Shout out to the guy that runs pinboard. He posts here sometimes (regularly? Rarely? Often?), and goes into his experience running a site like that by himself.

`idlewords, but that's that got to do with Pinterest?

The comment I replied to noted "they are popular because they are pretty much the only ones in that pretty specific space" while referring to Pinterest. Pinboard is a competitor, is it not? Not at the same scale, of course, but it is an alternative, a paid on at that, and is successful.

I guess I don't think of them as competitors. They're both social bookmarking sites but the interface and the way people use them seem very different.

Yup. Pinterest is less about saving the URLs/pages, than about curating a selection of pictures and visually displaying them in a fashion-magazine looking manner. Pinboard doesn't do that last I checked.

Actually, plenty of people use Pinterest as a way to save curated lists of URLs/pages. My daughters use Pinterest to make Christmas lists. my wife has used it to save interesting looking recipes. Sometimes the display is core, sometimes it's a nicety that makes it easier to browse.

I would hazard that the number of people looking to save bookmarks online easily is a couple orders of magnitude more than those looking for fashion magazine layout, at least.

Beyond that, it's pretty easy to slice up aspects of two companies so they are or are not competitors. I think Pinterest and Pinboard fairly clearly are (and since Pinterest is often mentioned along with Pinboard, I assume others think so as well).

A vast array of companies tried to copy Pinterest, after their usage began to soar. They all failed to gain user uptake. For a short while copying their layout was all the rage. People thought you could just copy the layout (as though that was the special thing), throw together the base features, and you might be the next Pinterest.

Copying & beating competitors doesn't actually work like most people seem to think it works. It's the same mistake people on HN have always made in claiming Uber can be smoked by a weekend MVP, and that they'll just face perpetual endless competition because it's so easy to do what they do.

It's dramatically more difficult to beat the existing competitor, even when they're mediocre, than it is to claim the initial territory (and doing just that, is extremely difficult).

To the extent your competitor is mediocre, you may only need a product several times better than theirs. If they're only slightly mediocre, you'll need a product 10x superior.

That's why the search engine wars were mostly a shit race of mild to severe mediocrity, until Google smashed them all with a 10x solution. Before that, they were all competing with barely better solutions and features. Excite? Lycos? AltaVista? Yahoo (Inktomi etc)? Who cares, it was mostly about who annoyed you the least, because the search quality largely sucked all around.

If you want to beat Pinterest, here's what you need to do, in no particular order:

- Produce a product that is leaps and bounds beyond Pinterest. A product that is slightly better, won't dent the market at all in this case. You'll waste years of your life getting to 100,000 users - what Pinterest accomplishes daily.

- Figure out how to get vast, endless media attention for a now rather boring product that has already been done to death, and for which a giant existing solution is already in place. The media has no interest, forget about that. And, alternatively, you don't have the tens of millions of dollars to bribe their attention. Free media attention is extraordinary for a hungry start-up: every time some media outlet ran an article about the latest outrageous thing (a kidney here, virginity there) to be auctioned on eBay back in the day, it was a boon to their growth.

- Convince millions of users to leave something they already know and are comfortable with. This is nearly impossible unless you're offering something extraordinarily superior. The product segment is mostly saturated by Pinterest now, so overwhelmingly you'll have to steal users from them.

- Plausibly raise venture capital. No VC firms want to back the 37th Pinterest clone. So you can forget about this, they consider that land already claimed. Once again, you'll need a radical new thing here, a 10x outcome, that blows them away versus what already exists.

- You'll need a lot of talented individuals to work with. You'll have to convince them to sign on to the mission - a truly challenging mission that will take years of grinding and struggle. All to work on a Pinterest clone. So there went your talented co-workers, they're not interested at all. They're interested in the next big thing, rather than cloning the last big thing. Can you build a product 5x or 10x better than Pinterest, and build it to scale, without a lot of talented people to do it with? Doubtful.

I don't think any founder that wants to fix a problem is going to talk about and saying 'making a clone'.

I agree with 90% with you, but a founder will never say the word 'clone' in a conversation with a candidate or VC. If you could buy directly ala Instagram shop button but for the web, you could have a chance. E-commerce can help a lot to bring people to your platform. But Pinterest is already doing Buyable Pins