Instagram CEO tells the story behind the product: do subtraction

More than a friend asked Instagram's entrepreneurial story, just its CEO Kevin Systrom in Quora had a wonderful description, now translated to share to everyone. This is a typical "American Entrepreneurial story".

First of all, I have to say that we never thought it would cause such an enthusiastic response, and in just a few hours, Instagram the top of the free photography software. As our co-founder, Mike Krieger, says, it takes only 8 weeks to build on the surface, but the product is behind it for more than a year.

The story begins here, when I was in Nextstop (a travel website, after being http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/1560.html ">facebook acquisition") work, responsible for marketing and other matters. I spent a lot of time learning programming skills outside of work, yes, I didn't receive any formal training.

At that time was to do a LBS software, including similar to the foursquare of the check-in mechanism, but also contains the gangster War (Mafia Wars is a famous social game) and other entertainment elements. So this project is named Burbn. I made a prototype of the product using HTML5 technology and showed it to my friends. In fact, the prototype and the final product is very big difference.

I spent several weekends improving it. I finally showed burbn at a party, and at the party I met two guys from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. After displaying the available product prototypes, they were interested in asking me for coffee.

After the first meeting, I decided to quit my job and devote myself to BURBN. After two weeks of separation, we received a 500,000 dollar investment from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, so I started to build a start-up team.

Mike Krieger said he liked the idea when he contacted me. After he joined the team, we began to look at existing products. Now the BURBN is a pure HTML5 Web App that features: Location check-in, custom check-in program, buddy Interaction, upload photos, and more.

Then we finally figured out that if we were going to build a company to do Burbn, we'd have to focus on doing something. So began to seriously consider mobile phone photography, want to use this as a goal.

It took another week to prototype the product, which was like putting the BURBN project down again, it was terrible. After making the BURBN on the IPhone platform, we used "subtraction" and cut off a lot of features, leaving only photos, comments, and sharing functions. This becomes Instagram.

Turning the name into a Instagram is because it sounds like a camera, and it feels good to have the camera you're shooting at.

The next 8 weeks are beta tests to fix defects. In the Monday, we can finally release it. Although the front is a long road, but the degree of popularity is far beyond our imagination, which gives us the impetus to move forward. (Original link: ifanr.com/40717)