The story of explosive growth on Instagram looks like a fairy tale from Silicon Valley, in which the company has been gaining stunning momentum for several months. The app’s development began just eight weeks before it was launched on iOS, and within a year and a half, Facebook acquired the company for a billion dollars in cash and stock. But, as in all good fairy tales, in this process there were many twists, failures and successes, conflicts and agreements, as well as simple accidents. If you also want to get more popularity and money, play at the bet Naija.
How Instagram Appeared
Kevin Systrom has been interested in writing computer programs, economics and photography since childhood. As a result, all these interests converged in one place — on Instagram.
One of the sites that Kevin created as a Stanford student was a resource full of pictures from drunks, a kind of diary of fun and excitement.
At some point, Systrom got bored of studying, and he went to Italy to study photography. Having admired the beautiful Italian views, having mastered a variety of photographic equipment, the future creator of the popular service thought about business.
He returned home, attended a startup startup course at the university, and after receiving his diploma, found a job at a not-so-recent Odeo company.
First There Was Burbn
And here begins the story of the creation of Instagram. In his free time and not free from work duties, Kevin decided to develop an old theme — to make a website for publishing photos, and by everyone, and not just friends at parties.
Having come up with the name – Burbn – Systrom began to look for those who would give money for the project. Investors were found, they were ready to give out a quarter of a million, but on condition that Burbn would have two partners. Kevin promptly found a companion among his Stanford graduates. His name was Mike Krieger, and he was also trying to do something of his own, working on a website for communication Meebo.
It soon became clear that the site in its pure form is empty, it will not live long. It is necessary to make a social network, and only as an application for smartphones.
“Many people liked Burbn, and it even got particularly ardent fans, but the application never became popular. All our attempts to explain what we were doing were usually unsuccessful, so we barely scraped together 1,000 users,” recalled Systrom.
But the guys tried, thought, perfected what they had, and eventually made what was called Instagram.
Focus On the Photo
After Krieger joined, they reviewed Burbn and decided to focus primarily on photography. They have carefully studied the leading apps in the photography category. Hipstamatic, a popular application at the time, stood out because it had filters for photos, but it lacked a social component, and young entrepreneurs saw the potential in creating an application that would connect Hipstamatic and Facebook. Systrom and Krieger made a difficult but critical decision to take a step back, leaving only photos, comments and likes in Burbn. At that time, they renamed the app Instagram, combining the words instant and telegram. With their UX skills, they worked tirelessly to improve the photo sharing process. The application was supposed to be minimalistic, requiring the user to do as little as possible. After eight weeks of fine-tuning the app, they launched beta testing among friends, fixed bugs and prepared for launch.
Here’s a Billion for You
The history of Instagram has reached a new level. It was very exciting. “In the middle of the first day of testing, Kevin turned to me and said:
“I don’t know how popular this app will become, but I feel that there is something in it,” recalls Krieger.
And on October 6, 2010, their brainchild appeared in the App Store. I had to work around the clock, because the load was huge. As a result, 25,000 people subscribed to Insta on the first day, and 100,000 in the first week.
The arrival of 2011 Systrom and Krieger celebrated with a grandiose drinking, especially since the occasion was twofold: not only the New Year, but also the first million subscribers. The growth was incredible. It is not surprising that in the spring of 2012, Mark Zuckerberg called Systrom and offered a billion to buy Instagram.
Such offers are not refused. Kevin’s share in the project was 40%, so 400 million landed on his account at once, part in money, part in Facebook shares.
New Page
Then, in 2012, Kevin, having already become a millionaire, continued to lead a modest lifestyle.
“Systrom is still living in a two-room apartment. Recently, the guys from Instagram invited me to celebrate the birthday of one of them. We got into a 2002 black BMW Systrom. The navigator in the car broke down, and a man who has almost half a billion almost got lost on the road. “If you don’t think about money, you can keep your mind,” he says, “that’s how Forbes described Kevin’s life.
Since then, everything has changed: Systrom got a taste of wealth, he traveled a lot, had fun, was friends with celebrities. What’s next? At the end of September, both creators of Instagram announced that they were leaving the company (where they remained to work after the sale).
“We plan to take a short break to test our curiosity and creativity again,” Kevin and Mike said.
Instagram Facebook has been having problems with the management of Facebook in recent months, The Wall Street Journal wrote, as the guys have diverged in their views on the future of Instagram. In any case, it seems to us that neither the network nor its creators will be lost. The history of the amazing Instagram service continues.
Evidence
– Hashtags on Instagram are an important tool that you need to be able to use. You can come up with tags yourself, or you can take the ones that are there, since the choice for each topic is simply huge. Below are the most popular hashtags in general.
– The number one tag is, of course, #love. And also – #instagood #photooftheday #tbt #beautiful #cute #me #selfie #tagforlikes #happy #followme #fashion #summer #picoftheday #like4likes #fun #art #friends #instadaily #girl #smile.
– Russia ranks second in the world in the number of instagrammers.
– – In June, the Instagram team announced a happy news for them: the audience of users of the service exceeded one billion.
– During the first six years, more than 30 billion photos were uploaded to Instagram.
– Every second, 8500 likes are put on Instagram and 1,000 comments are published.
– Kevin Systrom’s Instagram has “only” 7.6 million users.