STORY OF INSTAGRAM WITH KEVIN SYSTROM
Today I would be talking about the founding story of the world famous social media app ‘Instagram’ and each and every element that I have experienced from their story. I have been listening to their podcasts from the past and I came to showcase some learning that is not something you would find without struggle search.
KEVIN SYSTROM
The first founding father you can say of Instagram who came up with an idea of sharing pictures within an app when his girlfriend couldn’t be able to share her vacation pictures to her friends and that struck the mind of a brilliant self taught programmer named Kevin Systrom. He was always a problem solver, in one of his interviews/podcasts he said that the number one attribute of an entrepreneur is to find a simple problem that you want to solve, start working on it, show it to your other mates, if they like it it’s the time to expand the product. He was the first original author of filters in any app, he found that problem when he told his girlfriend about the new app and why is she not posting on it, she said “I don’t look good in this maybe some filters made me look good”. That idea of making something that will make people look good is now the world’s most valuable change. He went to Mike Krieger to pitch this idea, the initial idea was to build a HTML-5 check-in service named ‘Burbn’ , into a product that allowed users to do many things: check into locations, make plans (future check-ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. But it was too complicated to understand so they changed their app idea into Instagram in which they decided to focus their vision towards photo sharing. A month after launching the app, it was an absolute hit when it reached to 1 million users in one month. In April 2012, it was sold to Facebook for 1 billion dollars in cash and stock when there was only 13 employees left in the company. According to Wired, the deal netted Systrom $400 million from that deal. In a podcast that I have listened personally, he said that when we have been sold the most difficult question or you can a statement that someone has ever told me is that “it’s over now” and that’s also true in some sense, most of the serial founders in the past when they sold their company left the company to start something new. But these founders remain in the operations and functions of the company till 6 years after selling that shows his love, affection and determination towards his company and that should be a real attributes of an entrepreneur. In 2018, Instagram was valued at a strike valuation of 100 billion dollars that is a 100X from the valuation for which it was sold to Facebook. Instagram has a record breaking exponential revenue growth in the past years. The first Instagram post was a photo of South Beach Harbor at Pier 38, posted by Mike Krieger on July 16, 2010. Today over 1.3 billion pictures were posted on Instagram on a daily basis.
Storyline: If you love what you are doing and have a gut feeling in yourself that I don’t care what others says I am going to continue what I love, then make sure to handle the success. That was the same case with these founders when they initially came up with this idea of photo sharing everyone around them told them to immediately drop the idea even the ones who had some experience in this field but their reply was that these are the only things that they got so, that means they can’t leave this and they have taken the risk of not doing anything else and have a visionary focus on one thing that matters. This is one of the trait that many of the founders fail to adapt and that makes successful entrepreneurs different from others.
This is the story of how two Stanford grads who were passionate about building something that not everyone around them has seen in it.
The points here that I have made in all the paragraphs is 30 percent taken from sites like Wikipedia and 70 percent were from all the listening I have had of these founders from different sources and that makes it different from others.
Thanks for reading
From Finn Wilder
