Another cracker from Guy and the NPR team. This time the story of Instagram. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched their photo-sharing app with a server that crashed every other hour - but despite this, Instagram went on to became one of the most popular apps in the world. Ever. Like, game changing. Few actually realise this, but Instagram wasn't always Instagram. The business was initially called Burbn. And Burbn wasn't successful by any metric. The app was too complicated, Sawyer points out, and had "a jumble of features that made it confusing." Systrom, however, kept tweaking the app. He paid attention to how people were using it. He brought on another programmer, Mike Krieger; the pair used analytics to determine how, exactly, their customers were using Burbn. Their finding? People weren't using Burbn's check-in features at all. What they were using, though, were the app's photo-sharing features. "They were posting and sharing photos like crazy," Sawyer notes. So like any start up - Sawyer and Systrom pivoted. Once they did so, Instagram had 25,000 people sign up in the first 24 hours. Mad.
My highlights:
'The best thing for any entrepreneur is failure. For us, it was the lack of momentum that hurt the most - I mean, we had maybe 100 active users' says Systrom.
'Don't ask yourself why people don't use your product or service - ask why those that do, continue to' says Systrom.
To listen to the full podcast hit the NPR guys up here.