Instagram: The True Founding Story

Instagram, the photo sharing app created by Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom from Stanford University, spins the tale of success capitalized the right way. Launched way back in the year 2010, Instagram today boasts of 700 million registered users, with more than 400 million people visiting the site on a regular basis. Out of the 700 million users, around 17 million are from the United Kingdom alone!

When the two founders started talking about their idea, they quickly realised they had one goal in mind: to make the largest mobile photo sharing app. However, before Instagram, the two had worked together on a similar platform called Burbn. For Instagram to work, Krieger and Systrom decided to strip Burbn down to the bare necessities. Burbn was quite similar to Instagram and had features which allowed users to add filters to their pictures.

The pair looked at how users in Burbn’s beta gravitated toward photo sharing and then studied every single popular app in the photograph category. Mike and Kevin scrapped Burbn completely and decided to create a brand new platform. Very soon, they realised the photo sharing app had gotten a little saturated. During the multiple stages of development and modifications, a precursor to Instagram called Scotch was made. However, Scotch tanked because it didn’t have many filters, was slow and riddled with a few too many bugs.

With their UX skills, Krieger and Systrom refined Instagram to require as few actions as possible. Unlike the original version of Path, Instagram didn’t force users to add tags about people or places to their photos. A photo could be posted in as few as three clicks. Mirroring Twitter, they made Instagram public by default. After months and months of testing, Instagram was officially launched on 6 October, 2010.

Launched at just the right time, Instagram had 25,000 users on its very first day! For late 2010, with fewer I Phones in the market, that was quite a big number. Krieger and Systrom were not only minimalist in their approach to the app, but to the market as well. New financing gave Systrom and Krieger the opportunity to hire more people, but the founders kept the company very lean with barely a dozen employees. By March 2012, the app’s user base extended to more than 27 million.

Once Instagram was released for Android phones, the app was downloaded more than one million times a day. Interestingly, the online social media platform was all set to receive an investment of $ 500 million. Furthermore, Systrom and Zuckerberg were in talks for a Facebook poised takeover. In April 2012, Facebook made an offer to purchase Instagram for about $ 1 billion in cash and stock, with the key provision that the company would remain independently managed. Shortly thereafter and just prior to its initial public offering, Facebook acquired the company for the whopping sum of $ 1 billion in cash and stock.

After the Facebook acquisition, the Instagram founders have done little to change the user phase, sticking to the simplicity of the app. The astounding rise of Instagram’s popularity proves that people believe in real connections rather than those based on only words.