No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Systrom circled “photos.” Photos, they decided, were ubiquitous, useful to everybody, not just young city dwellers. “There’s something around photos,” Kevin said. His iPhone 3G took terrible pictures, but it was only the beginning of that technology. “I think there will be an inflection point where people don’t carry around point-and-shoots anymore, they’re just going to carry around these phones.”20 Everyone with a smartphone would be an amateur photographer, if they wanted to be. So if photos were the killer feature of the app they should build, what were the main opportunities? On the whiteboard, Systrom and Krieger brainstormed three of the top problems to solve. One, images always took forever to load on 3G cellular networks. Two, people were often embarrassed to share their low-quality phone snaps, since phones weren’t nearly as good as digital cameras. Three, it was annoying to have to post photos in many different places. What if they made a social network that came with an option to deliver your photos to Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr all at once? Playing nice with the new social giants would be easier than competing with them. Instead of having to build a network from scratch, the app could just piggyback off already-established communities. “All right,” Systrom said. “Let’s focus on photos, and on solving these three problems.” They would make it an app for iPhone only, since Krieger was better at those.

“Well, you guys should probably have filters too,” Schuetz said. Systrom realized she was right. If people were going to filter their photos anyway, might as well have them do it right within the app, competition be damned. Back at the hotel, he researched online about how to code filters. He played around on Photoshop to create the style he wanted—some heavy shadow and contrast, as well as some shading around the edges of the image for a vignette effect. Then, sitting on one of the outdoor lounge chairs with a beer beside him and his laptop open, he set about writing it into reality. He called the filter X-Pro II, a nod to the analog photo development technique called cross-processing, in which photographers intentionally use a chemical meant for a different type of film. Soon after, he tested his work on a photo he took of a sandy-colored dog he came across in front of a taco stand. The dog is looking up at Schuetz, whose sandaled foot appears in the corner of the shot. And that, on July 16, 2010, was the first-ever photo posted on the app that would become Instagram.

The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right artistic tone, creating good content for everyone else to look at, in what was essentially the first-ever Instagram influencer campaign, years before that would become a concept.

Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a luxury brand, manufacturing coolness and tastefulness around what they’d built.

It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.

Facebook never asked to look at the code. We could be running this company on Legos and they wouldn’t know, Krieger thought.

Looking at Instagram’s history of investor financing restored Zoufonoun’s respect for Systrom. Here was a man who just a few years ago had been helping on Google’s deals team, making PowerPoint presentations. He had done all this in just eighteen months.

“If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”

The question that Systrom would be asking, six years later, was whether Zuckerberg considered Instagram part of the “we,” or the “someone else.”

Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.

At Facebook, product requests were ranked by priority number, with ones and zeroes being top priority. The only thing above that priority level, superseding anything else on the road map, was unofficially called a “ZuckPri,” which meant that Zuckerberg was tracking the progress. Photo tagging on Instagram was a ZuckPri. It had been such a boost for Facebook in its early days, he was sure that it would work for Instagram.

He banned employees from using words like “share” and “post” that reminded him of Facebook, since Snapchat was about being more personal, and preferred using a term like “send” instead.

Only one brand per day, Systrom had decided—that felt right. It was nonnegotiable: if Louis Vuitton called wanting the twentieth of the month, they would decline if Ben & Jerry’s already had the slot. All the names of the early advertisers were mapped out in red marker on a whiteboard calendar. An employee would print the potential ads out; then Systrom would go through them, one by one, deciding what was good enough and what wasn’t. If an ad wasn’t good enough, he would protest. At one point Systrom was concerned that the food in one of the branded posts looked unappetizing, especially the French fries, which appeared soggy. “I don’t want to run it like this,” he told Jim Squires, his new ads lead, who had come over from Facebook. “Well, we have urgency to run this for the client,” Squires said. “No problem,” Systrom replied. “I’m on a flight this morning. I can fix the white balance and sharpen it up.” After he made the potatoes look crispier, he sent the photo back to Squires over Facebook Messenger, and then the ad ran.

Because there was no re-sharing on Instagram, it wasn’t about news and information—it was about individuals, and what they wanted to present to the world, and whether others thought they were interesting or creative or beautiful or valuable. Pretty pictures were just tools on Instagram in the pursuit of being understood and validated by the rest of society, through likes and comments and even money, giving users a small slice of power over their own destiny.

When someone goes to Google, their inbox, or their text messages, they generally know what they want to accomplish. But on social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.

Sponsorship deals or not, everyone on Instagram was selling in some way. They were selling an aspirational version of themselves, turning themselves into brands, benchmarking their metrics against those of their peers.

Brands pay travel influencers a per-post rate of about $1,000 per 100,000 followers, they said. But they make the most money off their Lightroom preset filters. Before the train incident, they were making upward of $300,000 per month just selling those via a link in their Instagram bio, Hocke said. He expects revenue to rise with follower count.

Brenner says he doesn’t offer the butt lift. Besides the safety aspects, he thinks it looks cartoonish. “It’s a fad that will pass,” he said. Kardashian, who sells perfume in bottles the shape of her curves, is widely rumored to have had the procedure, but once got an X-ray to prove her backside was real.

Mosseri’s title would be “head of Instagram.” At Facebook Inc., there was room for only one CEO.

But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.”