Pinterest doing things that don't scale

In the crowded landscape of social media and content discovery platforms, Pinterest has carved out a unique niche. Today, it stands as a visual discovery engine where users find inspiration for everything from home decor to fashion, recipes to travel destinations. With over 450 million monthly active users globally, it’s hard to imagine that this digital giant once relied on guerrilla marketing tactics as simple as changing the display screens in Apple Stores. Yet this unscalable, hands-on approach was precisely how co-founder Ben Silbermann helped spark what would become a visual discovery revolution.

The Birth of Pinterest: A Vision Meets Desperation

Before Pinterest became a household name, it was just an idea in the mind of Ben Silbermann, a former Google employee who had always been fascinated by collection and curation. Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, Silbermann had collected insects and pinned them to boards – an analog precursor to what would eventually become his digital pinning empire.

After leaving Google in 2008, Silbermann teamed up with Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra to build something new. Their vision was to create a platform where people could collect and organize things they loved from around the web. Unlike Facebook, which focused on connecting with friends, or Twitter, which emphasized real-time updates, Pinterest would be about discovering and saving ideas for the future.

The team launched the first version of Pinterest in March 2010. But despite their enthusiasm and vision, growth was painfully slow. In the first nine months, Pinterest had fewer than 10,000 users, a minuscule number compared to other social platforms launching around the same time.

“Those were pretty desperate times,” Silbermann would later admit during a talk at the Economic Club of Chicago in 2017.

The Apple Store Hack: Desperation Breeds Innovation

It was during these desperate early days that Silbermann and his team resorted to one of the most famous examples of “doing things that don’t scale” in startup history: the Apple Store hack.

The strategy was as simple as it was audacious. Silbermann would visit Apple Stores in Palo Alto and beyond, quietly moving from one display computer to another, opening the web browser on each machine, and changing the homepage to Pinterest.com. The hope was that curious shoppers browsing the latest Mac computers would stumble upon the site and be intrigued enough to check it out when they got home.

“I remember they used to go into the Apple stores and change all the default homepages to Pinterest.com on the Macs sitting on the table,” recounted entrepreneur Shaan Puri, who shared this story on his podcast “My First Million.”

This guerrilla marketing tactic wasn’t just a one-time desperate move; it became a regular part of Silbermann’s routine. He would spend hours driving to different Apple Stores in the Bay Area, methodically changing browser homepages to Pinterest, before store employees would eventually catch on and reset the machines.

The effectiveness of this tactic, in terms of direct user acquisition, was questionable at best. As Puri humorously pointed out: “This guy’s spending hours driving to Apple stores to try to get like 5 impressions. Like who’s going to be like ‘I went there for an iPhone but you know what I really want to do? What was that website I saw on the demo computer? I’m gonna go sign up and become a daily active user.'”

Yet the Apple Store hack represented something more important than an efficient growth strategy – it demonstrated the founders’ unwavering belief in their product and their willingness to do whatever it took to get it in front of potential users. This hustle, this refusal to give up despite slow initial growth, would become a defining characteristic of Pinterest’s early culture.

Beyond the Apple Store: A Multi-Pronged Approach to Unscalable Growth

The Apple Store hack was just one of several unscalable tactics that Silbermann and his team employed in Pinterest’s early days. They recognized that to build a platform centered around curation and collection, they needed to attract the right kind of early users – people who naturally enjoyed collecting and organizing visual content.

Silbermann personally emailed the first 5,000 users of the platform, seeking feedback and building relationships. He gave out his personal phone number to users and would take customer service calls directly, listening to their experiences and suggestions. This hands-on approach allowed the team to iterate quickly based on real user feedback, making the product better with each version.

The team also organized in-person meetups, particularly focusing on creative communities like craft bloggers, designers, and photographers – people who naturally created and curated visual content. These meetups weren’t just marketing events; they were opportunities to demonstrate the platform, gather feedback, and build a community of passionate early adopters.

“We did a lot of things that don’t scale,” Silbermann would later reflect, echoing the famous advice from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham about the importance of doing unscalable things in a startup’s early days.

The Slow Burn: Pinterest’s Unconventional Growth Trajectory

Unlike many Silicon Valley startups that prioritize explosive growth at all costs, Pinterest took a more measured approach. Even as the user base began to grow beyond those initial thousands, the company maintained its focus on quality over quantity, on building a platform that people would genuinely love rather than one that would simply attract attention.

This approach meant that Pinterest didn’t have the meteoric rise that characterized companies like Instagram or Snapchat. It didn’t have what one former employee described as its “media moment.” Instead, it grew steadily, building a loyal user base that genuinely valued the platform for what it offered.

By 2013, the stampede of new users started to slow noticeably. Pinterest set up war rooms where employees spent hours poring over data to understand the cause of the slowdown and what they could do to address it. Some attributed it to the rise of Instagram, others to the struggle to attract male users, and still others to the limits of the word-of-mouth marketing that had worked in the platform’s first years.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told one of his employees that he thought Pinterest was interesting but “niche,” predicting it would end up with 200 million to 300 million users. This assessment might have pushed other companies to race toward growth at all costs, but Pinterest maintained its deliberate approach.

The Anti-Facebook: Building a Different Kind of Platform

As Pinterest continued to grow, it increasingly defined itself in contrast to other social media platforms. While Facebook, Twitter, and later platforms like Snapchat focused on real-time sharing and social interaction, Pinterest positioned itself as a place for personal discovery and future planning.

This distinction became even more significant as concerns about the negative impacts of social media grew. Pinterest avoided many of the controversies that plagued other platforms, from fake news to cyberbullying, partly because of its different focus and partly because of the deliberate choices its leadership made.

“Pinterest’s CMO is pitching the service as one of the truly positive corners of the Internet,” reported CNN Business in 2019. This reputation was burnished by the company’s bold attempt to combat vaccine misinformation on its platform, blocking searches related to vaccinations to curb the spread of anti-vaxx content at a time when other social media sites struggled to tackle the problem.

The perception of Pinterest as a safe haven helped the company as it prepared for its IPO in April 2019. Marketers and users were eagerly searching for a less toxic alternative to the Facebook-Google duopoly that dominated digital media.

The Legacy of the Apple Store Hack: Lessons in Persistence and Authenticity

Looking back at Pinterest’s journey from those early days of changing Apple Store displays to becoming a publicly traded company valued at billions of dollars, several important lessons emerge for entrepreneurs and startups.

First, the willingness to do things that don’t scale can be crucial in a startup’s early days. The Apple Store hack might seem inefficient or even silly in retrospect, but it represented a founder’s determination to get his product in front of potential users by any means necessary. This kind of hustle and creativity can make the difference between a startup that survives its difficult early days and one that doesn’t.

Second, Pinterest’s story highlights the value of patience and persistence. In an era of overnight successes and rapid growth, Pinterest took a slower, more deliberate path. The company didn’t chase viral growth tactics or pivot to whatever was trendy; instead, it stayed true to its original vision of being a platform for discovering and saving ideas.

Third, the importance of founder authenticity cannot be overstated. Silbermann built Pinterest based on his genuine interest in collection and curation. This authenticity informed not just the product but how the company approached growth and user acquisition. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, Pinterest focused on attracting users who shared this interest in visual discovery and collection.

Finally, Pinterest’s journey demonstrates that there’s more than one path to success in the tech world. While the “move fast and break things” mentality has dominated Silicon Valley discourse, Pinterest showed that moving more deliberately and thoughtfully could also lead to significant success.

From Desperate Tactics to Deliberate Strategy

The contrast between the desperate early days of changing Apple Store displays and the deliberate, thoughtful approach that characterized Pinterest’s later growth is striking. Yet there’s a through-line of authenticity and user focus that connects these different phases.

Even as Pinterest grew beyond the need for guerrilla marketing tactics, it maintained the spirit of those early efforts – a commitment to getting the product in front of the right users and building something people genuinely loved. The methods changed, becoming more sophisticated and scalable, but the underlying philosophy remained consistent.

In 2017, when Silbermann reflected on those “pretty desperate times” at the Economic Club of Chicago, he wasn’t dismissing or minimizing those early efforts. Instead, he was acknowledging them as an important part of the company’s journey – a reminder of how far they had come and the persistence it had taken to get there.

The Human Touch in a Digital World

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the Apple Store hack story is how it humanizes the often abstract process of building a tech company. It reminds us that behind every digital platform are real people willing to do whatever it takes to bring their vision to life.

Silbermann didn’t just build Pinterest by writing code or raising venture capital; he built it by driving to Apple Stores, by personally emailing users, by hosting meetups, and by taking customer service calls. These human interactions, these unscalable efforts, laid the foundation for what would become a global platform.

In an industry often characterized by automation and algorithms, Pinterest’s early growth tactics stand as a reminder of the power of the human touch. Sometimes, the most effective growth strategy isn’t a sophisticated marketing campaign or a viral feature – it’s a founder willing to change computer displays one by one, believing deeply enough in their product to do whatever it takes to share it with the world.

Conclusion: The Value of Doing Things That Don’t Scale

Today, with hundreds of millions of users and a market capitalization in the billions, Pinterest has come a long way from those days of guerrilla marketing in Apple Stores. Yet the spirit of those early efforts – the willingness to do things that don’t scale, the focus on building something people love, and the patience to grow deliberately rather than explosively – continues to influence the company’s approach.

For entrepreneurs and startup founders, Pinterest’s journey offers a valuable counterpoint to the “growth at all costs” mentality that often dominates tech discourse. It suggests that sometimes the best way to build something enduring is to start with unscalable, human-centered efforts – even something as simple as changing the homepage on display computers in Apple Stores.

As Shaan Puri noted, “That doesn’t happen, but the hustle story makes it worth it. I’ve done several of those where the hustle story makes it sound like you were going to the nth degree even though it made zero sense to do so.”

Sometimes, it’s precisely these seemingly irrational acts of hustle and determination that lay the groundwork for rational, sustainable success. Pinterest’s Apple Store hack may not have directly led to thousands of new users, but it embodied the persistence and creativity that would ultimately help the platform grow into what it is today – a visual discovery engine used and loved by millions around the world.