Instagram: 8 insta-worthy lessons from turning a weekend project into a billion dollar biz

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Hey rebel solopreneurs 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️

Stuck waiting for the perfect, groundbreaking concept before you can launch anything?

That voice keeps whispering "this idea isn't original enough" or "someone else will think of something better."

Meet Kevin Systrom - who started with a completely wrong idea (a Foursquare clone called Burbn), pivoted to photo-sharing with filters, and sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion.

So how exactly do you turn the "wrong" idea into a billion-dollar success?

🍹 The humble beginnings...

Kevin Systrom was born to Diane and Douglas Systrom on December 30th, 1983, in Holliston, Massachusetts.

His mother worked at Monster.com during the first tech startup boom and later at Zipcar.

She was always eager to learn new things and learned to snowboard at 45 - Kevin says she's the coolest mom with tremendous energy.

Kevin has a younger sister, Kate, and grew up in a supportive middle-class family that encouraged curiosity and learning.

As a kid in fourth grade, Kevin already had entrepreneurial instincts and wanted to start companies in his classroom.

During his teens, he discovered programming and started creating pranks and small programs for fun.

But when high school came around, his interests completely shifted from computers to music - he became obsessed with DJing.

Kevin would email Boston Beat, an old-school vinyl record store, every other day begging for a job as a DJ.

He finally pestered them enough that they let him work a few hours a week, and soon he was doing real DJ gigs at Boston clubs.

Since he was under 18, older friends helped him sneak into venues where he'd stockpile giant stacks of records in his bedroom.

Kevin had a pattern: when he liked something, he got completely obsessed with it.

This obsessive focus would later become his secret weapon in building one of the world's most valuable apps.

But first, Kevin was about to learn some brutal lessons about what doesn't work...

🤔 The candy entrepreneur fails

Picture this: Kevin's charging classmates for candy from his locker, but nobody's buying because he's coming across as pushy and creepy.

"I won't say I was a natural entrepreneur. I think I was actually pretty bad at that," Kevin admits.

His AOL Instant Messenger pranks were so annoying they got the family account blocked - not exactly the entrepreneurial success story you'd expect.

But here's the thing - each 'wrong' attempt gets you closer to the approach that's waiting to work perfectly, you know?

But then Kevin discovered something that would change everything about his approach to business...

📸 Passion meets opportunity

In college, Kevin's interest shifted from computers to music, then to photography during a study abroad trip in Florence.

When his professor took away his expensive camera and gave him a cheap Holga camera instead, Kevin fell in love with the low-fi, retro-style photos it produced.

He started building websites like Photobox for his fraternity to share party photos and realized how much photography interested him.

Get this - this wasn't just a hobby, Kevin was unconsciously spotting a real need for better photo sharing.

Little did Kevin know this photography obsession would soon collide with the perfect timing...

💼 The corporate itch

After three years at Google working on Gmail and Calendar marketing, Kevin grew restless in the large corporate environment.

"I always had this itch," he says. "I wanted to get back in the social space."

He left Google for NextStop, a social travel site where he could finally write code and create app-style programs.

While there, he noticed the rising tide of mobile, location-based gaming and social networking trends.

Here's what's wild - Kevin realized he had to pursue his passion for photography and social sharing full-time.

The stage was set, but Kevin's first attempt would teach him a brutal lesson about focus...

🍺 Burbn burns out

On nights and weekends, Kevin built Burbn - a mashup of Foursquare and Zynga that let users check-in to locations, make plans, earn points, and post pictures.

He showed the prototype at a party and impressed venture capitalists enough to raise $500,000 from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.

Kevin quit his job and worked from his one-bedroom San Francisco apartment, but here's the crazy part - Burbn got lots of tech blog hype without really going anywhere.

It was "cluttered" and "overrun with features," but users were gravitating toward one specific function: photo sharing.

This realization would force Kevin to make the scariest decision of his entrepreneurial journey...

✂️ The pivot that changed everything

But wait - in August, Kevin and his new co-founder Mike made an incredibly risky decision: they scrapped Burbn almost entirely to build something new from scratch.

"It was really difficult to decide to start from scratch, but we went out on a limb, and basically cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities."

They wanted to focus on being really good at one thing instead of mediocre at many things.

For eight weeks, they worked day and night to perfect what would become Instagram.

Can you imagine throwing away months of work? But here's the thing - sometimes the best way forward is to kill your darlings and start over with laser focus.

But even after completing the app, something crucial was still missing...

🌊 The girlfriend's game-changing advice

Frustrated that their completed app felt incomplete, Kevin took a break and went to the beach with his girlfriend Nicole.

When Kevin explained his photo-sharing idea, Nicole said she wouldn't post her iPhone photos because "they're not as good as your friend Greg's."

Kevin knew Greg was using filter apps to make his photos look better.

Nicole simply said, "Well, you should probably have filters then."

Eureka! That night, Kevin figured out how to create the first Instagram filter and posted a photo of Nicole's foot and a stray dog - the first Instagram photo ever.

This simple addition would transform everything about their app's appeal...

🚀 The overnight sensation

At 12:15 a.m. on October 6, 2010, Instagram went live on the Apple App Store.

Within hours, 10,000 people had downloaded the app and their servers crashed from the traffic - can you imagine?

Kevin and Mike pulled an all-nighter fixing servers, but by the end of the first day, 25,000 people had signed up.

By the end of the first week: 100,000 downloads. By December: 1 million users. Wild, right?

The key was making it incredibly easy for amateurs to create professional-looking photos with just one tap.

But the real validation came from an unexpected source...

💰 The epic win

Multiple companies wanted to acquire Instagram, including Twitter with a mid-$500 million offer.

But Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't take no for an answer and invited Kevin to his home for detailed talks.

Mark's offer was essentially double what others had floated, including $300 million in cash.

On a Saturday evening in April 2012, less than two years after launch, Kevin signed a deal to sell Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion.

The company had just 16 employees, had never spent a dime on marketing, and Steve Jobs had highlighted them at Apple's keynote as validation of their incredible product quality.

🥂 Your turn to get awesome!

That's it, my fellow rebels!

Kevin proved that you don't need the perfect concept to start - you need the willingness to pivot when you find something better.

Kevin went from failed location app to billion-dollar photo platform by listening to users and adapting quickly.

Your "imperfect" idea might be exactly what leads you to your perfect breakthrough.

Let the good times roll for you! 🍨

Your 'partner in rebellion with the status quo' vijay peduru