13 Things Your Startup Should LEARN From Pinterest

Pinterest is a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections. The  social discovery platform was launched in March 2010 and founded by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp and Ben Silbermann. Users label and create theme-based image boards. Users can populate their own boards with media found online using the Pin It button. On August 16, 2011, Time magazine published Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites of 2011”.

In October 2011, the company secured $27 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at USD $200 million. In October 2011, the site surpassed 421 million pageviews. In December 2011, the site entered the top 10 social networks according to Hitwise data with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest now beats YouTube, Reddit, Google+, LinkedIn and MySpace for percentage of total referral traffic in January, according to a Shareaholic study.

How Pinterest works:
As a user of the site, when you see an image that you want to “pin” to your “board,” you can capture it using a “pin it” plug-in and add it to your online profile. Everyone who follows you can view your pinboards, comment on them and add to them if they have permission. They can “repin” the images to their own boards and you can do the same with what you see and like on their boards. Clicking on the image usually takes users to the original source.

Pinterest founders shared these tips in various interviews with bloggers and journalists.

1. We didn’t spend a lot of time trying to get tech coverage.
2. We didn’t build this company to build a really hot tech startup; what we wanted to do was build a product — and also a company — that we wanted to work on for the next five or ten years.
3. Hiring the right people and building a really great team is important to achieving our vision.
4. We wanted to build a product that people actually use and that enhances their lives.
5. One of the most exciting things for me now that we have a product that people love, is building a team at a company that people want to work at.
6. Pinterest is growing for a variety of reasons. It enables users to clip things they like. It emphasize pictures over text, which are more visually appealing and easier to digest.
7. Pinterest has added to the lexicon of “like” or “retweeting” or “reblogging” or “upvoting” with the ability to “pin” content and then “repin” it across the site and other networks.
8. One of the reasons people love Pinterest is that it is like a “living, dynamic catalog,” created with people you know and people who share the same interests, says Sharp.
9. The common thread on our team is that all of them have real interests and passions outside of Pinterest.
10. We want to make Pinterest SO much better! We know there’s a lot we can do to make Pinterest faster, more useful and more fun-Sharp
11. The reasons behind this rise are no secret. In fact, Pinterest is following one of the oldest adages of sales and marketing-Sell to the woman. TNW
12. Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site’s users are women ages 25-44.RWW
13. the true potential in Pinterest may be in its ability to impact purchases, which is why retailers like Etsy, Nordstrom, and Lands’ End have taken to developing a presence on, and strategy for, this new platform.-AdAge’s David Teicher