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.<p>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 (<a href="http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest" rel="nofollow">http://www.crunchbase.com/company/pinterest</a>)<p>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.<p>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 <i>another</i> six months prior (which I believe has been confirmed true)(<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-already-pinned-down-10m-at-a-40m-valuation/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/15/sources-pinterest-has-alrea...</a>)<p>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 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.<p>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.
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 <i>actually found its audience</i>.<p>Finding the right user base can be as time consuming, or even impossible, as finding the right life partner IMHO.
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)<p>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.<p>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?)