Compare / Grow Therapy vs Pinterest
GROW THERAPY
Jake Cooper spent years watching therapists drown in insurance paperwork while millions of Americans couldn't …
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Grow Therapy
BUSINESS MODEL
Grow Therapy
Two-sided marketplace for mental health. Therapists join Grow Therapy's network and the company handles insurance credentialing, claims billing, scheduling, and compliance.
In return, Grow Therapy takes a percentage of each session's insurance reimbursement. Patients search Grow Therapy's directory to find in-network therapists by specialty, insurance plan, and availability.
The therapist gets to focus on therapy. The patient gets affordable care.
Grow Therapy gets a cut for handling the business side. Everyone wins except the old credentialing companies that charged therapists thousands of dollars to do what Grow Therapy does for free.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Grow Therapy
Jake Cooper was working in healthcare operations when he saw the same problem from both sides. Patients couldn't find therapists who accepted their insurance.
Therapists wanted to accept insurance but the credentialing process took 6 to 12 months and the billing was a bureaucratic disaster. Most therapists just went cash-pay to avoid the headache, which meant only people who could afford $200 a session got care.
Cooper started Grow Therapy in 2020 to solve the plumbing problem. Not the clinical side — the administrative infrastructure that makes it possible for a therapist to see an insured patient without losing their mind.
He launched right as the pandemic made therapy demand explode and supply couldn't keep up.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Grow Therapy
Supply-side acquisition — recruit therapists by solving their biggest pain point (insurance credentialing) for free. Once therapists are in-network through Grow Therapy, patients find them through the directory.
The company expanded insurance partnerships aggressively, getting in-network with Aetna, Cigna, UnitedHealthcare, Anthem, and dozens of regional plans. State-by-state expansion tracking licensing requirements.
Content marketing targeting therapists frustrated with private practice admin. Referral loops from satisfied therapists bringing colleagues onto the platform.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Grow Therapy
Insurance reimbursement rates for therapy are low and getting lower in some states. Grow Therapy's margin depends on volume because per-session economics are thin.
Keeping therapists on the platform once they're credentialed is a retention challenge — some therapists use Grow Therapy to get credentialed, then leave to handle billing themselves. Competition from Headway, Alma, and others doing similar things means the race to sign up therapists is intense.
Quality control across 10,000+ providers is a real concern. And the fundamental tension remains: insurance companies want to pay less per session, therapists need to earn enough to survive, and Grow Therapy sits in the middle trying to make both sides happy.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Grow Therapy
Insurance credentialing — gets therapists paneled with major insurers in weeks instead of months. Automated billing and claims processing that eliminates the denied-claim nightmare.
A patient-facing directory with filters for insurance, specialty, location, and availability. Practice management tools including scheduling, intake forms, and session notes.
Telehealth platform built in so therapists don't need separate video software. Group practice support for therapists who want to scale beyond solo practice.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Grow Therapy
Investors include Sequoia Capital, TCV, Signalfire, and SVB Capital. Series C in 2023 valued the company at over $1 billion.
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.