Building Megaobjects in Minecraft

Robert Scoble · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace Managed Hosting · 71,110 subscribers
This is why my favorite question is: which would you rather have today? $100,000 or a penny that doubles every day for a month?

Those who are fast with math realize the penny that doubles actually comes out to $5.5 million at the end of the month, BUT all that growth happens in the last few days (if you can't live 25 days, take the $100,000).

Pinterest in a doubling penny. How many more times will it double? Well, among my friends it has hardly gotten any of the males to join. They are now starting and reporting that they love the service too. So, there's plenty of growth ahead. Things are going to go faster for Pinterest now.
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Reply · 26 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 8:39am

Ouriel Ohayon · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Co-Founder at AppsFire · 179 subscribers
Mmm 100k. No?
Reply · Like · Sunday at 9:01am

Robert Scoble · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Startup Liaison Officer at Rackspace Managed Hosting · 71,110 subscribers
Ouriel Ohayon wrong choice. Look here: http://www.al6400.com/blog/2006/07/10/a-penny-doubled-everyday/ Take the penny and pray for a 31-day month. :-)
Reply · 5 · Like · Sunday at 9:06am

Ouriel Ohayon · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Co-Founder at AppsFire · 179 subscribers
Missed the every day. Thought double every month...
Reply · Like · Sunday at 9:11am
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Dave McClure · Top Commenter · Founding Partner at 500 Startups
nice piece & good detail.

one thing: perhaps a bit more commentary on their potential for monetization. the growth is amazing obviously, but matters a lot whether each user is worth.10 vs $10 (or also, -.10).

sometimes I think silicon valley is overly obsessed with growth at the expense of making money. while growth may be a priority early over monetization for investors, for entrepreneurs there should be a strong awareness of unit economics & business fundamentals that drive both product & marketing strategy.

fortunately for pinterest it seems the opportunity for monetization is strong, likely much more so than most other photo-sharing services.
Reply · 8 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 11:59am

Jeff Eddings
It's the "lottery" model vs. the "plumber" model:

Lottery: invest in a lot of tickets, hopefully one of them will hit the jackpot.

Plumber: take one job at a time, make money with each job, if quality is good and meeting customer need, hire more plumbers to make more money
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Reply · Like · Sunday at 5:15pm

Paramendra Kumar Bhagat · Subscribe · Chairperson, CEO, Founder at Stealth Mode
With this kind of growth, monetization can be an after thought. And there will be loots.
Reply · Like · Sunday at 11:42pm

Daan Loening · Top Commenter · CEO & Founder at Kinderfee.de
I think the point of this article is to highlight the difference between internal and external viral elements, not how the system monetises. Great article! Thanks!
Reply · 1 · Like · Yesterday at 2:58pm

Jane Wang
: )
Reply · 6 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:47am

Benjamin Young · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Washington, District of Columbia
This if fascinating and encouraging. I actually remember reading about Pinterest A LONG time ago and actually signed up way way back. All of a sudden I see all these people following me. And then it has exploded. I think we often focus to much on the overnight successes, and don't realize how much dedication others work to ambitiously achieve virality through a phenomenal product experience. Kudos.
Reply · 4 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:38am

Sam H Well · University of Greenwich
Like they say, it takes years to create an overnight success!
Reply · 2 · Like · Yesterday at 7:13pm

Benjamin Young · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Washington, District of Columbia
Sam H Well Haha - So True! So True! It just makes a sexier story. Who want's to hear the real grueling truth??
Reply · Like · Yesterday at 8:04pm

Alex Buran · Top Commenter · Founder at Translation Cloud
Steve Cheney - I think you don't understand the difference between viral features and WHY people use those viral features. If you suck up to Tumblr or Facebook, it doesn't mean your users will start mindlessly share your content. I read a bunch of great blogs and consume absolutely great articles, but I rarely share them.

It has to go deeper than that. Why would your users care to bring someone else to your website? That's what makes it viral, not the stupid javascript buttons or "logged out users".
Reply · 3 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:32am

Trace Cohen · Subscribe · Syracuse University
Now this is the type of article I want to read on TechCrunch - good stuff!
Reply · 2 · Like · Follow Post · Yesterday at 12:14am

720MEDIA website design + marketing
Great article on the growth of Pinterest (an insanely addictive tech startup), and how they've grown virally.
Reply · 1 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 3:05am

Broad Castic · Top Commenter · Works at Founder at content delivery/responce startup www.Broadcastic.com
simple idea+great execution=wining.
Reply · 1 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 10:57am

Yosef Solomon · University of Washington
TheFancy.com is another site to watch out for... It's almost like the equivalent of Pinterest for males.
Reply · 1 · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:39pm

Jamie Anderson
Pinterest, came across it via a blogger from within twitter (who again was female). Don't really get its purpose and how it ties into the landscape, it's also more similar to tumblr than instagram. Instagram is successful because it pulls in the physical world and allows you to share it across your social graph, interconnectivity, 'SoLoMo'. Mind blowing figures though, $37.5M invested and an estimated valuation of over $200M? Where are these figures plugged from and what was the $37.5M spent on? pinterest, brilliant name and came from a girl, the site is aimed toward those girls, sharing sweet foods, cuteness, all round bubbly things that make them go 'aww'... begging the question, as it always is for social media setups and justifying their quoted valuations, how do you facilitate brands and is the psychographic profile of the network susceptible to warrant such a valuation. I'm dubious on this one.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 2:24am

Serge Bronstein · Subscribe · Top Commenter · C.E.O at FlameStorm.com FREE Blogging Platform
all these startups that techcrunch writes about are all full of air and BS. the real money is largely in enterprise software development, like netbackup and stuff, they are just quietly raking in their millions, while these laughable startups claim to have millions invested, when in fact, literally none of them even make any money
Reply · 2 · Like · Sunday at 8:58am

Jamie Anderson
Serge Bronstein haha, so true. How do they get these kinds of investments!!? Silly money, nothing like that going on in London, unfortunately. Backup? You meaning guys like engineyard and so on, who deal with all of the technical crap and server storage that bores all the sane people.
Reply · Like · Sunday at 12:59pm

Serge Bronstein · Subscribe · Top Commenter · C.E.O at FlameStorm.com FREE Blogging Platform
Jamie Anderson enterprise software is software that large organizations buy ... microsoft, oracle and ibm have the market cornered with windows servers, exchange, etc ... its a very lopsided market where top 1% of the companies have 99% of the business.
Reply · Like · Sunday at 6:32pm

Brandon C. Hall · CTO at CurationSoft
Go back and read their earliest blog posts. They did a huge promotion with a big female blogger in San Francisco. It was off to the races after that. They had the creative user base adding great content.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:01am

Kathleen Waters Bunshoft · Kodak Online
i want to see that blog post -- on pinterest or techcrunch? thanks.
Reply · Like · Yesterday at 1:22am

Brandon C. Hall · CTO at CurationSoft
Kathleen Waters Bunshoft You can really see the evolution of these companies by looking at their earliest blog posts. They usually offer a lot of clues. For Pinterest the public stuff starts here: http://blog.pinterest.com/page/15 - Here's the post I was referring too: http://blog.pinterest.com/post/5569690267/pin-it-forward
Reply · 1 · Like · 14 saat önce

David Chancogne · CTO at Traackr
I just gave propz to Steve Cheney for his article http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/26/pinterest-viral/! You can do it too http://propz.me/stevecheney.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 1:52am

David Rees · Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Instagram does have sharing and virility baked in, its just happens to be inherent in their medium. People use it explicitly for sharing photos and those shared photos are recognizable as different in a compelling way that draws more users. They are spreading the "meme" of tweaked photos and, like most successful viruses (which essentially spread genes), they do it by hitchhiking on existing vectors.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 4:13am

Christoph Ono · Ohio State
Has anybody done a comparison of pinterest and weheartit? Concept seems similar, launched around the same time, and according to their advertising page weheartit has 675 million page views per month.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 4:01am

Amanda Ellis · Vice President of Search at Special Counsel
Some interesting facts about Pinterest.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 1:15am

Kirsten Bischoff · Subscribe · Springfield, New Jersey
Really great article - and just what I was hoping to read.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 1:58am

Regina Turney · Subscribe · Los Angeles, California
Good Book - the Thank You Economy. Thanks to FB your business can be made or broken in virtual-ly minutes...
Reply · Like · Sunday at 3:07am

Ben Tseitlin · Subscribe · Top Commenter · UCSB
Great article, well done steve.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 2:18am

Peter J. Sullivan III · Subscribe · Top Commenter · Co-Founder at Tripl
Great article
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 12:14am

Jess Bachman
nice article Steve.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 5:00am

Guanzhi Ma · Top Commenter · University of Alberta
Simple. Build a great product.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Sunday at 7:36am

Nir Oren
One other good reason for a startup to grow moderately is to improve product, team and infrastructure in parallel to it's growth. Had Facebook received 50 millions hits from day one, the infrastructure would have cracked and friendster's episode would have been replicated.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Yesterday at 2:16pm

Daan Loening · Top Commenter · CEO & Founder at Kinderfee.de
Samwers to clone pinterest: http://www.deutsche-startups.de/2011/11/28/pinspire-pinterest-copycat/ (article in German).
Such schmucks...
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Yesterday at 2:59pm

John Haden · Subscribe · Western State College of Colorado
This is totally unscientific... but you know how I measure growth or (virality) in services such as this? When I see my email flooded with other users who are sharing their content. Another example of a service I signed up for and continue to see updates is Plancast. I sign up for everything...Animoto, Fancy, Flickr, Multiply, MOG, LastFM etc. All have a sharing component of some sort... but I get new shares from Plancast and Pintrest... that's how I determine if services are getting traction...
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Yesterday at 7:47pm

Dodd Caldwell · Greenville, South Carolina
The article mentions that Mint.com paid for it's users. Does anyone have an article that they can link to that analyzes Mint's approach?
Reply · Like · Follow Post · Yesterday at 6:09pm

Ani Oko · Abone Ol · Ziliot'ta CEO & Founder
Great article
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 05:07

Habibullah Khan · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Cisco Systems
Careful Steve, such competent articles where you actually put work in, detract from TC's recent reputation as a a "fast becoming average" blog.

Would be great if someone could clue me in on what causes the stickiness in Pinterest from a user perspective.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 15:12

Sarah Barton Mitchell · Preston High School
I use Pinterest everyday. I heard about it from a friend who was telling me about something she found on there. I signed up and found that it was a great place to find recipes, because the picture of the product is right there (like food porn!). Then I started making these amazing foods and telling people about them, and that I found them on Pinterest. Since I never really cooked before, it kind of became a challenge to find something to make from Pinterest every day (almost). Plus, it justifies my addiction!
It's really easy to use once you figure it out.

Other things it is used for is finding gift ideas, planning events (weddings, birthdays, parties), holiday decorating, organizing, any kind of diy project (yard, house, craft, clothes),building/furnishing a house, finding funny/motivational stuff.
Yes, many of these activit...Devamını Gör
Yanıtla · 1 · Beğen · 9 saat önce

Layak Singh · Fullerene Solutions and Services Pvt. Ltd.'da Co-Founder/Owner
Not only this one..there are many such crazy websites whose views are too fast than this..but people don't see those very closely.As one of this kind website I remember is www.socialdating.com or www.dateiitians.com.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 15:43

Ouriel Ohayon · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · AppsFire'de Co-Founder · 179 abone
So one question: Pinterest never ever invested $1 in media buying? no one ever saw their banners? it remind me angry birds who grew very fast, but did spend in marketing, it was just hard to know and observe it.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 15:13

David Robins · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Binfire.com'da CEO & Founder
@Steve Cheney, what I was hoping to read was how they made the site go Viral! emailing everybody they knew? other connections? The site is an open digital billboard, how people heard about it?
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 17:02

Nitin Magdum · Bangalore, India
Great post and a 'must analyze' case study if you believe in your service!
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 18:58

Thomas Oppong · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Accra, Ghana
The first time I visited Pinterest, I visited lots of pages. And now I have bookmarked it. Awesome site.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Pazar, 21:17

Roham Gharegozlou · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Stanford University
TechCrunch is doing an awesome job sourcing in-depth thoughtful posts from industry leaders. These user growth numbers are incredibly impressive, matched with a great business model makes it as good as gold. Kudos to the Pinterest team.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Dün, 04:02

Paul Marek · Abone Ol
Sweet post. Very timely. Thanks so much for this. So often as a founder I do find myself focused on attaining a legendary level of virility, but I'm also starting to realize that a relatively slower, iterated growth may be a smarter way to approach... everything. I saw Eric Ries speak in Waterloo Canada a few weeks ago and began to see and better appreciate the bigger picture of doing things smaller. This post reaffirms that. Thanks for the point in the right direction.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Dün, 07:29

Daniel Harris
I read your post. it was amazing.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Dün, 06:27

Flavius Saracut · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Mobiversal'da Chief Marketing Officer
Nice article, a good reminder that success is not built overnight and the crucial aspect of virality.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Dün, 12:48

GoIndo Cal · Abone Ol · New Delhi, India
Great piece....as Viral as it could be.
Yanıtla · Beğen · Gönderiyi Takip Et · Dün, 10:08

Semil Shah · Abone Ol · Üst Düzey Yorumcu · Palo Alto, California
This is a fantastic article, thanks for sharing. Reading between the lines, especially toward the end, it seems that the days of forced "virality" are nearing an end. Or, so I hope. Nice job Steve.