Hello ktimez readers today we are going to see the insane story of instagram.
in one interview Kevin Systrom co-founder of Instagram said that Instagram came out of because he wanted to be his own boss, and he wanted to work for himself and wanted to work on Ideas he really hope he is gonna make money from.
Instagram with only 13 employees bought today by Facebook for 1 Billion dollars and at that time has around 700 million monthly users.
Imagine you started a company today and later you sold that company for 1 Billion dollars pretty good right but what if I told you that it took you three years to sell that company that’s the story of Instagram, and it is one of my favorite story to tell people not only because of yeah it’s a unicorn company no they got so much money in such a short amount of time and blew up mostly because there’s one huge lesson that can be taken out of the story of Instagram that can be applied to business it can be applied to your life, and I have always applied it since learning about it into everything I do.
So without further do this is the story of Instagram . How one decision created a company that’s worth a billions.
Kevin Systrom
On December the 30th 1983 Kevin Systrom was born to his parents Douglas and Diane Systrom in Massachusetts Middlesex County now Kevin was a pre ordinary Kid he worked at a Vinyl Record store during school and he was also a big fan of Doom 2 which is a video game that’s am sure quite a lot people will be familiar with and it was in fact from doom 2 Kevin grew a love for computer programming also Kevin Loved to read .
in the interview Kevin continued saying that he was just a Kid that just wanted to play computers and the second he learned that you can program them to do things and he got Hooked and he like the idea of writing programs to then do things and then have those things be useful was like an idea that he caught on very quicky.
Kevin later on went to attend Stanford University and later he met a guy called Mike Krieger but that was it they met briefly and there wasn’t anything crazy happened there but Mike Krieger went on to become the co-founder of Instagram with him.
During Stanford University Kevin was approached by another young entrepreneur who approached and asked him: like hey Kevin I’ve got a business would you like to help me out with it? That entrepreneur was Mark Zuckerberg and the business was Facebook but Kevin declined doing it. And it is also Important to know that during his time at Stanford University Kevin attended what is called the Mayfield’s fellow program which is like this program where you are selected to work at a startup and they kind train you and show you the ropes thy kind give you the really good work experience that You want.
On that program Kevin worked at a company called ODEO, ODEO was the company that later went on to become Twitter so at that time it was like social media was literally following this guy forever and after university keeping up with his passions Kevin went on to work at a tech startup by day he was working and by night he was learning to code, It also just happened that Mike Krieger The guy who attended Stanford Along with Kevin and they met briefly was in the area also doing the same thing and they ended up meeting and having a chat in a café .The first meeting they had together was at just for you café and at that café they came up with the idea for an app but it wasn’t Instagram.
Kevin had the idea for an app called Burbn and if you heard of burbn you are probably one of the few because most people have never header of burbn so you’re probably wondering what the hell are these guys are doing creating burbn when they are supposed to be creating Instagram we will get there Mike Krieger his idea when they are sitting in café he goes yeah I like it the burbn was a check-in app with the photo sharing features where you would go to a bar or a restaurant and you would take a picture when you’re there and it would like hey guys I was here and this is the picture that I took I think even I don’t know how burbn works but it wasn’t anything like Instagram. It’s much more like a check-in app so Kevin goes around trying to get investments for his new Idea:
Kevin continued saying: I went to a bar where a bunch of investors were getting together and like I kind mingled around the room and you know people were kind of showing their prototypes on their phones to different investors and I showed it to this one investor his Steve Anderson who was on of our first investor so Steve saw that idea and says you know what guys I like it so I want put $50,000 towards your idea.
That’s huge amount of money and in silicon Valley when someone gets a wind of an investment like that going around suddenly everybody is coming up to you trying to get the piece of the pie they think if someone is willing to make that kind of investment and you’ve something big on your hands so it wasn’t long before Steve Anderson’s initial investment of $50,000 turned to $250,000 on the top of that the venture capitalist company Andreessen Horowitz onto that investment an additional $250,000 dollars so essentially you’ve called these two guys who are starting a relatively new company with half million on their shoulders and you’re probably wondering with that much money what the hell happened to burbn.
Asking the Right Questions?
No matter how much money investors throw at you there’s just one thing that they can’t change and that’s how the market reacts to your product or whatever it is you are selling people, and it turns out that burbn didn’t have as good as a user responses you see the burbn app only got to about a hundreds users and that’s was it Kevin and Mike both realizing this very soon that burbn really wasn’t going anywhere.
Kevin: We were both kind of burned out we had decided that burbn wasn’t going do anything we had.four hundred and ninety five thousands dollars left in the bank because five thousand dollars to buy couple of computers.
So then what was the catalyst what changed everything for this guys ?
You see Kevin and Mike did something incredibly important instead of asking man why aren’t more people joining burbn we need more customers we need well what king of what kind of marketing should we do to bring in more customers instead of asking those questions they asked one question which is the most important question they went directly to their customers and they said why do you guys use burbn in the first place and what they noticed was almost all of them said they didn’t care for the check-in aspect but they much rather preferred the photo-sharing aspect the .
Kevin said : The best thing for an entrepreneur is failure and for us it was the lack of momentum we I mentioned we got to about a hundreds users using this app don’t ask why people don’t use your startup ask why the people who continue to use your startup keep using it ? and when we looked at our users base a whole hundreds people each of them loved the photo aspect .
Kevin and Mike took the message and they realized that the burbn isn’t gonna work we need to change up we’re creating something new and It’s gonna be a photo sharing app now don’t get it twisted because intagram was certainly not the first photo sharing app to be published on the app store ,there were many others but different between them and Kevin and Mike is that Kevin and Mike always asked themselves what problem are we solving .
Kevin said : We set ourselves apart from crowd was focusing on the problems so many entrepreneurs today , our technology and searching for problem not the other way around, If stuff doesn’t exist and it’s a problem that can be solved aka the experience sucks then that’s you should go and do. There were a lot of check-in apps there, planners and meet up things and group chat things but there was no solution for posting great photo to like lots of friends all at once.
And later on when Kevin was on a vacation with his now-wife he had the following conversation with her .
Kevin: I was like so you’re excited about this new app we’re building ? at that time they haven’t called Instagram yet his wife she said yeah but I don’t am gonna use it because my photo aren’t that good. And Kevin asked why don’t you think your photos are good and the wife said well your friends you post these amazing photos and they’re all like filtered and stuff and Kevin was like oh that’s because they use filters and her wife goes like you should go and add filters then Kevin after came about from that walk he went straight to his room and he just open his laptop and made the first filter which was ex-pro two Off creating a filter he goes to a taco stand he takes out his phone and he takes a picture of his dog and that photo became the first ever photo posted on Instagram and you can still find it to this day.
So Kevin rushes back home after his vacation to Mike and they get started immediately working on Instagram and from around the time they started building it to when they released it on October the 6th 2010 it was about eight week worth of work and as soon as they released it, it blew up within about 24 hours they had 25,000 users roughly and if you’ve ever tried to create an app you know how incredibly huge that number is , learn the fact that of the one Month they had 1 millions users using they app and so two years after the launching this incredibly successful app after a countless celebrities like Justin Beiber, Snoop Dogg even Obama joined on the app there was an other entrepreneur well a well known entrepreneur who saw something very familiar with why Instagram was doing.
Of course that entrepreneur was Mark Zuckerberg and when he made Facebook he saw a similar trend in how there was a burst of users going towards Facebook, He saw that exact trend in Instagram so he decided that he wanted a piece of Pie and to put a long story short he went to Kevin and Mike and he said guys I will buy your company for 1 Billion us dollars and Kevin and Mike agreed.
Kevin: If you are going to sell your company the is to sell your company to a company that’s gonna be a rocket ship and I remember Mike and I talking about do we believe that being a part of this larger company Instagram can reach even a higher potential even more quickly.
Because here they believe that Facebook will take Instagram to a higher level s which he was right about Instagram at the moment was worth $100 Billion so in other words Facebook hundred x their investment pretty good but here’s the thing none this would be possible if it wasn’t for this one crucial moment during the creating of burbn when they were faced with a decision between two paths to pivot or to persevere.
Pivot Or Persevere?
Kevin : The key to entrepreneurship is failing really quicky just talk about the premise that most successful things are pivots.
Pivoting Is changing your idea based on analyzing what you’ve been told or what data you can gather from what you’ve been doing so far and going towards what it seems would be the best choice out of that data, persevering is continuing with it there are so many people that if they had burbn in they hands they would said along with that investment money of almost a half million they would have said no we’re gonna keep going with burbn we’re gonna try and get this thing off his feet but Mike and Kevin decided to pivot and that is the single most important decision in Instagram history pivoting is not a bad thing you see some people would looked at Mike and Kevin situation and they would said right when they were at that boiling point with burbn way wasn’t working they would have said if you guys stop now you’re quitting and that kind of advice would kept them stuck for very long time there was nothing wrong in changing the initial idea that didn’t workout for you as I said if it wasn’t for that single fact Instagram wouldn’t been what it is today .