Why Instagram Worked

In my opinion Instagram worked because it algorithmically hides flaws in photographs so everyone's pictures look "good", or more accurately "not as bad as usual". Down-sampling an image hides noise and smooths tones, which hides the sort of blemishes people hate in photographs of themselves. Immediately pictures of people are closer to what they want to see so they'll like them. Filters hide even more, especially if they boost the yellow and red tones to add warmth (aka 'happiness') to an image. Further to that though, there's an element of creativity to choosing a filter (sort of like the Ikea Effect[1]). People love that.

The fact that the pictures are subjectively better coupled with easy social sharing and sensible tagging made it a relatively likely success.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

Echoing the other comments here -- there isn't really any insight to be gained. Especially from a founder of instagram this is really surprising. I would have thought they would understood more deeply what's going on.

Here's my arm-chair analysis:

Producing content is hard. Writing, thinking, etc takes time, energy, and creativity. Typing on a small smartphone keyboard only makes this even more painful. Snapping a photo is easy and revolves around a moment -- something easier to recognize when it's worthy of sharing.

If you take twitter's original premise of 'what are you doing now' where the parody response would be 'im now sitting on the toilet', it's just not particularly interesting to read. When a turned into a photo it suddenly gains "994 words", and then you add on easy ways to enhance it with photo filters and now it turns into something far more special (even if its still just your feet on the ground). It's also remarkably easier to swipe through photos and grok what's worthy than it is to read a bunch of text. Now add that you can follow people who are visually inclined and suddenly you have a rich medium at your fingertips that's just as easy for people to participate in as well as passively observe.

All of these combine to having a unique experience that lead to explosive growth. Add a public-default and now you don't even need to have any friends in the app to still find it enjoyable, and even better if it let's you peer into the lives of celebs (if you're into that). First mover advantage certainly helped as well, as did having a walled off garden to contain the content.

That's why I think instagram worked. Now where's my FB check??! ;)

The real answer: "Let's be honest here, we don't really know. Some hard work, some luck, alignment of stars, go figure... I mean, Flappy Bird, right?"

The problem with retrospectively explaining success is that you fall prey to both survivorship bias and narrative bias. In physics this is known as anthropic bias.

All post-hoc justifications for the success of any business are dangerous because the gloss over the most important fact: the only reason we're asking the question in the first place is because the thing turned out to be successful.

So what can you conclude from this that is actionable and applicable to you? Absolutely nothing other than the fact that we aren't good at predicting the future, but are good at retroactively fitting the present to the past.

In my opinion Instagram worked because it was at the right place at the right time.

Radar was a photo sharing app that I loved using in 2008-2009. You took photos of what you were doing, edit them very simply, and shared them with your community of friends. The problem with Radar is that it went quietly in to the night. I don't recall the exact reason it shuttered, but I think they made some poor choices in features that killed it.

I always find it interesting to read posts about the start of Instagram and never to find references to Radar.

For Reference: http://readwrite.com/2009/01/27/radars_photo_sharing_app_com...

Is there anything interesting behind this story?

For every successful startup, there is hundreds or tens of thousands that failed and you've never heard of them.

In all seriousness, this article is not different than confessions of someone who happened to hit the jackpot.

It worked because it's a simple, quick, ultra-low friction way of sharing photos. Take or pick a photo, type a title, press send, voila. Couple of extra taps if you want to send it to other places as well.

(Even in 2015, it's easier to get a photo on Flickr via the Instagram app than the official Flickr app. Madness.)

The article did not really explain anything, other than providing some (interesting?) background.

I don't know if it "worked" either, as I don't use it! Of course, I am a small market of 1; thousands more use it for old-looking photos.

I am surprised by the repeat of the same ideas again and again. Since the early 90s when Geocities was available you could easily share text and pictures in your own site. Then MySpace allowed the same, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter (with limited text!), Google+, Instagram.... is there anything else I've forgotten? Each one mandates an account to post data or view specific data.

They all allow sharing pretty much the same (some content, whether it is text or photos) yet they are each hailed as the next big thing and the best thing since sliced bread, and you must be a sad weirdo if you're not a member of the currently fashionable site. Remember the looks of surprise/shock/disgust/anger when you state that you don't have a Facebook account? There are over 252 million (or more?) domains active yet there is obsession over a handful.

Maybe I'm an old fart, but I don't get it? I wonder if people class Google Image Search as the next big thing? You can see pictures in there too. You can also get text if you click on the "web" search tool too. Apologies for the sarcasm there :-)

I do think there are some interesting tidbits here, (albeit none of them exactly new), only that OP does not explicitly highlight them. The article is simply a narrative of their success story, with most of the analysis being left up to the reader.

That being said, what I got from it was:

1. Acute Observation. They had a prior product (a tiny social network), and they noticed that one of the features they had implemented (experimentally, I expect), namely the photo-filters, was disproportionally popular among their user base. This is a prime example of what Drucker calls "unexpected success", and drawing lessons from that.

2. Focus. Their original product had a much broader scope and they narrowed it down considerably. Not only did they discard a lot of their existing feature-set, but they also reduced the platform support in order to launch earlier, and test their idea ASAP.

3. Traction Can Carry. They had an existing user base, albeit small, and they managed to cross-sell some of those users on their new product from the start, using them as beta testers. This is similar to the "halo effect", only on a much smaller scale.

4. Luck. As OP puts it: "[Our] combination of being photos-first and public-by-default would prove to be a combination that solved an unmet need."[1] I suppose they thought this through, but as far as turning out to be right, I suppose one could say they got lucky.

The take-away for me then is that we could try to observe "unexpected success" of experimental features in our own, or even other people's products, and use the same strategy of applying focus; and that in the end there is always an element of chance, so one needs to keep trying different things, or different variations of the same thing, until one gets it right.

[1] Someone else mentioned Radar.net as a precursor to Instagram; but that app did not have the feature of being public-by-default.

Surprisingly shallow article. What I take from it is that Instagram really resonates with people - and that accounts for most of its success. There might have been similar apps (indeed, photo sharing is obvious no matter how you look at it)... but none so charismatic.

The design of Instagram - the colors, the icons, the filters - makes it very personal, which might in part explain why people love it so much.

Another major aspect in the success of Instagram was timing. The close proximity between its release and the release of the iPhone 4 meant that for the first time, consumers carried network-connected, (relatively) high resolution cameras daily.

Clickbait article. Not a single explanation to be found. Just some history and background

Is it just me or is scrolling on medium.com weird? It seems to only scroll further down the page for me every other time I try to do so.

The article fails to explain why it worked.

So apparently it took off, but why? Where did the initial 25.000 users come from?

In my opinion Instagram is completely useless and doesn't add anything to our lives. I really don't see the value of sharing photos with some "artistic" filter applied to them. I can share photos on facebook if I want, or on Twitter. I can edit photos with my phone, no instagram needed.

You are always in my heart!