The earlier app by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra that led to Pinterest was Tote.
Silbermann and Sciarra co-founded Cold Brew Labs, whose first major product was Tote, an iPhone shopping application. Launched around 2009, Tote was designed as a digital alternative to paper catalogs: users could browse products, save items, receive alerts about price changes, and discover merchandise from different retailers.
Tote did not gain the traction its founders wanted, but its underlying idea proved important. Silbermann and his colleagues noticed that people especially enjoyed collecting and organizing images of things they liked. That insight helped redirect Cold Brew Labs toward a visual bookmarking service. With Evan Sharp joining the effort, the team developed the product that became Pinterest.
A common mix-up is to identify Pinterest as having begun directly as a social-media site. It actually grew out of a shopping and catalog concept. Tote was not simply an early name for Pinterest; it was a separate predecessor whose lessons about visual discovery and collecting influenced Pinterest’s design.