Having spent almost three years as a product manager at the company, Kevin was eager to take on more responsibility and apply his nuclear drive to something tangible. Instead, he was offered by his boss to take up golf.
His next stop was NextStop, a location recommendation app startup. With FourSquare leading the way, check-in apps were all the rage in the late 2000s, and a small team meant Kevin could get more responsibility and take initiative.
He did. After a year of honing his coding skills at the startup, Kevin decided to create a check-in app of his own.
“I didn’t have a specific idea in mind… I mean, the idea was basically to start a check-in app… Who wasn’t starting a check-in app at that time? […] It was probably the worst idea we could’ve been working on at the time.”
A hostel in Mexico seemed like the right place to pursue his terrible idea, so Kevin packed his flip-flops and bought two tickets out of California — one for himself, one for his girlfriend. That second ticket would become the best investment Kevin Systrom ever made.
Kevin’s life story and quotes taken from these four sources.
“You should probably add filters”
Burbn — Kevin’s first grown-up brainchild — sounded good on paper. Unlike other check-in apps, Burbn allowed users to post photos and videos along with their check-ins. Investors liked the idea, and Kevin received two checks — one from Baseline Ventures, and another from Andreessen Horowitz — totalling $500,000.
“We spent like $60,000 to launch Burbn. We raised $500,000 and we were kicking ourselves the second day after… We were like, we had all this money left. […] Turns out, you can bootstrap yourself with Amazon Web Services; you need like 2 engineers these days to do things well.”
Burbn was easy to build, but it was even easier for users to forget. 80 people — that’s how many joined Burbn over nine months. Kevin recalls having his friends meet his parents via the app, and reconnecting with long-lost acquaintances. But whenever he showed the app to ‘outsiders’ — a.k.a. potential users like you and me — they would nod enthusiastically and then dismiss the app minutes later.
It was a tight-knit community of enthusiastic location-sharers. But it wasn’t growing. Something had to be done.
“We made a list of [Burbn features] and we asked ourselves: what already exists in the world? What sucks? […] There were a lot of check-in apps, there were a lot of planners and group chat things… but there wasn’t a great solution to posting great photos to a lot of friends at once.”
During their Mexico trip, Kevin asked his girlfriend why she didn’t post any pictures on Burbn. She said that her iPhone 4 photos didn’t look as good as some of Kevin’s friends’. He explained that his friends were using photo filters.
“She goes ‘oh, well, you should probably add filters.’ We came back from that walk, I went straight to the room, got on my laptop and I made the first filter, which was X-Pro II.”
Within weeks, Burbn was stripped of all features except photo sharing. The gutted version was downloaded 25,000 times on day one.
How do you call an app that sends instant camera shots with the speed of a telegram? That’s right. Insta-gram.
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