Startup stories

When a startup is in its infancy, it is not always easy to determine whether the product is very popular.

Dustin Curtis, the creator of Svbtle’s online magazine platform, thinks two of the now hugely successful startups are idiots when he first sees them.

“For some cruel reason, I keep finding myself introduced to things in their infancy (often before they even begin), dismissing them as stupid, and then watching them become incredibly popular,” Curtis wrote on Svbtle. “This has happened to me at least four times. Every time I promise to never call anything stupid again, and then, every time, it happens again.”

It happened with Pinterest, a social bookmarking service worth about $2 billion. And then it happened again with Vine, the video app that Twitter acquired last year.

At Pinterest, Curtis isn’t sold on the idea that middle-aged women will flock to the fashion and design-oriented site to collect and share products. Notably, Pinterest founder and CEO Ben Silberman wasn’t created by a twenty-something.

When Curtis met with Silberman, he quickly rejected the idea, saying the product was stupid.

Now, Pinterest brings in billions of page views per month. Most recent tally: 3.4 billion monthly page views from its 25 million members worldwide.

But Curtis didn’t learn from his mistakes right away. Last year, Vine founder Dom Hoffman met Curtis for dinner and showed off his “Instagram for video” app.

“The app was very well designed and engineered, especially for a prototype, but I had a lot of experience with photography and video applications, and I knew the odds were against it,” Curtis wrote. “The mobile video space is littered with dead bodies from previous attempts. How will this guy overcome all the obstacles that other attempts at mobile video have failed to overcome?”

Again, Curtis rejected the idea.

Thinking back on those meetings, Curtis said he was “disgusted” by his response.

“Both men are extraordinarily passionate and driven, and you can tell within five seconds of meeting them,” Curtis wrote. “They saw the future and built it. But for some reason, the first reaction to their first attempt was not to give them any doubt – it was to immediately look for problems and then eliminate their ideas.”