Pinterest Raises $200M

you're missing the point of pinterest, it's not "things i want", but rather things i like. The whole premise is showcase a personal aesthetic. it is through these aesthetics that we learn more about each other. obviously there is overlap between the things we love, like maybe old cars, or sailing yachts, or (of course) cats, and the things we want, but pinterest isn't about consumerism at all. if you spend any time on it, you'll see passion, places to visit, vintage trinkets, and about a billion wedding dresses. people use it a lot for planning and mood boards. It's easier to explain something visually than it is with words (sometimes) and pinterest taps into that aspect. It's mainly for (I suppose) "creative types", those that are visually stimulated by colors, fonts, textures etc. And of course cats.

For me it adds very little value (by comparison I find fb to have 0 value and twitter to be very valuable)

I don't actively design day in and day out,so when I'm online I want to be informed... for me Pinterest is just eye candy and entertainment and not a tool that I use often, unlike twitter.

My wife however...

Remember the dot com bust days, when companies with ZERO revenues raised BILLIONS on user (vanity?) numbers ?

I use it as a tool to collect and save infographic data... quite a good tool but the valuation is kinda beyond my understanding!

Hi mynameishere,

I'm the developer on the Growth Team @ Pinterest that built the experience in question.

First, thanks for the candid feedback. We always strive to understand users and better their experience (in this instance from the very first second they come in touch with Pinterest).

The overhaul of the unauth home page, which is internally dubbed "inspired wall", is a concept that we introduced and refined over a period of a few months. As the name suggests the idea behind it is to instantly connect with you on the level of a story(or a use case) of Pinterest that can inspire you and stick with you as you go through the signup and orientation process. It is a hint of what Pinterest could be for you not written in words but rather expressed through a visual composition. The further you get into the product the more we tailor the experience around things that you love and the story that they tell about you.

We actually did quite extensive testing around this experience because it is such an essential and sensitive part of the product. This included concept research (where we tried to identify what got people to use Pinterest), A/B testing (where we quantitatively showed that results were better than the previous home page), and user testing (where we qualitatively showed that people get better understanding and satisfaction with the product). One of the key findings was that people were able to instantly grasp how Pinterest is different from other popular services such as Instagram or Flickr. To put in music channel terms - it did a good job at explaining how MTV is different than VH1.

Obviously the work is not done and things can be improved. The inspired wall is still a relatively fresh concept and we continue iterating over it.

We plan on releasing an engineering blog post soon that will detail the process of rebuilding our unauth home page and the several iterations that it went through to be successful. Stay tuned and again thanks for the feedback.

Ludo