Ben Silbermann On Pintrest - Lessons For Everyone!

Ben Silbermann is the new Mark Zuckerberg and almost everyone's watching the new startup on the block - Pinterest. Ben and his friends founded Pintrest few years ago and no one took notice. People were not ready to join and the VCs said 'No' to Pinterest founders who had no background in engineering. Yet, Pintrest kept doing what it believed and and today, they're turning everyone's head.

Amazing stuff from Ben's <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/08/pinterest-startup-mountain/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Pinterest's Unlikely Journey To Top Of The Startup Mountain • TechCrunch</a> :-

• Four months after launch, Pinterest had only 200 users.
• The team was pressured with the possible embarrassment of giving up and going back to jobs, but they "never seriously considered giving up".
• "We were obsessive about the product" - (Hint: Obsessiveness goes beyond just being 'very passionate', are you getting it?)
• We were obsessive about all the writing and how it was described. We were obsessive about the community. I personally wrote to the first 5,000-7,000 people that joined the site.

Reminds me of Michael Arrington saying, "Startups are hard and are certainly not for the crybabies". If you're planning to start-up or work for a start-up; are you willing to go to the extremes? It's not optional, by the way.
I can't help quoting my own experience. When CE was a hobby-site, I literally worked on it for over 4-6 hours every day; after regular 6-9 hours of my regular job. It now looks 'a lot of work', but back then; it was 4-6 hours of serious enjoyment after a day of boring job.