Kevin Systrom explains the three insights that separated Instagram from its competitors

Everyone was trying to solve social mobile photos, right? I think the key was, how do you make people want to share on your network versus every other network in the world, right? Including Facebook, including Twitter. What sets you apart? And I guarantee you, every person that signed up for Instagram on that first day thought it was a filter app, and that's it. But what we did was we bootstrapped the social network by allowing you to do the filters you wanted to, which, in my opinion at the time, definitely were some of the best filters out there. And I think that drew people to it. They were like, wow. All of a sudden, not only can I take awesome photos, but I can share them. So that was the second problem. We wanted to allow you to share across multiple networks all at once. And the third one was every single app we used before, it was like an eternity to take a photo and upload it. An eternity. And the one simple thing we did was while you were choosing a filter and filling out the caption, we started uploading it in the background, and you clicked done after entering a caption, and then it was like, boom. So while you're doing all this work, we uploaded it in the background, and everyone was like, how did you make that thing upload so fast? And it wasn't. We just hid all the slump.