Startup Mantras Podcast - The Magic of Personal Touch

Tune into this Episode  of the Startup Mantras Podcast with Anu Khanchandani, exploring the transformative power of personal touch in the startup world through the inspiring journey of Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest. Discover how Ben's dedication to personal connections not only shaped Pinterest's early days but also provided unique insights that fueled its growth. Learn practical tips on leveraging personal touch to enhance customer engagement, forge meaningful connections, and build a resilient startup network. This episode is a must-listen for any entrepreneur looking to bring a human touch to their digital ventures. Join us to uncover the magic that personal connections can bring to your startup journey.

Mon Apr 29, 2024

TRANSCRIPT

Hi! Welcome to the Startup Mantras Podcast. This is Anu Khanchandani - Engineer, Entrepreneur, Startup Coach for the past 25 years.I'm here to share valuable lessons for Startups in terms of success and failure stories, processes, tools and techniques, which can be applied by Startup Founders in various aspects of their Startup Journey.

In this age of technology, social media, automation and the likes, personal touch has lost its fervour. Here is an inspiring anecdote of Ben Silbermann, founder of Pinterest which will show you how a personal connection with people can get you want.

Ben used to work at Google but had a habit of doing side projects whenever time permitted because just working on spreadsheets all day long really started getting to him. He kept saying he wanted to launch a startup but didnt really do it, till his girlfriend reprimanded him for just talking and not doing anything about it.

In May 2008, in spite of having no particular ideas he quit Google and started thinking about ideas. He met his co-founder Paul and they launched an app called Tote. Tote completely bombed and they then setup a new Startup with a new co-founder Evan related to collecting things. That too didn't go too well. Ben didn’t want to go back to Google out of embarrassment and kept thinking.

They started creating this image search tool that lets users save and share their favorite photos, designs, and recipes. The first users of Pinterest were the founders themselves. They found it incredibly useful. The next set of users were their friends and family and their networks. There was no paid marketing to reach millions of users, it started from home!

In fact, Ben must have been the only founder in the history of Startups to have shared his cell number with the first 7000 users of Pinterest. Reason being, that if and when the website went down, or they needed some help they could call him directly. And while on the call, he could also get first hand feedback from them. Ben and Evan even went to the extent of travelling to places, not for PR but just to ask people what’s working, what’s not and what’s annoying and then go back to their Tech team and ask them to work on it.

There is also an interesting anecdote here which again relates to the power of networking. The Pinterest Team were a bunch of closely connected people. They were like a club, a family. Every Friday they had a barbecue party at the 2 BHK apartment, which was then Pinterest’s office. Many of the other early recruits of Pinterest were neighbours who came to the barbecue, heard about the Startup and showed an inclination to join it!

When Pinterest came to a point when they knew that it was time to scale and start looking for funding, they started attending college hackathons where you could pitch your Startup and if your Startup stood out they would connect you to investors. They attended such a contest in NYU and stood 2nd. There was an investor who agreed to fund them for half of the first round and asked them to arrange for the second half.

At this opportunity, they went on a completely desperate spree and started calling everyone they knew who had money. They told them “This is an opportunity of a lifetime where an Investor from New York is ready to invest in our Startup. The other half is up for grabs. Don’t miss the opportunity to invest in it since this may not come back again” And sure enough they had people investing right, left and center!

Lesson Learnt

Whether it was early customers, team or investors, the founders of Pinterest made it happen through personal connections.

This just goes to prove what networking can do for a Startup, not in one but many ways all around.

So, attend those conferences, reach out to people and think of more and more ways where you can talk one on one to people about your Startup since you never know which of those connections will end up being a customer, team member or an investor!. I sincerely hope that you will brood over this as I did and make it work for you.

So, Until Next Time - Ciao and have a great life!