In 2010, they launched as “burbn”.
The founder loved photography. In fact, he discovered the Holga-a cheap vintage camera that produced hip, vintage looking photos when studying abroad in Florence. At the time, there were photo sharing apps coming out of Silicon Valley on a weekly basis.
He wanted to combine photo-sharing with the trend of the day: location check-ins.
Along with a few buddies, he learned to code over nights and weekends. In fact, the initial version of the product took 8 weeks to develop. They put up a waitlist landing page with the following copy: ”Burbn is a new way to communicate + share in the real world. Please leave your email if you're interested in receiving an invite.”
After posting it on the app store, it started getting downloads: 25k in the first day, crashing their servers. And even though most downloaders clicked around once or twice, there was a trickle of active users that kept coming back.
Money was running out.
Pressure was building to just cut their losses.
When the team managed to dig into the details, it turned out their loyal users were really keen on the filters feature-the ones inspired by the Holga. Filters made them look like photography rock stars. If you’re going to share photos, you want to make them look as attractive and unique as possible (without needing to learn and use photoshop each time). As few clicks as possible to get the same result.
So the product team did a zoom-in pivot: double down on filters and sharing. They cut out most of the features, like location check-ins, they had created—in order to focus the app on those two. And they renamed the company to Instagram.
Growth took off, piggy backing on the word of mouth generated by really amazing looking photos that users shared (and then talked about the app that let them do it).
Two years later, the company sold to Facebook for $1 bln.
As you can probably tell, Instagram is my favorite story about startup existential risk. Everything was roughly the same: the market, the team, the conditions, the tech. But using the prototype to figure out exactly what’s most valuable in the moment (and having the guts to cut everything else despite sunk cost bias) is often the best strategy possible.
Get out of your own way.
Kill your darlings.