Filtering Ideas
On October 6, 2010 Kevin Systrom and
Mike Krieger launched an app. These two had come together after a few years of dabbling: each with his own interests, and new ideas. Krieger had recently worked on user experience design with a company called Meebo. He would bring in groups of high school students to test the company’s interface. However, Krieger had always had a passion for picture-sharing. Meanwhile, Systrom was working with some app ideas. He created an app called Burbn which let users share their location pictures with friends–but what the app lacked was a smooth user interface. So these two came together and began to collaborate–each bringing his own skills, passions, and ideas to the table. It was then that the filtering and refining of ideas began.
Social, Simple, Slick
They decided to trash the Burbn idea, but they held on to the concept. They loved the idea of creating a social, picture-sharing medium, and so they began their research. They wanted to make picture-sharing fun and simple–so that it only took a few clicks. In the end, Systrom’s programming and Krieger’s design experience came together and fashioned Instagram.
In three months, they had one million users. And eventually they had three million. Today the app not only has 150 million active users, but also gives users the opportunity to share videos.
Just recently the company was bought by Facebook, but here’s the catch: they were bought for one million dollars–and Systrom owned 40% of the shares. Yes, that’s right–he now has 400 million dollars. Now is that a profitable idea, or what?
I am obsessed with Instagram. I think it is the best app out there! This is the first time I have heard about the beginnings of it. It’s nice to see that this idea did take some tinkering. It took two people brain storming together to come up with this. I love how simple and easy Instgram is, the design is so user friendly and I love how it edits pictures. Thank you so much for sharing this; it is so interesting!
As a huge instagram fan, it was great to hear this story! Despite all of the picture sharing apps and websites out there, instagram found a way to be unique and gain popularity. It seems that they’ve even started movements in culture, such as taking pictures of your food. It’s incredible to see what a little collaboration can do.
It was a smart move on their part to sell the company to Facebook. I think this shows how connecting ideas, and not protecting ideas can really be both profitable for the owners, but also helpful for the customers! I love that I can share my Instagram photos on Facebook, or other social media sites. These guys really found a brilliant idea and ran with it!
This is really cool – I use Instagram all the time, but I never knew how it started. It was a great idea to talk about people who made and app because that is such a big part of our culture these days.
Instagram is an amazing idea, i’m Instagramming myself writing this post… the market for apps is narrowing in profitability. Instagram feeds our love for laziness we’d rather see a picture than read a text setting it apart from twitter and Facebook.
There are so many people who use this and this is such a great example of our generation and social media. It is just so popular and profitable and I think its really smart how the founders set this up and compete with Facebook and twitter and other companies. They were really smart about how they got into it.