How Instagram Grew From Foursquare Knock-Off to $1 Billion Photo Empire
How do you make a billion dollars in two years? Here's a narrative look through the brief, hectic, (and lucky), 14 months of Kevin Systrom's life growing Instagram.
Robert Scoble
Portrait of the multi-millionaires as young men: Blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble snapped this Instagrammed shot of Instagram founders Kevin Systrom (left) and Mike Krieger back in November of 2010, when they were building their photo-sharing app out of a $500-a-month desk rented from Dogpatch Labs on Pier 38, which was so structurally unsound San Francisco forced tenants to vacate within a year.
News of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram boomeranged around the Web yesterday with near-light-speed velocity. The interest made complete sense. Instagram, a start-up which had existed for a mere 551 days, which had never made a cent in revenue, and which employed just a dozen people, had pulled off one of the most impressive exits in recent memory. And it all seemed to happen overnight.
So how did Kevin Systrom, the 28-year-old company's founder, pull it off?
The common, almost Tweet-sized narrative, is that Kevin Systrom, a freshly pedigreed member of Silicon Valley's nouveau elite—he graduated from Stanford University, interned at Twitter, and worked at Google—founded Instagram in March 2010. But this is only a sliver of the story.
Beginning in January 2009, Systrom spent his days toiling as a product manager for Nextstop.com, a travel recommendation start-up which Facebook would acquire in September of 2010.
On the nights and weekends, Systrom, who has no formal computer-science training, poured his time and energy into side projects that, he says, would help him learn to code.
On the nights and weekends, Systrom, who has no formal computer-science training, poured his time and energy into side projects that, he says, would help him learn to code. Perhaps from his time at Odeo—the proto-Twitter—Systrom developed an entrepreneurial bug that made him restless.
At the time, in late 2009, Foursquare was just beginning to hit its stride of popularity, and location-based check-in apps were the quickly becoming the focus of investors and entrepreneurs throughout San Francisco and the Valley. Systrom had developed a few concepts in his spare time, but in late 2009, he concentrated his attention on one: An iPhone app that would combine elements of Foursquare with elements of Mafia Wars, a popular game developed by Zynga.
"I figured I could build a prototype of the idea in HTML5 and get it to some friends," Systrom wrote on Quora. "Those friends ended up using the prototype without any branding elements or design at all."
Systrom called his idea Burbn, and the app's primary functions were to let users check-in to locations, make future plans with acquaintances, earn points for hanging out with friends, and post pictures.
But there was just one thing missing: Money. Systrom was still working full-time at Nextstop.com, so he would need an infusion of cash that would allow him to focus full time on developing his product.
Of course, no great start-up story would be complete without just a bit of luck. For Systrom, his good fortune came over cocktails in early 2010 at a party for Hunch, a start-up based in Silicon Valley.
"At that party there were two people from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz," Systrom writes on Quora. "I showed [them] the prototype, and we decided we'd meet up for coffee to talk about it. After the first meeting, I decided to take the dive and leave my job to go solo and see if Burbn could be a company. Within two weeks of leaving, I raised $500k from both Baseline and Andreessen Horowitz, and started work on finding a team."
That was March 2010.
Systrom's first hire and eventual co-founder was Mike Krieger, a Brazilian-born 25-year-old engineer who worked at Meebo at the time. The pair had met at Stanford's Mayfield Fellows program, a nine-month work-study program at Stanford designed to educate eager young students in running technology companies. Kim-Mai Cutler, writing for TechCrunch, describes Krieger as one of the "sweetest, most self-effacing engineers and user-experience designers."
"Once he joined, we took a step back and looked at the product as it stood," Systrom reflected on Quora. "We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing."
But Systrom and Krieger were unhappy with Burbn.
It was "cluttered" and "overrun with features," Systrom noted on Quora, adding that the photo feature was by far the most popular. So in August, the founders made an incredibly risky, but perhaps prophetic, decision: They'd scrap Burbn almost entirely in order to build an entirely new app from the ground up.
"It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities," Systrom continued.
The founders settled on the name, Instagram, as a portmanteau of "instant" and "telegram." "It also sounded camera-y," Systrom wrote.
The founders settled on the name, Instagram, as a portmanteau of "instant" and "telegram." "It also sounded camera-y," Systrom wrote.
For the next eight weeks, Systrom and Krieger methodically stripped down Burbn and worked day and night to perfect Instagram. They shared it with friends, tested it in beta, and fixed bugs. One bug, for example, would make the app crash on a user's phone if their password contained an "@" symbol. Another decision, to use 11 filters, was pared down from a batch of more than 30 filters.
Decisions like these were made with "No rhyme or reason—just lots of experimentation and feedback from beta users," Systrom wrote. It was, essentially, crunch time.
The purpose was to perfect the product, but also to get it launched as quickly as possible. Finally, that day came.
On 12:15 a.m., October 6, 2010, Instagram went live. Mike Krieger liked to joked that the app, which took barely eight weeks to build, was a year in the making. This was the moment of they had been waiting for.
"We figured we'd have at least six hours before anyone discovered the app so we could grab some shut-eye," Systrom wrote on the company's blog. "No problem, we figured."
But within minutes, downloads began pouring in from all corners of the globe.
