Capture and share the world's moment
Tagline
Net Worth
$1,000,000,000
Started in (City)
Silicon valley
Started in (Country)
United States
Incorporation Date
06th December, 2010
Bankruptcy Date
-
Founders
- Kevin Systrom
- Mike Krieger
About
Instagram is one of the most prominent social media platforms today. Now a day, it became an integral part of human life. It comes second only to Facebook when it comes to the number of active daily users. It has become the home of brands, bloggers, influencers, small business owners, friends, and social media rivals alike. Here, people share beautiful pictures, moments, news, memes, and many other things via pictures and short videos, or they just keep their profile in private mode and lurk! With more active users than Twitter, it has also become the favorite watering hole for celebrities and fans.
Beginning
The story of Instagram begins in 2009 with Kevin Systrom, a 27-year-old Stanford University graduate. At the time, Kevin was working at Nextstop, a startup specializing in travel recommendations. Before this, he had previous experiences at Google as a corporate development associate and he also interned at Odeo. During his work at Nextstop, on the nights and weekends, he learned how to code. This was important in the creation of Instagram because he had no formal training in computer science. With his coding knowledge, within four months he managed to create a complicated location-based iPhone app. The app allowed people to check-in at particular locations, make plans for future check-ins, earn points for spending time with friends, and post pictures of the gatherings. Being a fan of Kentucky whiskeys, he named the app “Burbn”. Despite the market for location-based check-in apps already being quite crowded by popular ones like Foursquare at that time, Burbn’s photo-sharing feature made it stand out. However, that was not really enough for it to become instantly popular. Burbn was complicated to use and had a bunch of features that users found confusing.
Road to Success
Then came the important course change for the app when Systrom attended a party for Hunch, a startup based in Silicon Valley in March 2010. There, Systrom met two venture capitalists from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. The prototype of his app that he showed them impressed them enough and so they met for coffee to discuss it further at a later date. Right after this, Systrom decided to quit his job at Nexstop and focus on Burbn, tweaking it daily to make it better. After this, Baseline Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz gave him $500,000 in seed funding to develop it further. The first to join him was someone he knew, his fellow Standford graduate Mike Krieger; together they used analytics to understand how the customers were using Burbn. They found out that the users did not really care for its location-based check-in feature. Instead, they were really using the app to post and share a ton of photos. Burbn was now developing into a simple photo-sharing app. After this, they decided to study other photo-sharing apps available on mobile devices that would be their main competitors. The first of the two that they looked into was Hipstamatic. It was a “hip” app and had filter features for the photos that enhanced the photos taken on phones. However, sharing photos on it was difficult. Then they had Facebook, the undisputed king of social networking back then and till now. The main drawback that they saw again on Facebook was that it was that although sharing photos there was easy, there was not much photo functionality, especially in the iPhone app version. They saw an unfilled void in between these two apps and hence decided to include Hipstamatic’s filter feature and Facebook’s social networking design to Burbn. In order to mark this new birth, they combined the words “instant” and “telegram” and came up with the name “Instagram”, a name that we all know today, for the app.
Challenges
When Instagram updated its terms of service in December 2012, it came into hot waters. This update effectively granted Instagram the right to sell users’ photos to third parties without notification or compensation. This update was met with criticism from advocates of personal privacy and many Instagrammers. Some even went ahead and deleted their accounts in protest. Instagram eventually retracted the controversial terms. Its ineffectiveness in handling online bullies and harassers has also been brought up. So far, the solution for the online tormenters on Instagram are reporting, blocking, or disabling comments, besides the obvious choice of not joining the platform in the first place. Instagram itself has not really come into too much of any controversy, in fact, even while its parent company Facebook was being grilled for privacy concerns and other matters of national security especially in the US, it remained relatively untouched and besmirched. The controversies related to Instagram that most people may be familiar with would be actually regarding those who are on the platform like social media influencers, especially from the beauty and Make-up Company, and not the app itself.
Achievements
- Shorty Award for Apps