Pinterest is a photo sharing website that is in the top 50 most popular sites in the world. However, the visual discovery tool began as just a dream.

Ben Silbermann was studying medicine and training to be a doctor when he realised that wasn’t the career path he wanted to take. He switched to business and became a consultant, working on spreadsheets and financial models but again he realised it wasn’t for him. Silbermann really wanted to build a product, so he moved to California and got a job with Google but the job was similar to his consulting role so he left his job and went after his dream.

He teamed up with his friend, Paul Sciarra from New York and they released an iPhone app called Tote for shopping on the phone. The app flopped, so he decided to focus on something he loved – collecting things. Silbermann met an architect, Evan Sharp and he joined the team. The three of them then built Pinterest, showing collections of photos in a grid layout in 2010.

Growth began slowly and Silbermann wrote personally to the first 5,000 users, subsequently speaking to some of them on the phone and meeting others. After 9 months, they still had less than 10,000 users but slow and steady growth and a belief in their product convinced them to keep going.

Eventually the site got some traction and technology blogs started to pay attention. The iPhone app launched in 2011 got more downloads than anticipated and Pinterest went from strength to strength. It now has an estimated value of $11 billion.