Pinterest CEO: Success benefits from marketing rather than technology

Beijing Time October 21 news, according to foreign media reports, the United States famous social Atlas website Pinterest now has developed into the Internet field, the third largest recommended flow (referral traffic) the main source. Ben Silbermann, chief executive of Pinterest, has been describing the site as a tool to help users find inspiration.

Hibberman in Saturday at Stanford University Y Combinator Innovation Enterprise College to the audience, although Pinterest has already achieved greater success, but the site's success is not easy to obtain. He also said that the growth of Pinterest and Silicon Valley's traditional wisdom is not much relationship, in fact, Pinterest success mainly thanks to the company's marketing, especially the grassroots marketing, but not a better algorithm.

2010, three months after the launch of Pinterest, the site has only 3,000 users, of course, some of the users are active users, the other part is very love the site of users, in both categories of users, including Hibberman himself. Hibberman said: "I did not change the product, I think, maybe I just need to find someone like this." ”

To this end, Pinterest began organizing rallies at local boutiques and taking interesting photos of the people who attended the rally. At the same time, Pinterest also actively communicates with bloggers, encouraging and inviting them to participate in activities similar to "Post photo (Pin It Forward)", where bloggers get more invitations to use Pinterest Web sites, This also effectively helps Pinterest to promote the world.

Hibberman said that when he heard that party users were chatting with each other, talking about their real innovation projects rather than focusing on topics that might be from superficial relationships on Twitter and Facebook, he realized that Pinterest's strategy might start to work.

"There's not a lot of people in Silicon Valley using Pinterest, and I don't know if they still haven't used Pinterest," Hibberman said. In fact, what works for some people is certainly something that really feels important. ”

At the start of the Pinterest, many investors were reluctant to invest in Pinterest, and were not bullish on the site's non-technical founders (of course, the situation is very different today). In this regard, Hibberman said: "For investors, they have a lot of reasons to say ' no ' to you, but I will listen carefully to every reason." "In addition, investors did give Pinterest feedback on how Pinterest should be adjusted." Just a few years ago, VCs wanted the Pinterest site to pay more attention to text content and real-time, but today Pinterest has been very focused on the visual effects of pictures and more permanent.

In addition, Hibberman said, for some time, he thought the secret of Pinterest's success should be to find some of the Stanford graduates who did not discover to create better algorithms, but in the end, Pinterest site does not need better technology, but better marketing, distribution and promotion channels.

As a result, Hibberman says, if Pinterest's success can provide some lessons for others to learn, the experience is that there are many ways to succeed.