Oct 20, 2014
A co-founder looks back at how a stalled project turned into a historic success.
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At first, we were building an app called Burbn, a location-based social
network written in HTML5. Burbn was well-liked and had a few passionate
daily actives, but it wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Our
attempts at explaining what we were building was often met with blank
stares, and we peaked at around 1,000 users. For those early adopters,
though, it was a new way of sharing what they were doing out in the
world. Many of our favorite updates came from friends who posted to
Burbn after putting their photos through some early filter apps,
compensating for the lower image sensors on phones like the iPhone 3G.
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We needed to scope down the product we were building, or risk failure in
trying to be too many things at once. It was time to try something
different — why don’t we take the photo updates from Burbn and make them
into their own product?
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Our fundamental idea was that people would want to connect and share
experiences out in the real world, through snapshots of their lives. In
retrospect, Instagram may seem “obvious” — communication through photos
is universal. But products are defined by a series of decisions and
assumptions, and our combination of being photos-first and
public-by-default would prove to be a combination that solved an unmet
need.
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Roughly 100,000 people signed up in the first week.
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Border-crossing connections are my favorite thing about what we’re building at Instagram.
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