Kevin Systrom: Finding the Problem is the Hard Part

Finding the solution to the problem is the hardest part. I always thought, like, you're faced with these problems that people have, right? You assume that you know exactly what you're going to tackle. And the hard part is finding that algorithm, right? The hard part is scaling that solution. It turns out. Thank you, Mike. That the hard part is actually finding the problem to solve. Solutions actually come pretty easily for the majority of problems. Not for every problem, but for the majority of problems. And in our case, what we did was when we sat down and we were deciding to work on Instagram, what we did was we wrote down the top five problems people have with mobile photos because we wanted to build a product that solved problems. We didn't want to just build a cool app to look for a problem that people had. We wanted to do it the other way around. So what we did was we listed out these five problems, and I remember the top three that we circled. Number one was that mobile photos don't look so great, right? Like, we've all had that experience. You're seeing the sunset, you take a snapshot and it looks like, you know, washed out, you can barely see the sun, et cetera. And we were like, that's like the major problem we want to solve. Number two was that uploads on mobile phones take a really long time. So we were like, what could we do around that? And we were like, well, maybe if we start the upload way before you're done even editing the photo's caption. And what if we, like, sized down the photo just to fit perfectly on the screen, but nothing else. And that's like the small little problem and solution that it turns out really delights people because they press done entering their caption. It's already been uploaded, right? The third problem was that we really wanted to allow you to share out to multiple services at once. We felt like, should you have to make the decision of taking a photo with the Facebook app, the Twitter app, so on and so on, or should you just take it in one place and distribute it to many places at once? Right. Those top three problems allowed us to really hone in on what solution we wanted to build, and that's really what Instagram became. I also wanted to say that once you have those top problems that you want to solve, you need to verify that they're actually the ones that people have. And really the way to do that is get your product in front of people very quickly and test that hypothesis. I think too many people wait a long time, and I'm going to talk about this a little later. Too many people wait a long time to see whether or not what they're working on is actually the problem people are having. And the last point is that, really, you should not be afraid to have simple solutions to simple problems. Like I said early on, I think too many people believe you have to solve things in a really complicated way. And at the end of the day, if you delight people even a little bit with a simple solution, it turns out it goes very far. And that first day when we had something like 20,000 new users, I was like, clearly there was a need for this that hadn't been done before. And I'm so glad we tackled those simple problems. There's something about, like, you know, in the tech community, you always want to feel like you're working on the hardest problem in the world. It turns out that simple problem becomes very hard at scale. And that's what's really exciting in a way.

Like, we often in our entrepreneurship classes would hear about the big, hairy, audacious goal. Like, what's the huge chunk you're trying to bite off and tackle? And one thing that really struck me was that that big, hairy, audacious goal could be bringing that simple solution to something delightful to the masses. And that in itself is a huge challenge.