South by Southwest
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Tech start-ups are thronging to the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Tex., hoping to jump-start their new businesses by cozying up to Silicon Valley venture capitalists and influential bloggers. But Jenna Wortham reports in Monday’s New York Times that they might do better to study the more low-key approach of Pinterest, the hottest start-up of the moment.
Pinterest, which lets users create “boards” to collect images from around the Web and share them with friends and strangers, showed its service to “lifestyle bloggers, crafters and hobbyists” in its early days, Ben Silbermann, a founder and the chief executive of Pinterest, told The Times. “The early people were from the area where I grew up, in Des Moines, and the site grew very organically from there.”
The approach defies the conventional wisdom that Internet success comes from building a service for San Francisco and New York, and spreading it from there.
Pinterest won’t say how much it has grown, but data indicate the company’s traffic has been rising exponentially. Nielsen reported that Pinterest had 16.1 million unique visitors in January in the United States alone, double the number it had in November.
That is the kind of gain that most entrepreneurs in the South by Southwest crowd can only dream about.