, the brand frequently had to deal with copyright breaches. Not only this, the Chinese government also banned Pinterest without any intimation in March 2017. In the light of copyright violations and online piracy, even India temporarily banned Pinterest in 2016.
However, the company overcame all those challenges and had grown from a scrappy organizational tool for images into one of the most popular social media sites across the globe. It has now become a household name in social media networking.
Success of Pinterest
After a lot of efforts and hard work, Silbermann and Sciarra took Pinterest to the pinnacle of success. As of 2021, the platform recorded 436 million monthly active users and generated over $2.58 billion in the form of revenue. The Success of Pinterest has been an inspiration to all the budding entrepreneurs across the world.
When Pinterest was launched in 2010, the founders didn’t know that this platform would become a go-to destination for every new idea discovery. The company managed to gather around 10,000 users in the first year of its inception and by the end of 2011, it became the 10th largest social media network with a weekly visitors count of 11 million.