Why Instagram shot: the story of the founder of the service

In October 2014 came the fourth anniversary of the work of Instagram. During the day, I looked at my watch and remembered what we did four years ago.

6:00 meal on the bike on the foggy San Francisco to our coworking in Dogpatch Labs.
7:00 stomach is tied in a knot, and Kevin and intercept bagels from Crossroads Cafe.
8:00 open the site and it attracts first users
9:00 Kevin and I panicked: small server can not handle the load of the first day
12:00 am relieved when everything working again
was your day
2:00 still not sleeping. Already 25,000 registered users.
6:00 meal on the train back to the Haight and fall into bed

The first day was a reflection of all the ensuing year, alternating between the dizziness of success and panic at the thought of the impossibility to continue at the same pace.



Night work in an office near Dogspatch i>

People ask, were we afford such a success. Work on startup is balancing between the insane belief in his idea, and reasonable interpretation of signs indicating that something is wrong. So we balanced the entire preceding year.

At first, we wrote an application Burbn, sots.set tied to geography on HTML5. It was pretty good, but the stars in the sky is not enough. Our attempts to explain what we actually do, ran into blank looks, and at the peak, we had 1,000 users. But for them it was a new way to share with others what is happening in the world. Many of our updates grew out of our blog friends Burbn, which placed photos treated filters to compensate for the poor quality photos with phones such as iPhone 3G.

Kevin and I were walking along the waterfront Embarcadero after a meeting with investors in July 2010, and agreed among themselves. Close to the conference hall of Dogpatch Labs, we expressed aloud what boiled for a few weeks: it is necessary to seriously revise our product, or we will fail trying to do everything at the same time. Why not take updated photos of Burbn not get it as a separate product?

The idea was that people share with each other the events of life through photography. In retrospect, the idea seems obvious - communication using pictures is a universal language. But the product is determined by the chain of decisions and assumptions, and our combination of the ideas of "first pictures" and "public access by default" was exactly what people needed.



An early draft of the application interface i>

We spent the next week in the Crossroads Cafe, sketching pages and interface. Were taken some little idea of ​​Burbn, for example, large and centered pictures, and not just small thumbnails. Comments were submitted in the form of a list, rather than hidden behind links. For two weeks we did the first version, including the first filter works by Kevin. We had to figure out if it would work, so we sent a letter to hundreds of testers Burbn:

"The last 6 weeks we are working on a native application for the iPhone to communicate and card sharing photos. We took the best of what was in our application on HTML5. Some things can not be done on HTML5, but some things do not make sense to drag and drop into the application. Try to consider this application as "done based Burbn" :) ».

When you have hundreds of testers, success can only be measured approx. A couple of days of the application, which is then simply called "Codename", we realized that we stumbled upon something big. During the first weekend of activity testers exceeded the maximum user activity Burbn. Not everyone liked it, many have left and never returned. We refused to support Android for a while that cut off one of our most dedicated users.

Those who liked it, started to document in detail their lives, and after dovodok and revisions, we released an application. We are very surprised to see how many users have registered for one week. In the middle of the first day, Kevin turned to me and said, "I do not know how it will grow, but it seems to me, is something in it." For a week we received approximately 100,000 people.



The first official photo in Instagram Krieger i>

A few days later we were awakened by a call from the provider at 3am. We thought that at this time all users are asleep, but then I remembered the time zones. It turned out that in Japan boom Instagram, which marked our servers. I could not read the signature, and just enjoy the photos. I especially liked the photo ofumetaturou.

These links across borders - one of those things that I like the most in Instagram. They can be seen everywhere - great accounts likeeverydayafrica, meeting 900 network users in Jakarta, independent photographers and illustrators, gaining foloverov thanks to his talent. It is these travel through space and time encouraged me to work on a project, I talk with my friends from Brazil, or watch the digital traces of other visitors from any other country where I find myself.

In the end those sleepless nights in October 2010, Kevin and I looked up from his computer and noticed fireworks over the park AT & T. To celebrate the victory of a sports team, and when we looked at our stats, we saw that some people were already using Instagram for uploading photos from the stadium. This year, thousands of pictures already come with each of the games, and it serves as a demonstration of how far we have come.

Mike Krieger founded Instagram in 2010 with Kevin Sistromom. Both left the company after it acquired in 2012, Facebook, and Mike is currently working as technical director.

Source: geektimes.ru/post/243969/