Meet: Kevin & Mike

Context

Instagram ranks 4th among the most popular social media apps (2B users).

• Founded in 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger

• Kevin and Mark Zuckerberg studied together at Stanford

• In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion

Instagram’s story

Instagram started with Kevin's desire to be his own boss. He had a few ideas and chose to work on a check-in app called Burbn. He managed to raise money and started working on the app.

Kevin was looking for a technical co-founder and came across Mike, who was one of Burbn's users and had previously studied with him at Stanford. Mike agreed to join, and they worked together on Burbn for about 3 months until they realized it wasn't going anywhere, they only had 100 users. But, they also had $495,000 in the bank from the fundraising, so they decided to pivot.

One of Burbn's features was the ability to upload a photo of you where you checked in. The founders saw that people really liked this feature, so they removed all the others and kept only the photo-sharing one.

The first version of Instagram had no filters. While walking with his wife, Kevin asked her if she was excited about the app they were building. She said it was cool, but she wouldn't use it because her pictures weren't that good.

From this conversation, Kevin realized they should add filters. He came back home, went to his room and coded the first filter in the app. It worked, the filters became the main driver of Instagram's early growth. The app started to skyrocket, and in 2012 it was sold to Facebook while still having a very small team of only 13 members.

Kevin’s career advice

1. Actually do the thing. Don't just read and talk about it, start it. If you want to be a chef, start cooking.

2. Encourage people to give you feedback. Look for what you can improve. Let people know that it’s safe to give you open feedback.

3. Companies go through identity crises and figure themselves out over time. It’s all about keeping what sticks and throwing away what doesn’t.

If you want to watch an interview with Kevin Systrom on The Tim Ferriss Show, talking about the experience of starting Instagram, check it out here.

Push it harder this month,

– Steve