The Shopping App No One Was Using
In 2009, long before “pinning” was a verb, co-founders Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra launched an iPhone app called Tote. The concept was simple and, on paper, smart: create a single, elegant interface for shoppers to browse catalogs from their favorite
retailers like J.Crew and Banana Republic. Tote would aggregate products, alert users to sales, and act as a digital replacement for the clunky paper catalogs filling mailboxes. It was meant to make mobile shopping easy and fun. The problem? It didn't. For one, the mobile payment technology of the era was clunky and unreliable, making actual purchases a frustrating experience. More importantly, the app was a solution in search of a problem. In the late 2000s, mobile shopping hadn't yet become a mainstream habit, and the app languished with very few users.
A Glimmer in the Data
While Tote was a commercial failure, Ben Silbermann noticed a peculiar and fascinating user behavior. A small-but-dedicated group of users weren't actually buying anything. Instead, they were meticulously saving images of items they liked, creating informal collections, and sharing them with friends. They were using a shopping app for everything but shopping. For Silbermann, a self-described collector since his childhood days of pinning insects, this behavior struck a chord. He realized the desire wasn't for a mobile mall, but for a beautiful way to collect and organize the things that inspire you. The core human impulse wasn't transaction; it was collection and identity. Users wanted to say, “This is me, this is what I love,” not just, “This is what I want to buy.”
The Pivot from Commerce to Curation
This insight sparked the pivot. The team, which now included designer Evan Sharp, decided to abandon Tote and build a new platform entirely around the behavior they had observed. They moved away from a transactional model focused on retailers and toward a user-centric model focused on personal curation. They traded the goal of immediate sales for the more abstract—and ultimately, more powerful—goal of inspiration. In March 2010, they launched a closed beta for a new website: Pinterest. The new platform, with its revolutionary grid layout designed by Sharp, was built for visual discovery. Instead of pulling from a limited set of retail catalogs, it allowed users to “pin” images from anywhere on the internet onto their own personal “boards.” The focus shifted entirely from buying items to collecting ideas.
The Billion-Dollar Lesson in Failure
The early days of Pinterest were slow. Silbermann famously emailed the first several thousand users personally to gather feedback. But unlike Tote, Pinterest tapped into a genuine, unmet need. It wasn't another social network about who you knew; it was a utility for organizing your aspirations. By 2011, propelled by a new iPhone app and passionate word-of-mouth, the platform’s growth exploded. The failure of Tote wasn't a detour on the road to success; it was the road itself. It provided the crucial, market-tested data that proved the initial hypothesis was wrong and revealed a much bigger opportunity. The company learned that users were more interested in the act of discovery and collection than in a streamlined checkout process. That lesson in listening to what users do instead of what you think you want turned a failed shopping app into a multi-billion-dollar public company.
