
Five Years of Building Instagram - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/war-stories-3696d00207ff
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acconrad
> _my co-founder Kevin and I bet on how many people would download the app its
> first day in the wild. Kevin guessed 2,500, and in an especially optimistic
> moment, I went big and guessed 25,000. The next day, the realist in me
> couldn’t believe I had hit it on the nose._

That seems outrageous and amazing. Systrom had only ever worked at Google and
then Nextstop, how could he have possibly had a network that large that early
on to get that many people to download it?

How can someone reading this possibly think they can get 25,000 people to
download their app on day 1? I feel like I'm missing something here.

~~~
RickS
Barring some strong marketing leading up to launch, that's not realistic,
which is the point of the quote. Instagram's first day performance was in the
"so good you'd sound like a joke for suggesting it was possible" territory.

With that said, actual viral growth is absurdly fast. I didn't really have an
understanding of it until one of my tweets got picked up during the Ferguson
riots, and the speed is just staggering. It increments faster than you can
reload the page. Hundreds of people per second. 25k in a day is totally doable
under those circumstances. It's one of those things you can read about, but
have to see to really internalize.

