Pinterest's Interest Picker Onboarding

Pinterest solved the cold-start content discovery problem by having new users select interests during onboarding, immediately personalizing their feed and dramatically increasing first-session engagement and D7 retention.

Challenge

Pinterest's core experience — a personalized visual discovery feed — required understanding each user's interests. Without follow or interest data, the home feed was generic and uncompelling. New users would see random pins, fail to find relevant content, and churn. The chicken-and-egg problem: you need user preferences to show good content, but users leave before expressing preferences.

Approach

Pinterest redesigned onboarding to start with a mandatory interest picker: new users selected from categories like home decor, fashion, recipes, travel, and fitness. This initial signal was enough to populate a personalized feed immediately. The growth team (led by Casey Winters) tested the optimal number of interest picks, the visual presentation of categories, and the sequencing of follow prompts. They found that combining topic interests with suggested user follows created the highest first-session pin saves. The approach was replicated by many consumer apps afterward. Pinterest also invested heavily in email digests that pulled users back based on their declared interests.

Results

• Monthly active users (2023): 450M+
• Revenue (2023): $3.1B
• Pins saved (lifetime): 300B+
• Markets: 60+

Sources

• Pinterest S-1 Filing (2019)
• Casey Winters — Pinterest User Onboarding (Appcues)
• Ben Silbermann interviews (Startup Grind, Y Combinator)

The full record sits in the studio register.