"We crossed 10,000 users within hours, and I was like, 'this is the best day of my life.' This is amazing, right?" Systrom told Inc.com last year. "At the end of the day, it kept growing so much I thought, 'are we counting wrong?'"
"The night of sleep we were hoping for turned into a few meager hours before we rushed into the office to add capacity to the service," he wrote on the company blog.
At the end of the first week of the company's launch, Instagram had been downloaded 100,000 times. Another week passed, and another 100,000 people had downloaded the app. By the middle of December, the community had grown to a million users.
"We believe it's the beginning of something bigger," Systrom wrote in December of 2010, a few days before his 27th birthday. "It was both rewarding and humbling to see people embrace Instagram as both a new home on their iPhone—and a new way of communicating visually with people around the world. We believe this is only the beginning. With 6.7 billion people in the world, we're a tiny fraction of the way there, but we're extremely happy with the progress."
"For better or for worse, I've done most of the pixel pushing in our app."
—Kevin Systrom
Investors, too, began to take notice. As the company coasted through January 2011, the company began meeting with institutional investors.
In February 2011, a group of investors led a Series A financing of $7 million. The round of funding, which was led by Adam D'Angelo—an early casual advisor of Systrom, who'd founded Quora—Jack Dorsey, Chris Sacca, Baseline Ventures, and Benchmark Capital, valued the company at $20 million.
Not bad for a start-up that launched just five months ago.
Media were quick to notice the fledgling start-up, which had just four employees centered around four desks in a ramshackle office in San Francisco.
"Instagram represents a new kind of stylish startup on the Web—one whose skyrocketing popularity, thanks to the prominence of outlets like Apple's App Store, largely precedes its evolution into a traditional company with such accoutrements as financing, office space—or even a permanent Web address," noted BusinessWeek shortly after the financing was announced in February.
By that time, Instagram had about 1.75 million members, who were uploading about 290,000 photos per day. And the growth never slowed down.
But even as the company scaled, and the company's financing gave Systrom the opportunity to hire more employees, the founders kept the company super-lean.
"For better or for worse, I've done most of the pixel pushing in our app," Sytrom wrote on Quora in August of 2011.
The company still had fewer than 10 employees.
What's remarkable about Instagram, aside from its colossal acquisition, is how little the product has changed since launch. Few add-ons or features have been added, and the company has demurred from adding premiums to generate revenue. Instead, the founders have focused exclusively on the core product, and responded to the needs of the community with aplomb.
Even back in November 2010, in an audio interview with Robert Scoble, Systrom was devoted to focusing on a core product.
"In the long-run we'll make or break this company based on focus," Systrom told Scoble. When asked about how the company will make money, Systrom responded, "I'm absolutely certain that we're not going to be one of those start-ups that you talk about five years from now, that hasn't even looked at making money. I care deepy about it. But we're eight weeks old. It's the time to be stable and grow."
At the same time, Systrom envisioned a huge future for the company. "We don't want it to be another photo-sharing service," Systrom said. We "want to make big leaps into the Web."
From the summer of 2011 until the beginning of 2012, little changed inside the walls of Instagram. It hired a few community managers, and posted on a jobs section looking for design and engineering candidates, noting "we're a small team, and we're looking for people to make a big impact." In January 2012, the company had 15 million registered users. By March, that number jumped 27 million, and rumors began swirling that the the company was planning on raising $50 million at a $500 million valuation.
"We've had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe."
—Kevin Systrom
Those rumors were confirmed in the beginning of April, when it was announced that Sequoia Capital, Thrive Capital, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, and Baseline Ventures had led the Series B round of financing.
Overnight—well, four full days later—those investors enjoyed a 100% return on their investments when Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, drawing comparisons to Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube in 2006. Perhaps it wasn't the 10x return firms like Sequoia generally pine for, but on an annualized basis, it wasn't too shabby, either.
So far, the company has declined to comment publicly about the acquisition. Perhaps that makes sense, considering Facebook's pre-IPO quiet period it might be honoring. But on the company's blog, Systrom did recount some of his feelings about the acquisition.
"When Mike and I started Instagram nearly two years ago, we set out to change and improve the way the world communicates and shares," Systrom, who is now worth a reported $400 million, wrote. "We've had an amazing time watching Instagram grow into a vibrant community of people from all around the globe."
