In my opinion Instagram worked because it algorithmically hides flaws in photographs so everyone's pictures look "good", or more accurately "not as bad as usual". Down-sampling an image hides noise and smooths tones, which hides the sort of blemishes people hate in photographs of themselves. Immediately pictures of people are closer to what they want to see so they'll like them. Filters hide even more, especially if they boost the yellow and red tones to add warmth (aka 'happiness') to an image. Further to that though, there's an element of creativity to choosing a filter (sort of like the Ikea Effect[1]). People love that.
The fact that the pictures are subjectively better coupled with easy social sharing and sensible tagging made it a relatively likely success.
Nice, I like your idea about lower resolution meaning people are more likely to like a picture of themselves, which they rarely do. Never thought of it under that angle.
To me, Instagram is the culmination of photography, making shooting and editing available to truly everyone. When photography first appeared, it was this slow, clunky, expensive process that required extreme knowledge of the tools to produce anything. Over time, it got easier - we went from daguerreotypes to self-contained camera, to portable cameras that still required fiddling with settings, to portable cameras that could take shots in almost any conditions, to instant cameras, to digital cameras that still require effort to share the picture, to digital cameras that can share the picture instantly to the entire world.
And in counterpart to that, the editing process has gotten simpler too: we went from needing to know the chemicals of photography, to bringing your film at your local store, to tools like Photoshop (that allowed you to crop, adjust colors etc. but still required knowledge to do so), to Instagram: where there's no manual to read, and an instant a 12 year old teenager or a 75 year old grandparent can crop, retouch, color balance, etc. their photos.
Sure, the purist might argue that Instagram filters are not the same as balancing your chemicals yourself, blablabla - but look at the end result: people are able to take ownership of photography in ways that were impossible to in 1840. Ultimately, photography, like any form of expression, is as much about the tools that enable it as the people it reaches.
Because Instagram (and other mobile photography apps of course, but Instagram is kind of the figure head) have put photography in the hands of everyone, I think they've really brought the medium to its best form.
(my views on this topic are mostly informed by the book "L'Image Sans Qualités", sadly only available in French, and conversations with my uncle, a hardcore photographer who develops his own pictures and builds (!) his own cameras from scratch, also sadly only available in French)
Also, as mentioned in an article yesterday, people are also more choosy about what they upload to instagram. They spend more time on the photo, spend time with editing, and are proud of what they upload.
Echoing the other comments here -- there isn't really any insight to be gained. Especially from a founder of instagram this is really surprising. I would have thought they would understood more deeply what's going on.
Here's my arm-chair analysis:
Producing content is hard. Writing, thinking, etc takes time, energy, and creativity. Typing on a small smartphone keyboard only makes this even more painful. Snapping a photo is easy and revolves around a moment -- something easier to recognize when it's worthy of sharing.
If you take twitter's original premise of 'what are you doing now' where the parody response would be 'im now sitting on the toilet', it's just not particularly interesting to read. When a turned into a photo it suddenly gains "994 words", and then you add on easy ways to enhance it with photo filters and now it turns into something far more special (even if its still just your feet on the ground). It's also remarkably easier to swipe through photos and grok what's worthy than it is to read a bunch of text. Now add that you can follow people who are visually inclined and suddenly you have a rich medium at your fingertips that's just as easy for people to participate in as well as passively observe.
All of these combine to having a unique experience that lead to explosive growth. Add a public-default and now you don't even need to have any friends in the app to still find it enjoyable, and even better if it let's you peer into the lives of celebs (if you're into that). First mover advantage certainly helped as well, as did having a walled off garden to contain the content.
That's why I think instagram worked. Now where's my FB check??! ;)
"Producing content is hard. Writing, thinking, etc takes time, energy, and creativity. Typing on a small smartphone keyboard only makes this even more painful. Snapping a photo is easy and revolves around a moment -- something easier to recognize when it's worthy of sharing."
Startups need lucky breaks, but connections with the right people increase the odds considerably. The Instagram founders knew all the right people. A big check from Andreessen, help from Facebook's CTO, Twitter's co-founder, Dorsey, tweeted Instagram pics. This doesn't discount the work Instagram did, but hard work alone won't lead to success.
Indeed. With things like these there is limited value in trying to find the core reasons it was a success while so many other similar things failed. Even if you do find the reasons, it's not really possible to know that you did. You can't use the same formula again to verify its success potential.
The problem with retrospectively explaining success is that you fall prey to both survivorship bias and narrative bias. In physics this is known as anthropic bias.
All post-hoc justifications for the success of any business are dangerous because the gloss over the most important fact: the only reason we're asking the question in the first place is because the thing turned out to be successful.
So what can you conclude from this that is actionable and applicable to you? Absolutely nothing other than the fact that we aren't good at predicting the future, but are good at retroactively fitting the present to the past.
In my opinion Instagram worked because it was at the right place at the right time.
Radar was a photo sharing app that I loved using in 2008-2009. You took photos of what you were doing, edit them very simply, and shared them with your community of friends. The problem with Radar is that it went quietly in to the night. I don't recall the exact reason it shuttered, but I think they made some poor choices in features that killed it.
I always find it interesting to read posts about the start of Instagram and never to find references to Radar.
It worked because it's a simple, quick, ultra-low friction way of sharing photos. Take or pick a photo, type a title, press send, voila. Couple of extra taps if you want to send it to other places as well.
(Even in 2015, it's easier to get a photo on Flickr via the Instagram app than the official Flickr app. Madness.)
The article did not really explain anything, other than providing some (interesting?) background.
I don't know if it "worked" either, as I don't use it! Of course, I am a small market of 1; thousands more use it for old-looking photos.
I am surprised by the repeat of the same ideas again and again. Since the early 90s when Geocities was available you could easily share text and pictures in your own site. Then MySpace allowed the same, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter (with limited text!), Google+, Instagram.... is there anything else I've forgotten? Each one mandates an account to post data or view specific data.
They all allow sharing pretty much the same (some content, whether it is text or photos) yet they are each hailed as the next big thing and the best thing since sliced bread, and you must be a sad weirdo if you're not a member of the currently fashionable site. Remember the looks of surprise/shock/disgust/anger when you state that you don't have a Facebook account? There are over 252 million (or more?) domains active yet there is obsession over a handful.
Maybe I'm an old fart, but I don't get it? I wonder if people class Google Image Search as the next big thing? You can see pictures in there too. You can also get text if you click on the "web" search tool too. Apologies for the sarcasm there :-)
> They all allow sharing pretty much the same (some content, whether it is text or photos) yet they are each hailed as the next big thing and the best thing since sliced bread
I think the difference is that with each iteration it became easier for the end-user to publish/share something. With GeoCities, they removed the need for a user to figure out hosting, running a server and purchasing a domain name (very expensive at the time). However, with GeoCities, you still needed to know how to write HTML/CSS/JS and use FTP. MySpace took it a step further from that point and did most of the HTML/CSS leg work but allowed for some minor alterations. Facebook took it even further and basically said, "we'll do all the leg work for you, all you need to do is type in a thought or upload a picture."
There isn't a way to endlessly scroll geocities of relatively high quality images (filters are important and unique), let alone do that with just your friends or people of interest. If you start to compare to myspace, bebop, fb, twitter, etc... it's just as much about what's removed as what 'feature' they allow.
I do think there are some interesting tidbits here, (albeit none of them exactly new), only that OP does not explicitly highlight them. The article is simply a narrative of their success story, with most of the analysis being left up to the reader.
That being said, what I got from it was:
1. Acute Observation. They had a prior product (a tiny social network), and they noticed that one of the features they had implemented (experimentally, I expect), namely the photo-filters, was disproportionally popular among their user base. This is a prime example of what Drucker calls "unexpected success", and drawing lessons from that.
2. Focus. Their original product had a much broader scope and they narrowed it down considerably. Not only did they discard a lot of their existing feature-set, but they also reduced the platform support in order to launch earlier, and test their idea ASAP.
3. Traction Can Carry. They had an existing user base, albeit small, and they managed to cross-sell some of those users on their new product from the start, using them as beta testers. This is similar to the "halo effect", only on a much smaller scale.
4. Luck. As OP puts it: "[Our] combination of being photos-first and public-by-default would prove to be a combination that solved an unmet need."[1] I suppose they thought this through, but as far as turning out to be right, I suppose one could say they got lucky.
The take-away for me then is that we could try to observe "unexpected success" of experimental features in our own, or even other people's products, and use the same strategy of applying focus; and that in the end there is always an element of chance, so one needs to keep trying different things, or different variations of the same thing, until one gets it right.
[1] Someone else mentioned Radar.net as a precursor to Instagram; but that app did not have the feature of being public-by-default.
Surprisingly shallow article. What I take from it is that Instagram really resonates with people - and that accounts for most of its success. There might have been similar apps (indeed, photo sharing is obvious no matter how you look at it)... but none so charismatic.
The design of Instagram - the colors, the icons, the filters - makes it very personal, which might in part explain why people love it so much.
Another major aspect in the success of Instagram was timing. The close proximity between its release and the release of the iPhone 4 meant that for the first time, consumers carried network-connected, (relatively) high resolution cameras daily.
So apparently it took off, but why? Where did the initial 25.000 users come from?
In my opinion Instagram is completely useless and doesn't add anything to our lives. I really don't see the value of sharing photos with some "artistic" filter applied to them. I can share photos on facebook if I want, or on Twitter. I can edit photos with my phone, no instagram needed.
>> "I can share photos on facebook if I want, or on Twitter"
And if you didn't use Facebook or Twitter and wanted somewhere to share your photos you'd probably use Instagram. The filters enable you to make shitty photos look better in one tap. Lots of people don't use them. I think that was the initial appeal but now that cameras are better it's just a good place to share and view photos. The ability to share it to lots of other sites in one tap is also very useful.
>> "I can edit photos with my phone, no instagram needed."
So can I. Instagram isn't really a photo editor. You can apply filters and do basic edits but that's the point. If you apply the filters your stuff automatically 'looks good' and you don't need to spend time editing.
Instagram is actually one of the few social networks which seems to be to be really easy to understand.
Instagram is specifically about sharing cool photos, emphasis on the cool. So you toss out the 90% of photos you took that nobody else would be interested in. It's also specifically about photos that you took, unlike things like Tumblr where people just recycle stock photos. Therefore it's actually interesting to follow a friend on Instagram.
But there are a few more details that make it work. First, it encourages the use of filters. These filters have been criticized a lot for being "hipster", but let's face it -- adding strong sepia tones or making photos really high contrast tend to make people look better in photos. They block out your flaws. The use of filters on a per-photo basis also works in with what I mentioned earlier, the idea that you don't just dump all your photos on Instagram but instead specifically look only for cool ones.
Second, it's simple. Facebook has become this huge, monolithic, hilariously complex and borderline incomprehensible beast. Who even knows what algorithm goes into constructing your news feed? When I go on Facebook I'm inundated with a ton of content almost none of which is "cool" -- ads, links to random videos or articles that someone I know "liked" or "shared", photo dumps, etc. Facebook is like a big family gathering where you cover up that tattoo you recently got with your sleeves, and the talk of the party has died down and now you're sitting on the sofa watching ads on the TV for products that you're not interested in, waiting for the ads to end so a show will come on that you're also not interested in.
They had an existing email list from Burbn of a couple of thousand users that they emailed when they launched Instagram. These users were extremely targeted because they already knew the company and because they were interested in photo sharing apps.
Then the viral co-efficient was a lot higher than 1, maybe something around 3, because it was a good product. Users used the app a lot and told their friends about it. Then you add social sharing on facebook and twitter and you have enough growth, simple. :)
It stops people from uploading the 200 photos they took on a night out, by not having a bulk option. Rather they just upload one or two making the viewing more pleasant.
The fact that the pictures are subjectively better coupled with easy social sharing and sensible tagging made it a relatively likely success.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect