Why Instagram shot: the story of the founder of the service

October 2014 marks the fourth anniversary of Instagram. During the day, I looked at my watch and remembered what we did four years ago.

6:00 am riding a bike through foggy San Francisco to our coworking at Dogpatch Labs.
By 7:00, the stomach is tied in a knot, and Kevin and I intercept the bagels from the Crossroads Cafe.
8:00 the site opens and first users flock to it.
9:00 Kevin and I are in a panic: a small server can not withstand the load of the first day
12:00 am relieved when everything is working again
day passed
2:00 still not sleep. Already 25,000 registered users.
6:00 am train ride back to Hight and fall into bed
')
The first day was a reflection of the whole subsequent year, alternating between dizziness from success and panic at the thought of not being able to continue at the same pace.


Night work in the office near Dogspatch

People ask if we imagined such a success. Work on a startup consists in balancing between the insane belief in your idea, and a rational interpretation of signs showing that something is going wrong. So we balanced the whole previous year.

At first we wrote the application Burbn, a social network linked to geography on HTML5. She was pretty good, but the stars from the sky is not enough. Our attempts to explain what we actually do, stumbled upon incomprehensible views, and at the peak we had 1000 users. But for them it was a new way to share with others what is happening in the world. A lot of our updates have grown from the posts of our friends in Burbn, who posted photos processed by filters that compensated for the poor quality of photos from phones like iPhone 3G.

Kevin and I walked along the Embarcadero Embankment after meeting with investors in July 2010, and agreed among themselves. Having closed in the conference room of Dogpatch Labs, we expressed out loud what boiled up in a few weeks: we must seriously rework our product, or we will fail, trying to do everything at the same time. Why not take an update of photos from Burbn and put it in a separate product?

The idea was for people to share with each other the events of life through photos. In retrospect, the idea seems obvious - communication using photographs is a universal language. But the product is determined by a chain of decisions and assumptions, and our combination of the ideas “first pictures” and “public access by default” turned out to be exactly what people wanted.


Early draft interface application

We spent the next week at Crossroads Cafe, sketching pages and interface. Some ideas from Burbn were taken, for example, large and centered photos, and not just small thumbnails. Comments were presented in the form of a list, and not hidden behind the links. In two weeks we made the first version, including the first working filters from Kevin. We needed to understand if this would work, so we sent such a letter to a hundred testers from Burbn:

“For the last 6 weeks we have been working on a native iPhone application for chatting and sharing photos. We took the best of what was in our HTML5 application. Some things could not be done in HTML5, but there is no point in dragging some things into the application. Try to treat this app as “made after Burbn” :) ”.

When you have a hundred testers, success can be measured only approximately. A couple of days of the application, which was then simply called “Codename”, we realized that we had stumbled upon something big. During the first weekend of activity, testers exceeded the maximum activity of Burbn users. Not everyone liked it, many left and did not return. We refused to support Android for a while, which cut off one of our most loyal users.

Those who liked it, began to document in detail their lives, and after the final design and revisions, we released the application. We were very surprised to see how many users registered in one week. In the middle of the first day, Kevin turned to me and said: "I don’t know how much it will grow, but it seems to me that there is something in it." About 100,000 people came to us in a week.


The first official Instagram photo of Krieger

A few days later we were awakened by a call from the provider at 3 am. We thought that at this time all users are asleep, but then we remembered about time zones. It turned out that the Instagram boom started in Japan, which put our servers. I could not read the captions, but simply enjoyed the photos. I especially liked the photos from @umetaturou.

These links across state borders are some of the things I like most on Instagram. You can see them everywhere - amazing accounts like @everydayafrica, a meeting of 900 netizens in Jakarta, independent photographers and illustrators gaining followers due to their talent. It is these travels through space and time that encourage me to work on the project, whether I communicate with friends from Brazil, or follow the digital tracks of other visitors from any other country where I find myself.

At the end of those sleepless days in October 2010, Kevin and I broke away from their computers and noticed a firework display over AT & T Park. The victory of the sports team was celebrated, and when we looked at our statistics, we saw that several people had already used Instagram to post pictures from the stadium. This year already thousands of photos come from each of the games, and this serves as a demonstration of how far we have come.

Mike Krieger founded Instagram in 2010 with Kevin Sistrom. Both remained in the company after it acquired Facebook in 2012, and Mike now works as a technical director.