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Social media has expanded its domain at a very rapid pace in last 5 years. The craze of social networking sites and apps for instant messaging, photos and videos sharing has brought about a revolution in the social life of people. In the list of all such sites and apps, the inception of Instagram has set a milestone. Instagram has made a record breaking impression in the lives of millions of users in a very short span. Its unique features like filters, adding special effects before uploads and hashtags have made it one of the most popular apps on net.

Talking about the success of this app, the heavy toil and dedication of the person behind bringing out such a great idea cannot be overlooked. The journey of Kevin Systrom in building up this app worth $1 billion had been short but endowed with several twists and turns. The interest for computer programming in Systrom had developed right from the days when he attended Middlesex School in Concord and it intensified as he grew up. He graduated from Stanford University in 2006 acquiring a bachelor’s degree in management science and engineering, after which he joined Google as an associate product marketing manager. Dedicating his service to Google for two years, Systrom turned to join a travel recommendation startup named Nextstop.

Dedication to learn
Kevin Systrom was not completely satisfied with his job at Nextstop, as he had a bigger plan in his mind. But he knew it was difficult to proceed further without a training and in-depth knowledge of computer science, thus he gave up his comfort to learn coding. He accomplished the assigned tasks of Nextstop in the office hours while learned to code at nights and on weekends. Indeed it was not easy to manage it altogether yet his inexorable efforts showed ardent result and he came out with an HTML5 prototype which he named as Burbn. The app dealt with the on-going trend of photo sharing and checking-in. Now the only thing dwelling in his mind was to take his idea further and it didn’t take much time as well. It was in March 2010 when Systrom met Baseline Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz at a party and approached them with his prototype. The party came out to be a remarkable event in his life as the two venture capitalists liked his idea and agreed to invest in it. He then quit his job to dedicate all his time and skills to Burbn and within just two weeks he raised $500,000 as seed funding from the two venture capital firms.

Steps towards success with Mike Krieger
The reassessing of Burbn began after Mike Krieger, an acquaintance from Stanford University joined in with Systrom. Now it was the time to give the app, a unique feature so as to make the experience of users different from the other popular apps. The main focus of Systrom right from the beginning was on mobile photos. The duo wanted to make the app very handy, free from the complications of too many features at a time and therefore they took few steps back and stuck to photo sharing. And then they decided to rename the app from Burbn to Instagram. Their incessant efforts and hard work were all directed to make it better by improving the photo-sharing experience of users, fixing the bugs and by passing it through several other tests.

And finally the big day came, eight weeks later Instagram was launched on 6^th October, 2010. No wonder, the minds of two gems made this app with such intent care that there were hardly any complaints or issues after the launch. And by the end of the first week it had been downloaded over 100,000 times and reached to one million users by the mid of December.

Acquisition by Facebook
In not more than 4 months after its launch, Instagram with its remarkable features began attracting investors and as a result of which the company value reached around $25 million in February 2011. Seeing its increasing popularity, Jack Dorsey the executive chairman of Twitter approached Kevin Systrom offering an amount of $500 million to acquire the company. But till then Systrom had no intention of giving his dream in other hands and thus he declined the offer.

Insagram made constant progress adding up more polished features and in April 2012 it was released with a new version compatible to the android phones. With this step the app established new records as it was downloaded by more than a million of android users in less than 24 hours. Acknowledging the company’s progress even Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder could not resist himself and showed his desire to purchase Instagram. He was aware that Systrom would never agree to leave his hands completely off from the app so, he offered a tempting amount of $1 billion in cash and stock emphasizing on the provision that the company would be free to be independently managed and to this Systrom could not deny.

Hit by criticism
No successful story could be completed without the involvement of scandals and criticism. In December 2012, there were some changes made in its terms and services policy which included the clause of owner’s rights to sell users’ photos to third party without any notification and compensation. As a result of this Instagram was hard hit by criticism and there was a notable drop recorded in the number of users. But the mistake was soon rectified with an apology by Kevin Systrom himself.

Aanchal Awasthi

Aanchal is a freelance writer and has been writing since 2013. She is currently pursuing her masters in English Literature from University of Delhi and received her B.A. (hons.) degree in English Literature from University of Delhi.

She has a great passion for writing poetry. She is also a keen reader of inspirational stories of people who have achieved success through hard work.