01 · Strategy: is Pinterest for your product?¶
Why Pinterest can work for small software¶
- People come to plan, and they search. Pinterest's Trends tool is built on searches and saves: it shows which search terms rise each week, month and year, and which are seasonal (Pinterest Help: Trends). That's demand you can read before you make anything.
- A pin links out. Every pin can carry a destination link, and Pinterest counts "outbound clicks" as its own metric (Pinterest Help: Analytics). On most feeds a link is a fight; on Pinterest it's the normal thing to click.
- It's big. Pinterest reported 640 million monthly active users for Q2 2026 (Pinterest Q2 2026 results, SEC filing).
- A pin isn't tied to today. Search, not a feed of the last hour, decides most of who sees it. Plan for months.
Fit test: yes, test, or no¶
| Signal | Points to yes | Points to no |
|---|---|---|
| Can one tall image show the result? | A planner page, a desk setup, a wallpaper, a template, a before/after | A CLI flag, an API, a background daemon |
| Do your buyers plan things? | Students, creators, home, wellness, small shops, teachers, families | Developers fixing a bug right now |
| Do you have pages worth landing on? | How-to guides, free templates, a gallery, a landing with a clear demo | Only an App Store link and a changelog |
| Search check | Your topic shows autocomplete suggestions on Pinterest and appears in Trends | Search shows nothing related |
- 3–4 yes → Pinterest can be a main channel. 2 → test for 90 days as a support channel. 0–1 → skip; see the marketing hub.
- Good fits for software: Notion / spreadsheet / Canva templates, planners and habit apps, study apps, photo and design tools, wallpaper and theme apps, recipe and meal-plan apps, budgeting apps, Mac desk-setup and productivity tools with a visual result. Weak fits: dev tools, B2B infrastructure.
The plan: three phases¶
| Phase | Weeks | Do | Don't | Done when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 · Set up | 1 | Business account, claimed website, 5–10 boards named for searches, 3 landing pages picked | Pin before the pages exist | Every board has a search-word name and a description |
| 2 · Seed | 2–8 | 5–10 new pins a week, 3–5 different pins per page, spread over the week | Save the same image again and again, or post 50 in a day | Pins get impressions from search, saves start |
| 3 · Double down | 9+ | Each month, make new pins for the pages and topics that got outbound clicks; add pages for rising Trends terms | Judge a pin on its first week | You know your 3 best pages and 3 best pin variants |
Pin to page, not pin to store¶
App stores strip most tracking and give a stranger one shot. A how-to page or free template on your site gives the reader what the pin promised, and offers the app as the faster way, plus an email box. That's also where claiming your website pays off: your name shows on pins saved from your pages.
How Pinterest fits the other channels¶
Pinterest is reach for planners and makers of things; it sends people to your pages, not to a profile. Reuse the same visual facts as your Instagram carousels and TikTok slideshows, re-cut to 2:3 with a search-word title. The full map: Marketing & Social.