In January 2010, when Ben Silbermann launched Pinterest, his initial growth strategy was to target his techie friends. He first emailed friends to let them know about his new site that lets you organize and share the things you love. “What’s the point?” they all asked. He then emailed all of his co-founders’ friends on the East Coast. No one cared. He emailed everybody he knew from his last job at Google, and all of his wife’s friends at Facebook.

“No one really got it, to be totally honest with you. But they were also very polite about it. ‘This looks interesting. Very interesting,’ they’d say.”

He then started spending time at Apple stores, where he switched the default home pages on every laptop to Pinterest.com and stood in the back saying, “Wow! This Pinterest thing is really blowing up.” Didn’t work.

Ben started to realize that maybe tech people had no interest in what he was building. But there was an unexpected demographic that seemed to get it, as Ben shared at a talk at Startup School:

“There was a small group of people who were really enjoying it. Those folks would not be who you’d think of stereotypically as early adopters. They were folks I grew up with. People that were using it for regular life stuff: What is my house going to look like? What kind of food do I want to eat?”

On a whim, Ben decided to attend a conference in Salt Lake City called Alt Summit, a large female-focused design and blogging conference. He walked the halls pitching Pinterest and began to see a bit of interest. Eventually he met a woman named Victoria Smith who had a blog called SFGirlByBay. She quickly saw the potential of Pinterest, and they decided to collaborate on a promotion: Victoria created a Pinterest board with all the things that mean “home” to her and then tagged other bloggers to do the same. Each blog had a small but rabid fan base, and their audiences loved it. They got Pinterest. Soon they started to use it for all kinds of other things, and just a year later, Pinterest was at over a million users.

Throughout this journey, the product itself didn’t meaningfully change—the audience did. Ben initially assumed that a new tech website would resonate with tech employees. Instead, 30-something female bloggers turned out to be the ideal early adopters.

When deciding who to go after when just starting out, it’s important to be super-specific. You need to find your “super-specific who”.

Alfred E. Neuman

How the biggest consumer apps got their first 1,000 users