No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Krieger and Systrom started the exercise by making a list of the top three things people liked about Burbn. One was Plans, the feature where people could say where they were going so friends could join them. Another was photos. The third was a tool to win meaningless virtual prizes for your activity, which was mostly a gimmick to get people to log back in. Not everybody needed plans or prizes. 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.” 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?

FromBrbn to Instagram