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.