Here Are My Honest Results.
Image generated with ChatGPT
Three months ago today, I told myself I’d run a Pinterest experiment for 90 days and then decide whether to keep it going. Today’s the deadline. And coincidentally, this is my 100th post on this platform too!!
Quick recap. I started posting three pins a day on Pinterest in mid-May, purely to see if it could drive traffic back to Medium and Substack newsletter. I started a brand new account from scratch!
About a month in, I got ambitious. I built a pipeline with Claude Code and the Gemini API, one command and it would take an old article, write a script, generate stick-figure images, and render a 40 to 50 second video.
Check out the article here: I Had 87 Articles Gathering Dust. I Built a Claude Code Pipeline to Turn Them Into Daily Short-Form Videos.
The plan was one video a day next to the static pins. It worked. Each video cost somewhere between 80 cents and a dollar to make. But posting one of these everyday started to prove costly.
The bigger issue was the videos started looking like the same. Same visual beats. Same energy every single time. Traction never showed up to make pushing through that worth it. So I stopped. Video pipeline back in the drawer. Three static pins a day again.
Screenshot of my Pinterest analytics dashboard
The growth was more or less the same for the last 3 months. For a few weeks I wasn’t sure the account would grow at all. Three pins a day, every day, for three months, watching a flat graph is rough. I won’t pretend that didn’t get to me a little.
Then I pulled the actual analytics export instead of trusting the chart in my head. Month one, mid-May to mid-June, landed at 4,885 impressions. Month two came in at 5,096. Month three, wrapping up today, hit 5,370. A small climb, about 3% then another 5%. Those are my real numbers.
Screenshot of my Pinterest analytics dashboard
The most recent 30 days back that up too. 5.75k impressions, up 14% from the 30 days before. Total audience at 2.01k, up 31%. Saves at 261. Outbound clicks dropped 27% to 24 though, so people are still saving my stuff for later far more than they’re clicking through. Same pattern I flagged at the two-month mark.
Board by board it gets more specific. My Digital Products board, my Pinterest Marketing Tips board, and my Substack Growth Tips board are all converting saves between 5.5 and 5.9%. My two biggest boards by raw impressions, general content creation and side hustle ideas, convert under 4% each.
Coming to the numbers that actually matters to me! Three Substack subscribers directly attributed to Pinterest over three full months, plus 20 to 30 profile visits. That’s it (smiling face with tears).
I consumed a lot of content online researching this. The usual answer from Pinterest creators is that three to six months of consistent pinning is the normal runway before anything kicks in. That advice is usually for beauty, lifestyle, recipe, and travel accounts, the niches Pinterest was built around. What I post, solopreneur income, AI tools, newsletter growth, attracts fewer people. I probably need more patience than that advice accounts for.
So, am I quitting? No. I’ve made over 300 pins and shown up every single day for three months. Walking away now wastes all of that right as the account starts aging into whatever comes next.
I’m also done treating this as the centerpiece of my content strategy. Going forward it stays in the pipeline. Three pins a day. Consistent. But I am not carrying big expectations from it (in terms of growing my newsletter).
One thing I want to test next is pinning outside my usual niche, just to see how the account reacts. No idea if that helps or just confuses the algorithm more. I’ll report back when there’s something worth reporting.
If you want the full timeline instead of just this snapshot, here’s every update in this series so far:
The original 90-day experiment announcement : Everyone Said Pinterest Wouldn’t Work for My Niche.
Month one, the first real numbers: I’ve Been Using Pinterest Every Day for a Month. Here’s What Actually Happened.
The mid-summer platform-wide traffic crash everyone was seeing: Pinterest Traffic Dropped 70%?
Two months in, when the numbers didn’t move the way I expected: I’ve Posted on Pinterest Every Day for Two Months. The Numbers Don’t Add Up the Way I Assumed.
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And if this piece saved you some time or money, some readers buy me a coffee. I do all of this alongside a full-time job, salsa classes, and a golf habit — running almost entirely on coffee, tea, and Red Bull. It goes to exactly the right place. 🙏