Kevin Systrom left his job to build Burbn, a check-in app that flopped. He and his cofounder stripped it down to just photo-sharing, added filters like X Pro 2 to make people comfortable posting, and called it Instagram. The lesson: cut everything until one thing works.
Chapters
Came out of one wanting to be my own boss. I was like, you know what, I want to work for myself. I want to work on ideas. I really hope I'm going to make money. And I remember telling at the time, my mom, I was like, hey, I'm going to go do this thing. And she was like, what about health insurance? I was like, oh, what about health insurance? You're right. Like I totally forgot. So my point is I was a little naive, but I wanted to do my own thing. And I had a bunch of different ideas, one of which was a terrible idea for a check in app. Actually it wasn't terrible, but like at the time, time there were a bunch of check in apps. And we're sitting in Austin right now, south by Southwest, Zoom back six, seven, eight years ago. It was all about Gawala and Foursquare, right? Everyone was all about it. So I had to have my version. And it wasn't bad, wasn't good either. And catchy name. Yeah, it was called Bourbon and B U R B N. I still, I think I own the domain name somewhere. But anyway, we, what happened? I was working on that, I left my job and I, I happened to be able to raise money for it and I'm not sure how or why, but checking apps were all the rage. So we raised some money. It was a couple well known firms in the valley and I had just enough money to work on it. And I met my co founder, Mike. At the time, he was one of the power users of Bourbon. And he was like, yeah, this will be super fun. So we decided to join up. We worked on Bourbon for maybe, I don't know, three months. And it was clear it wasn't working okay, it was like very clear the startup was going nowhere. And we decided to pivot. And this is where keeping it simple comes in. We actually got to the idea for Instagram by taking away features from Burbn, not by changing it all. So a bunch of the features of one, you could check in at a place, but two, you could add a photo of what you were doing at that place. So you and I were out to drink somewhere. I check in at the bar, I could post a photo of the beer I'm having or the cocktail or whatever. And it turns out people, people liked the check ins. They thought it was pretty lame because it was a me too thing, but they loved showing people what they were doing. They loved taking a picture of the bar, the restaurant, the whatever. And we realized to keep it simple, we were going to have to Cut every other feature of Bourbon, which we did, and we just kept the photo part. How did you decide on that feature? Because we made a list and we asked ourselves, what exists in the world? What sucks? Meaning you look out in the world and you say, what opportunity is there to fill? If stuff doesn't exist and it's a problem that can be solved, AKA like the experience sucks, then that's what you should go do. There were a lot of check in apps, there were a lot of planners and meetup things and group chat things. But there was no solution for posting great photos to like lots of friends all at once. So we made the list, we crossed off the things we thought were pretty boring or just there was no opportunity in them, and we circled the photos thing because we saw the confluence of both mobile phones being pervasive again. Go back in the day, not everyone had an iPhone. Maybe the iPhone had been out for a couple of years at that point. 2007, 8. Right. We knew that cameras were going to be pervasive in people's pockets, that people were going to be carrying these camera phones wherever they went. But we didn't know if it would be successful or not to capitalize on that. But it was the only thing that looked like a greenfield opportunity. Everything else felt crowded. That's a different way of saying it. So we got to the idea by cutting everything away from Bourbon, circling the one thing that we felt was the biggest opportunity. Because it didn't exist yet and it was a big need. And we built the first version of Instagram. Note, by the way, the first version of Instagram did not have filters. And people forget the only reason Instagram worked early on was because of the filters. And filters came about because I was on this walk with my wife. We were taking a small vacation I had been working on in Bourbon for a while. I was exhausted. And we were taking this walk along the beach and I was like, oh, so you're excited about this new app we're building. We haven't called it Instagram yet. She was like, yeah, but I don't think I'm gonna use it. Cause my photos aren't that good. Okay, why don't you think your photos are good? And she's all your friends. You post these amazing photos and they're all like filtered and stuff. And I was like, oh, that's because they use filters. And she goes, oh, you should probably add filters. And we came back from that walk. I went straight to the room and I just got on my laptop and I made the first filter, which was X Pro 2. This is a long way of saying we cut features, we focused on what we thought the world needed, and then we got to the heart of the issue of why people wouldn't use it. Because people didn't feel comfortable sharing their photos. By solving those things right in a row and keeping it uber simple, even that first filter could have been written in OpenGL and could have been a lot faster. You tap on that filter, it took three seconds to show you the filter. No one cared. It was fine. Yeah, keep it simple. Keep it super simple.
