Unless you’ve been trolling in some ‘Enchanted Woods’ this past 24 hours, it’s likely that you’ve heard about the latest gung ho from the tech world – the acquisition of the photo genius, 12 people, San Francisco based company called Instagram by Facebook for $1 billion in cash (or stock) .
For an iphone app that only took 8 weeks to build and ship, and which went live less than two years ago this makes for an exceptional rocket ship success story. Till date this photo-sharing smart phone application has been downloaded by more than seven million people who use it to add stylistic filters, frames, and effects to photos, which can – by tapping one of the 16 options – turn a simplistic snapshot of your pet dog into what looks like a weathered Polaroid time-capsuled frame from 1967.
So What are the Key Takeaways for any Start-up from the Instagram Acquisition
In looking through Instagram’s story, and what they’ve masterfully built and practiced, there are 5 clear lessons that we came up with that any new entrepreneur or start-up should look at while building their marketing campaign—
Be Really Good At One Thing
Before Mike Krieger joined hands with Kevin Systom (co-founders of Instagram), Kevin had built a prototype of an idea in HTML5 called Burbn. This mobile app was supposed to let you: Check into locations, make plans (futures check ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. But when they decided to build a company together – they wanted to “FOCUS on being really good at one thing.” The locations, check-ins, points were all good but felt cluttered, and overrun with features. As they singled out mobile photos as an awesome opportunity, they began to spend their entire efforts solely focused on photos. Basically they went out on a single limb of Burbn, cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. And what remained was Instagram.
Develop the Simplest Solution to what your Customer is Seeking
Instagram is a definite case of exiting a mangled heap of hay rather than having a single grand idea upfront and persisting. In textbook customer development fashion, Kevin and his team learned a lot from developing the experience called Burbn. Despite feeling like the space was overrun from a slow, relative html5 app, the team pivoted to focus on photo applications. Central to the Instagram principles, was the idea of building a very simple user interface to the application. Cutting down the number of features, and streamlining the user interface to the essential elements, the Instagram team reinvented a “one button” application.
Open the app — Take a photo — With a “single tap” apply a crazy cool filter — drop a caption on the image and share out to all your social networks……
(Instagram geo-tags the location on all photos on its own)
Instagram – a one button application was a solution to their customer’s problem (where the value proposition requires only one button). Instagram focused on a key feature users always want—speed.
Build a Cost Effective Method of Customer Acquisition
If you peek into the employee composition of Instagram, you will find it’s mostly developers with a few community managers. No BIG sales team force (like groupon), absolutely no one in business development. Instead Instagram focused on building the sales mechanism into the product and having people understand and give feedback on the community. The smart research lead then to find the set of influencers that would love what they were doing; those people such as photographers with lots of twitter followers who would really be excited about the applications capabilities. A good focus and continued PR with great ways of capturing, keeping and referring customers was the key.
Leverage on Existing Networks to BootStrap your Own
Instagram didn’t just work to create its own network; rather its principal benefit was that it made easy to post great snaps to other networks such as twitter, flickr and facebook. This meant that the application had value for the first person that used it – not only just making the photo look good; but sharing the way people wanted to share. Another focus was of course the iPhone users and their existing network.
Don’t let the Ocean Waves Distract You
Instagram was launched for iPhone users – and here the focus was important. The team didn’t try to boil the ocean but until recently and stayed manically – yes! That’s the word – manically focussed on Apple iPhone – even to the extent that the web experience is minimalist compared to what’s in the iphone app. Further, iOS was the right choice for two reasons – it had the largest consistent platform at the time of launch and the gaps in the built-in photo experience fit well with the advantages of instagram (better photos, multi social net connection). The focus on iPhone also let the team keep performance for the user and simplicity of the experience at the center of what they did.
More importantly, Instagram cracked the code where Facebook itself failed: viral growth on mobile.