The Invention of Instagram: How a Mobile App Transformed Visual Culture
Instagram dominates daily digital life for over a billion users across the globe. Its curated feed of polished photos and lifestyle content shapes visual culture itself for a smartphone generation. However, Instagram began from humble origins as a bootstrapped mobile app startup trying to find product-market fit in the fast-moving world of tech.
Behind Instagram‘s global success stands co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Bringing their own backgrounds to bear, they transformed a simple photo filter app into one of most impactful social platforms ever. This is the inside story of how Instagram came to be and worked its way into the daily lives of a significant fraction of humanity.
The Inception: Kevin Systrom‘s Entrepreneurial Vision
In tracing Instagram‘s history, our story starts with Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom. After graduation in 2006, Systrom began his career as an associate product marketing manager at Google. His time at the tech titan informed his thinking on how products could be designed for massive scale.
Systrom also spent two years at Nextstop, a travel startup focused on recommendations. There he learned to code during his free time, laying the foundation to someday bring a bold digital idea to life himself.
But it was while backpacking through Mexico and Central America that Systrom gathered inspiration for the core idea behind Instagram. Snapping pics on his smartphone along the way, he envisioned how digital filters could transform boring cell phone shots into compelling photography worth sharing.
Soon after, Systrom connected with his Stanford classmate Mike Krieger to combine software expertise towards making that photo-sharing vision into reality.
Mike Krieger and the Early Burbn Prototype
As a Symbolic Systems major at Stanford, Mike Krieger first crossed paths with Kevin Systrom in class. Krieger himself had built a prototype app focused on users sharing sunlit photos to brighten up long winters indoors.
When Kevin pitched the idea for the app that would become Instagram, Mike came onboard to develop the initial prototype, combining their coding and design talents respectively.
Dubbed "Burbn", the early app included check-in features à la popular location apps of the era like Foursquare. But above all, Systrom envisioned mobile photos themselves as the hook around which a community could form.
The Pivotal Shift Towards Photos
Systrom and Krieger worked during evenings and weekends to refine Burbn and attract funding in San Francisco. Over 2010-2012 they met with investors and incubators, while also soliciting feedback from early testers.
Reactions to Burbn itself proved mixed given its fractured focus across check-ins, photos, and more. However, testers continually gravitated most strongly towards Burbn‘s photography editing capabilities.
In response, Systrom and Krieger began questioning if check-ins should be stripped from Burbn entirely.
Everything accelerated in October 2010 with the game-changing release of the iPhone 4. Its onboard camera represented a giant leap in integrating high quality photography directly into a smartphone.
Sensing a paradigm shift, Systrom and Krieger pivoted to focus exclusively on mobile photography. This refined app was christened “Instagram” and submitted for App Store approval to launch just days later on October 6.
Explosive Early Traction
From the instant it went live on the App Store, Instagram’s growth exceeded even Systrom and Krieger’s optimistic hopes:
- 25,000 users downloaded Instagram on day one
- By day two it was the #1 free photo app on the App Store
- After one week, over 100,000 users had downloaded Instagram
- Within one month, Instagram passed 1 million registered users
To provide comparison, it took popular services like Twitter over 2 years to reach 1 million users. Instagram was clearly onto something addressing mobile visual communication.
Several key factors fueled this hypergrowth right from the start:
Streamlined Editing Tools
Instagram’s editing experience emphasized simplicity in transforming photos via filters and basic adjustments. Systrom knew too many complex options risked losing users.
By perfecting just a few filters, Instagram made elevating smartphone pics to art share-worthy easy and appealing.
Viral Distribution Channels
Links built into Instagram allowed users to natively share new pics across Facebook and Twitter with ease. Piggybacking atop existing social giants brought massive early visibility.
Influencer Seed Users
Systrom and Krieger made a wise early decision recruiting influencers and style icons during Instagram’s closed beta testing. Generating buzz among photography aficionados and hip New York scenesters gave Instagram and its aesthetic immediate cultural cachet.
Continued Instagram Traction in Numbers
Instagram’s astronomical early growth only continued through major viral milestones:
- 10 million users by 2011
- 100 million users by early 2013
- 500 million users by mid 2016
- 1 billion monthly active users by mid 2018
For wider context, it took competitors like Twitter and Snapchat far longer to reach these adoption marks, 6 years and 4 years respectively to hit 500 million. Instagram accomplished the same in under 6 years total, demonstrating runaway mainstream popularity.
Critical Product Iterations
Beyond just its flagship photo filters, Systrom and Krieger continued rolling out features improving the app experience:
Photo Map – Allowed browsing content by geographic locations
Hashtags – Enabled discovery around trending topics and events
Explore Tab – Personalized feed of trending and recommended content
Instagram Direct – Private photo and video sharing with friends
Instagram Video– 15-second videos and stop motion ‘Hyperlapse’
Stories – 24-hour ephemeral photo/video content à la Snapchat
IGTV – Support for up to 60 minute videos
Live Video – Real-time broadcasting
Shopping Tags– Allowing purchases directly from posts
Through rapid iteration, Instagram grew from a simple photo filter app to a rich, multimedia content platform.
Monetization Evolution
In pursuit of sustainability, Instagram began rolling out advertising options for brands:
Photo Ads– Images with links to advertiser’s site
Video Ads– Short video spots
Carousel Ads– Swipeable series of images
Stories Ads– Sponsorships between public stories
This opened the door for small businesses, creators, and influencers to directly monetize their own audiences on the platform.
Instagram further boosted commerce via shoppable posts, enhanced profiles, and shortcuts to messaging businesses directly regarding products featured in their content.
The Billion User Benchmark
In June 2018, just 8 years after launch, Instagram officially crossed the threshold of 1 billion monthly active users.
This placed Instagram in truly rarefied company amongst global digital services, behind only established giants YouTube, Facebook, and WhatsApp.
It also officially gained ground over once fast-rising threat Snapchat, which then sat around 190 million users in comparison.
Instagram had successfully embedded itself as one of the preeminent social apps on the planet.
Cultural Impact
It’s no exaggeration to say Instagram has profoundly impacted culture itself for a generation raised on smartphone cameras and social media.
Over years of consistent user growth, Instagram has remained the preeminent platform for sharing bite-sized visual content. Though originally photographs, video, ephemeral stories, and streaming have all since entered the mix.
Beyond everyday users, Instagram dominates marketing for global celebrities, brands, and whole new classes of social media influencers and creators.
This is evident in usage metrics across key demographics:
- 71% of US teenagers use Instagram as their dominant social media platform
- 60% of Instagram users log in daily, higher than rivals
- 500 million Instagram Stories users daily, more than Snapchat’s total user base
- Over 200 million businesses and influencers using Instagram to reach audiences
Clearly the app has crossed over from niche photo filter app to global visual communication phenomenon.
The Founders‘ Guiding Vision
While now ubiquitous, Systrom insists Instagram in its inception was never solely intended as a viral app or path to riches. Above all, he and Krieger sought to build a platform promoting visual creativity and communication.
Even with Instagram‘s meteoric growth, Systrom strived to maintain internal culture rooted in that original motivation to empower people’s inspiration. He stepped down as CEO in late 2018 feeling the company had struck a “balance between creativity and growth”.
Mike Krieger also eventually moved on from Instagram in 2019, leaving it in the hands of parent company Facebook.
The Takeaway: A Defining App of Its Era
It took under a decade for two app developers with a passion for mobile photography to upend the social media landscape. Where grainy cell phone pics and filters now anchor trillions of social media feeds.
Systrom and Krieger identified and refined a crucial use case before most: transforming phone cameras into platforms for self-expression and human connection through instantly shareable visual content.
Today Instagram remains the defining app of its era. What began as DIY photo filters evolved into a ceaseless feed of bright, polished moments wearing the sheen of Instagram’s fluent visual language. A window where over a billion people craft and consume share-worthy snapshots every day.
All social apps inevitably reflect the societies that spawn them. As such, Instagram holds up a mirror to a generation enamored with photos, videos, and life as curated highlight reel. It sits among the top apps they simply couldn’t do without.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger discovered a fundamental human desire for self-expression and contact by attaching filters and context to otherwise isolated moments. That revelation fueled a historic mobile app success story that proceeds to burn brightly among both casual users and culture shapers across the planet.
