Kevin Systrom (Instagram cofounder) gives advice to entrepreneurs: launch early rather than staying in private beta, focus on solving a small number of real user problems (he cites three photo-related problems Instagram solved), and avoid maximizing features for their own sake. He illustrates these principles with Instagram examples—focusing on filters, fast uploads, cross-network sharing—and notes the team scaled the product to over 15 million users.
Questions this video answers
About eight months.
Making photos beautiful; allowing sharing on multiple networks; making uploads go really quickly.
Over 15 million users.
Chapters
Launching as early as you can. We stayed in private beta way too long. How long is too long? I mean, it was like eight months or something. Since the first day we coded a line, I remember thinking, oh, we'll do it next week because we'll have this new feature. It was like this worry of if I put it out there, we're gonna get judged. And it turns out you want to fail. If it's going to fail, you want to get that feedback. And that fear of putting something out and having it being rejected from someone is terrible. Right. But at the same time, it really teaches you, like, listen, like, go do something else or focus on something else. By launching it, we were able to focus on the fact that people love sharing photos. Right. And that's why we focused on photos. And that's where Instagram came from. If I could give any advice, it's like, stay away from this private beta stuff. Like, put it out there. Find the people that are vocal about what you're doing and put it in their hands and listen to them. Listen to what they're excited about. And then in terms of something we did really right, it was by focusing on solving problems. I think far too many startups are technologies in search of a problem. They're like, oh, I guess Google Maps exist and I guess tweets exist, so let's mash them up and do this geolocation tweet thing. No offense to anyone doing that. Exactly. I, like, honestly, I made that up, but I think too many people don't focus on problems people have. And I mentioned those three problems before, about making photos beautiful, about allowing you to share them on multiple networks, and then finally making uploads go really quickly solve problems that people have. And we focused on three. We weren't trying to reinvent the world of photography. We were just like, let's focus on these three humble, simple problems. And that's what turned Instagram from simply yet another network trying to tackle this photos thing to something people used. And that was the fundamental difference. I think probably the first time you used, it was like, it solved these three problems. Yeah, absolutely. So I would give that advice to any entrepreneur, which is like, what are the three problems you're going to solve? It seems like you've been pretty slow to launch new features. Yeah, I think too many startups, the goal is to maximize features. I had one VC come up to me and was like, you guys haven't really launched any features in the last year. Is that a problem? I was like, dude, do you know how much work we've done on the product to make it scale to where it is today. The things you launch that end up making the difference are not like yet another feature that no one's going to use. It's like, what can you go really deep on, right? What we went deep on was scaling to over 15 million users. We made our filters fast, right? We said, what do people love about the product? And how can we make it even better? We didn't say, what do people love about the product? Let's add a bunch of shit, right? It was a very focused effort to make the product better. And I mean, frankly, only having back in the day, two, three engineers made us focus on those problems. And I think, if anything, that wasn't our Achilles heel. It was the thing that made us shine. I think focus is key.
