Today, Instagram has over 2 billion monthly active users. Its ubiquity has changed the way we travel, eat, and shop. Interior designers have remodelled countless locations to make them more ‘insta-worthy’. Restaurants concoct drinks and dishes, not only to satisfy their customer’s taste buds, but to also look good for their Instagram followers. And millions of people have been elevated to celebrity status — some become personal media companies — purely based on their Instagram followings.
A lot of anti-FOMO in this story, where all of Systrom’s experiences seem to come into play in building Instagram. Things have worked out even though he never worked at Facebook, stuck around at Google, or worked at Twttr.
I got the sense his experiences gave Instagram a vast pool of data to draw on, especially on the confidence to pivot.
Systrom’s experiences also gave Instagram the seemingly key focus on their users and users’ problems to solve.
Also – they were super practical! Systrom raised money however he could, and also delayed a pivot based on his co-founder’s needs – super tough decisions to make in a high-stress environment.
I think this is one of those stories where you read it and go “I see what Jobs meant about the dots connecting only when you look back, not forward.”
I’m sure it looked random as hell when they were executing it, and it’s only with the benefit of hindsight that we can tell a cohesive story like this.
I really love this case. I think of it as a game of “pick the useful frame and see what happens.” Every action loop changes the world a bit, and from that you need to pick a winner among all the possible frames that emerge from multiple sources: user feedback, partner opinions, previous experience… beggars can’t be choosers
What I find genuinely fascinating is the criteria behind that selection, they’re not picking the truest frame or the most theoretical-sense one, they’re picking the most useful one, based on how much they believe it moves them closer to whatever success looks like (a hunch really).
In a way, this feels like a more real chaotic version of what the Lean Startup explains, but with one key difference, the iterations are frame-based, not feature-based. Whatever pivot or feature comes next is just a consequence of the previous winning frame in the frame picking game, a game based on a bunch of parallel PDSA loops based on frame betting and healthy doses of serendipity
