Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Great. They’ve got a name for the product, they’ve got this super innovative grid UI, they’re ready to ship. January 2010, they launch. They email all of their friends in Palo Alto, everybody that they know from Google, and Divya’s friends at Facebook, and Evan of course is going to Facebook at this time, and nobody uses it. Everybody is like, “What is this for? What are we supposed to do with this?” What’s interesting to me too about this point in this story is, it’s not like they had done an exercise and said, “Okay, who’s our core target user? What is our ideal customer profile?” We all know today, Pinterest is, I believe is two-thirds used by women. They didn’t come up with it and say, “Okay, what product can we build for moms?” It was very much, “Here’s a thing that is very agnostic to who’s using it and what they’re using it for and let’s just see.” It’s interesting to think about—I’m sure you’ll get into this—but how did they find that the right use case and who they’re real target user is. Before that happens though, they’re trying to do everything they can to get their friends to use it, to do growth hacking, just all the rave of this. What they think is going to be really cool, Ben goes to the Apple store in Palo Alto and—I don’t know if he does this everyday or just for a couple of days—he goes to all the computers and he changes the home screen to Pinterest, all the computers in Palo Alto. Has precisely zero impact. They applied to TechCrunch Disrupt and they get rejected.…

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