Cold Brew Labs

In August 2008, two friends named Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra both quit their jobs to start their own company called Cold Brew Labs. Ben Silbermann, who used to work at Google, had a love for collecting things and wanted to create a site where people can show a collection of things they are interested in. This idea led to Pinterest, an app and a website database where people can find recipes, DIY projects, places to travel, and creates a place where individuals can share their common interests. People can use Pinterest for inspiration to try new activities and for discovering things they love. With this application, individuals are able to group items or “pins” into categories, search for other products that fit into those categories, and

This is a company that builds social commerce applications and aids in mobile shopping. Ben Silbermann, the visionary at Cold Brew Labs, first came up with the idea of a mobile shopping app called Tote. This mobile app Tote eventually led to the start of Pinterest. Tote was the first vision Ben Silbermann had when he started Cold Brew Labs. This app launched in 2009 and was able to pull data from catalogs, which was a way for shoppers to find particular products and save them within the app. After launching Tote, the app quickly went downhill and was a total failure. Tote did not have many users and people were not using mobile apps for shopping at the time. Silbermann noticed that the people using Tote were collecting images of products and not particularly buying them. His team then began working on a website that would be used to collect items and put them into so-called “buckets” or boards. For this product to be a success, Silbermann had to make sure it was not described as just a source for shopping. He needed to make sure everyone knew it could be used for multiple purposes. Ben Silbermann’s girlfriend came up with the name of Pinterest at Thanksgiving dinner in 2009, and the website beta version of Pinterest was launched in March

Pinterest did not have a revenue source until the year of 2013 when they created Promoted Pins. Promoted Pins are advertisements in the form of pins on a specific user's feed based on their interests. When a user clicks on the pin, it takes the individual to the product's website. Pinterest does not charge users who buy products off of it (delete it) add: (products websites). On this issue, Evan Sharp in a CBS news article said, “We don’t because to us helping you buy things is just a way to making it more useful for users, rather than a revenue source”(cite CBS?). This benefits Pinterest because more users can use this app and website for services other than purchases and gives them more reasons to further utilize it for their own good and potential benefits. The Promoted Pins are specific towards each individual and aids the users as well as the advertiser. An example of a Promoted Pin on Pinterest would be an ad about the two “must have” holiday fragrances by L’Occitane. This ad provides a link that leads directly to their website when you click on the pin where an individual can purchase these popular items. This ad would show up on the dashboard of an individual who looks up fragrances frequently and uses filters such as great smelling scents. Another example