Ben Silbermann shares two lessons from the early days of Pinterest

When he first launched Pinterest, Ben emailed all of his friends and family asking them to try the service. No one really got it, but there was a small group of people that were enjoying it.

“These folks were not who you think of as early adopters. They were folks that I grew up with, and they were using it for regular stuff in their life - what was my house going to look like? What kinds of food do I want to eat?”

This was the first lesson Ben learned:

“There’s a stereotype of where early adopters come from and [people think] they should be these technology-forward folks. And I just think that idea is really outdated now. So many people have these amazing computers in their pockets. Early adopters are coming from everywhere. And I think if we had been really dogmatic about wanting cool Silicon Valley people to like it, we probably wouldn’t have made the service we made.”

The other lesson Ben learned was to really take care of users.

Ben put his cell phone number in every customer support email, and when the service went down, customers would start calling him.

“Since it took us so long to get those users, we cared about them so much.”

Ben would also sit in coffee shops and ask people to try the service. Then he would watch them to see what they were doing to see if the product had rough edges that needed to be smoothed out.

“I would ask them to look at a button and push it. And right before, I’d say, What do you expect to see on the other side of that? And then right after, I’d be like, is that what you saw? And if it was different, I’d be like, We should fix that up.”

Full video: Y Combinator “Ben Silbermann at Startup School SV 2016“ (Sep 2016)