The Story of Instagram

Kevin Systrom, the CEO and co-founder of Instagram likes to say that Instagram is an app that took only 8 weeks to build and ship, but was a product of over a year of work. Kevin began his path to the creation of Instagram while he was working at Nextstop in marketing. Kevin didn’t actually know any complex computer programming and he didn’t have a formal CS degree or training, but he would stay up late after work and teach himself new code. Like many entrepreneurs, Kevin didn’t need a degree to jump into a certain field, he was confident in his ability to turn a great idea into a reality — even if he had to teach himself how to get there.

The ancestor to Instagram was called Burbn, a program that combined elements of Foursquare with elements of Mafia Wars. Burbn, after a few weeks of refining, had turned into an HTML5 mobile web app that let you check into locations, make plans for future check-ins, earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. Burbn was still just a prototype, but Kevin’s friends had been testing it out and using it in its most primitive form and had liked it.

Kevin still needed the financial support to get his program running and he ran into the perfect opportunity to get this support at a party one evening. At the party he met two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, he showed them the prototype and they set a coffee date to talk about the possibilities further. After the first meeting, Kevin knew that he would have to really jump into Burbn if he wanted it to succeed. He had reached the point that many entrepreneurs do — the fight or flight. Kevin decided that rather than give up on his project, he would fight for it — he quit his job and within two weeks, he had raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen. His next step was to find a passionate team of people who could help him refine his program even further.

Kevin started talking with Mike Kreiger, a Brazilian entrepreneur and software engineer that Kevin had met at Stanford. Mike liked the idea of helping start the company and they became partners. At this point they had to step back and look at Burbn in its most raw form and decide how they wanted to change it, what they wanted its focus to be, and how they could make it better and increase its chances of popularity. Together they decided that they wanted to focus on being really good at one thing. They wanted to simplify Burbn into having one main purpose and function. Kevin and Mike spent the first week creating a prototype version that focused solely on photos. It didn’t turn out how they wanted it to, so they went back to the original Burbn model. They then created an entire version of Burbn for the iPhone app, but weren’t pleased with it either. They didn’t like how busy and cluttered it felt. There were too many features and it was confusing to use.

The men decided to take a chance and leave their almost finished product behind and start almost from scratch. They cut out almost every single feature from the Burbn app, leaving only its photo, comment, and like capabilities. They decided to call this Instagram.

For eight weeks, Kevin and Mike worked relentlessly to perfect Instagram. Friends, always the guinea pigs of our crazy experiments and newest inventions, played a major role in testing out the app as it evolved. Simple things like deciding how many filters to make available, and making sure certain symbols could be used in account passwords, were things that the men worked on during the final stages of the app’s creation.

Instagram was released at midnight on October 6, 2010. Having freshly introduced the app for viewing, the men thought they would have at least a few hours before people would begin discovering it, but they were mistaken — it took only a few minutes before downloads were pouring in. There were over 10,000 users in a matter of hours and at the end of the first week Instagram had been downloaded over 100,000 thousand times and by the middle of December this number had grown to a million users. The almost instantaneous success of Instagram was like a dream come true for Kevin and Mike. In September of 2013 the men sold Instagram to Facebook for one billion dollars. The popularity of Instagram spread like wildfire, with over 150 million active users in 2013. Instagram has a truly inspirational success story and looking at the app now it would be hard to guess that it was created in just a little over eight weeks.

Systrom, Kevin. “The Genesis of Instagram.” 11 1 2011: n. page. Web. 14 Nov. 2014. <http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-genesis-of-Instagram>.

Markowitz, Eric. “How Instagram GrewFrom a Foursquare Knock-Off to a $1 Billion Photo Empire.” 10 Apr 2012: n. page. Web. 14 Nov. 2014. <http://www.inc.com/eric-markowitz/life-and-times-of-instagram-the-complete-original-story.html>.