The Story of Instagram🩷

I’m 100% sure you are a user of this app. Some love it, some hate it. But looking at it from the lens of a founder, there is one defining moment that changed everything for the Co-Founders of Instagram.

Without this key decision, we might have never heard of Instagram…

Let’s see what this key decision was. This is the Story of Instagram 🩷🤳

It’s the 1990’s and Kevin Systrom has a passion for gaming, particularly Doom 2, where he not only plays but also edits levels to make the game last longer. This early interest in technology continues through boarding school, where he learns how to code. Later, at Stanford University, Kevin pursued studies in management science and engineering

Later on, Kevin crossed paths with Mark Zuckerberg at a party. Interested by Zuckerberg's new project called "The Facebook" which wanted to add photos and videos to the platform, Kevin was invited to join Mark’s company. However, Kevin's mentor advised him against it, dismissing "The Facebook" as a passing fad. 1st missed opportunity to join a life-changing startup.

After that, thanks to the Internship program at Stanford, he was able to join a podcasting startup called Odeo, which later turned into Twitter. Kevin got along well with the founders but left Twitter as the platform struggled. After a short stint at Google, he joined another Startup called Nextstop. 2nd and 3rd time he missed the opportunity to be part of tech giants early on.

When the iPhone launched in 2007 he started teaching himself mobile app development during his free time at Nextstop.

Then he created his first app…👇

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His first app is called “Dished” which helps you to rate meals at restaurants.

After that, he started to work on another app. Kevin wanted to know all the places that served fine Bourbon whiskey. To obtain that information, he created an app called ‘Burbn’ that allowed people to share their check-ins and pictures with the world.

However, things that leave a mark on the world are all about being at the right place and at the right time, and Kevin got lucky in it – because he got to reach the party that changed his entire life.

Kevin attended a party, Hunch, that was for Silicon Valley startups. Here, Kavin met two venture capitalists from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz and discussed the prototype of the Burbn.

The idea of an easy photo-sharing application that has a check-in feature too impressed them.

Steve Anderson was the first investor in that round and he required that Kevin had to find a co-founder to join him. So Kevin reached out to an old friend he knew from Stanford - Mike Krieger.

So now Kevin had $500,000 in the bank, a technical co-founder, and it was 2010 when the top apps in the App Store were “Beer drinking” apps.

What could go wrong right?👇

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Well, with only 100 users at that time overall user growth stalled and there were just no new users downloading the app. At this moment, everyone would ask themselves this question

“Why are people not using our app? How can we find more users?”

But Kevin and Mike asked themselves this one question that changed everything.

“Don’t ask why people don’t use your product, ask the ones using it why they keep using it?”

After asking some users, they realized that barely anyone used the check-in feature, but most of them loved the photo-sharing aspect of Burbn.

Right at this time the famous pivot happened when Kevin and Mike decided to scrap everything else and only focus on photo-sharing.

Now instead of finding a problem to a solution at hand. They tried to solve a problem.

But there were 4 key components why Instagram succeeded instead of other photo-sharing apps:

1. Focus

   The original premise of Burbn was on Location sharing, which was hot hot hot at the time. But from the handful of users they had, they found that they were primarily using Burbn to share photos of mundane things. So they had some initial direction.

2. Study Competition

   Kevin and Mike studied every competitor on the market to find how they could build a competitive product (Path was all the rave back then 🤣). And they decided to focus relentlessly on minimizing the number of clicks to post a photo (spoiler alert: that wasn't enough)

3. Experimentation

   Before Instagram, the duo developed a prototype named Scotch. It had a similar premise to Instagram... but without the filter (and the UI was a bit wack).

4. Do Something Special

   Photo sharing in itself wasn't something special; what was special and unique at the time was the amount of processing power one could do on the iPhone 4. Taking a beautiful panorama and turning it into a cool 1980 Polaroid is not just something you could do on any of the existing "old-school" photo-sharing apps.

   The funny thing about filters, though, it did not come out of user research or any unique insights the founders had. Instead, Kevin (after being burned out by the failure of Burbn) was taking some time off with his girlfriend, and after showcasing the new IG prototype, she said she wouldn't post any pictures though because her photos weren't as good as Kevin's friend Greg (he used a separate filter app to make his photos look nice). So Kevin, upon returning to work, added filters to the Instagram prototype.

After 8 weeks of work, they’re ready to relaunch their app Instagram as an IOS-only App in October 2010.

And then it happens…💥

The Servers crashed because within 24 hours Instagram got downloaded 25,000 times 🤯 But it wasn’t pure luck. It was strategically planned by Kevin and Mike. They planned it in two ways:

Prelaunch

Mike and Kevin only had 100 Testflight Beta Invites to give out before launch, and so they treated them very specially. They focused their initial target on two main categories:

1. Journalists - so they write about them when the app launches.

2. Dribble.com, Top designers from Dribble meant that the quality of the content that seeded the app would be out of this world. This fueled the "wow" factor of Instagram. It is worth mentioning that they didn't go with photographers because they were just a much more demanding segment.

Launch

Kevin and Mike got @Jack (ex-boss + investor) to tweet about it to his 1m followers and a dozen other design influencers (example).

IG didn't just rely on influencers but also got themselves covered in TechCrunch, Wired, and many other publications (thanks to some of those beta invites they set aside for reporters).

Exclusivity = Value

A consequence of the PR + Influencer launch was that they also got featured on the App Store. This is not crazy because Apple loves design-first companies.

With this, they went from <100 users to 25,000 in 24 hours!

After that, they never stopped growing…

• 2 months after launch on 12th of December 2010 → 1 Million Users

• June 2011 → 5M Users

• August 2011 → 10M Users

• Massive names like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande joined

Then in April 2012, it all came full circle when Twitter wanted to buy Instagram for $500M. Given the personal connection, it seemed likely that it would go through but Zuck made a last-minute attempt and bid $1B for Instagram, an app which launched 18 months ago with 10M users and no revenue…

Kevin and Mike asked for $2B but got rejected. But the most important factor in Zuck’s terms was that Instagram would stay independent of Facebook.

With these terms, Kevin and Mike agreed to the acquisition and the rest is history…

It’s insane how Startups and Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google were literally following Kevin Systrom but he always left too early and couldn’t capitalize on the opportunity each time. Well, then he created his own social media giant…

But the key decision to all of this was what he learned from the founders at Odeo/Twitter. To pivot when things aren’t going well. Twitter pivoted from podcasting to a messaging service that allows instant updates.

So Kevin and Mike didn’t focus on “Why are people not using our app?”, instead they asked the question “Why are the people who are using our app currently, still using our app?”. Then they stumbled upon photo-sharing.

Pivot or Persevere… that’s the tough question for every founder in the arena.

Thank you for taking the time to read the Story of Instagram 🩷✨ 

I hope you enjoyed it and learned something from this.

My goal each week is to improve every story by at least 1% so every feedback is immensely valuable.

So again, if you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see more or less of, please reply to this email and let me know🙏 I read and reply to everything!

— Mehmet Karakus