I came upon an interesting Inc.com article about Instagram and it's rapid rise to success. The start-up, was just over a year and a half old when it sold for $1 Billion to Facebook and here are some interesting highlights:
- Instagram had zero revenue when it was sold
- The app took only eight weeks to build
- After two and a half months, the app was downloaded one million times
- There were 12 employees at the time of sale
- Founder, Kevin Systrom, studied and worked in Silicon Valley (Stanford, Twitter, Google)
- Kevin randomly met his first investors at another start-up company's cocktail party, got $500k and quit his job to focus on Instagram
Here's the part that I like the best. The first interation of Instagram was called "Burbn" and it was similar to what Foursquare is today. There were a ton of features and if there's one thing you should keep in mind in product development it's that if you can't explain what your thing does in one line, it's probably too complicated.
