Instagram, like many tech startups of the 21st century, has an origin story that highlights the importance of being flexible in business. The app, first developed by Kevin Systrom, was originally called Burbn. It allowed users to check-in at particular locations, plan future meet-ups, earn points and post pictures of hangouts.
If all that sounds familiar, that’s because similar apps like FourSquare were popular at the time. Likely for this reason, Burbn didn’t really catch on. Still, Systrom kept fiddling with the app and brought on another programmer, Mike Krieger, to look under the hood of user activity. Together, they dug into the app’s analytics and found something interesting — people weren’t really interested in check-ins, but they were sharing a lot of photos. Based on this user research, the pair decided to pivot to a much simpler product: a social photo-sharing app. They saw a gap in the market for a single-use platform, something other social apps like Facebook couldn’t offer. It was renamed Instagram.
In October 2010, Instagram launched, and its success was almost…instant. Two months after it went live, Instagram had over a million users. Just two years later, Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. At the time of the acquisition, it had just 13 employees. Today, it has over 500, along with over a billion active users. No one could have anticipated how essential Instagram would become to the lives of so many people, as well as to businesses who depend on the platform for brand awareness and direct marketing.
There have been a number of changes over the past decade that have made Instagram what it is today, many of which complicate the platform, arguably taking away from its appeal and founding principle. Highlights include the addition of sponsored posts and the ability to upload videos, both of which appeared in 2013 and the introduction of an algorithmic timeline, which debuted in 2016. The most recent of these additions is Reels, a copycat of TikTok that launched last week and has been largely derided for its blatant mimicry and lack of functionality (see: the NYT’s head-to-head comparison). But if you look back a little further, you’ll see that much of Instagram’s evolution has been guided by this impulse to oust competition by imitating their success.
Instagram Stories is perhaps the most visible example. Back in 2013, Snapchat was becoming more popular by the day. It had just launched its Stories feature, which allows users to share short videos that disappeared after 24 hours. That kept users engaged on a daily basis and gave them the chance to upload content that was more casual, less curated. Instagram, and parent company Facebook, saw a threat, and an opportunity. (Facebook made a number of attempts to buy Snapchat.) In 2016, a copycat feature debuted inside Instagram, and two years later, Snap started to see its first drop in users. Given early reviews of Reels, it seems unlikely that the app of the moment will be dethroned anytime soon — barring a federal ban on the platform, that is.
