Pinterest Got Its First Users From Strangers in Coffee Shops
Its founder also sneaked into an Apple Store to set browsers to his site, a lesson in doing work that does not scale.
YC Root Access · Lecture 1 - How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman, Dustin Moskovitz)He walked around Palo Alto and talked to strangers in coffee shops. Ben Silbermann, who was building a website called Pinterest, had a simple pitch that Sam Altman recalled as Silbermann saying, "will you please use my product."
When he was not recruiting over coffee, he was hurrying through the Apple Store in Palo Alto. He would switch the display computers to show his site for a moment before staff spotted him and threw him out. Shoppers walking in would suddenly see Pinterest on every screen.
Speaking at a startup talk, Altman, an investor who backs and teaches young startups, offered this as a lesson in how companies actually begin. You do not buy your first users with Google ads. You recruit them by hand, one by one, until you have a few people who respond daily and, over time, come to adore what you built.
That sounds slow, and it is supposed to be. Altman said early founders do not need very many users. They need a small group they can understand extremely well, stay extremely close to, and listen to. That closeness turns complaints and requests into decisions about what to build next.
Altman said "everyone thought Pinterest was a joke." Silbermann found users in person, explained the product, and borrowed Apple's computers to get a stranger to notice it.
It is an example of what programmer and investor Paul Graham called doing things that do not scale, in an essay Altman urged listeners to read. Hand recruiting brought Silbermann early users who could explain what was broken, what was confusing, and what would make them stay.
Describing early founders in general, Altman said the best ones are fanatical in that phase about small details, about the words used to explain the product, and about customer support. Altman was describing early founders generally when he said founders "feel physical pain when the product sucks" and correct flaws almost immediately.
The Apple Store trick did not last. Silbermann got kicked out. The coffee shop conversations produced early users, one by one.
Questions people ask
What does 'doing things that don't scale' mean?
It means doing slow, manual work in the beginning that could never serve millions of people, like personally emailing users or delivering a product yourself. The point is to learn what early fans want before you try to grow fast.
Why not just buy Google ads to get first users?
Ads can bring clicks, but early on you need conversation, not traffic. A few users who reply every day will tell you what confuses them and what to fix, while thousands of anonymous visitors will often leave without explaining why.