On Instagram FOUNDING DAY A look at how Instagram began its journey

From start to a billion dollars

THE IDEA

Kevin Systrom, the former CEO of the company, before developing Instagram, build an app called 'Burbn' that let users check-in their location but soon the project was scrapped and Systrom and Krieger started working on something different

COMMUNICATION WITH IMAGES

Following the trends of Burbn a product was finally launched exclusively for Apple store on October 6th, 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger under the name Instagram as they thought it looked like users will be sending 'Instant Telegrams'

THE UNEXPECTED TURNOUT

The founders were unsure of what reaction to expect but 25,000 people joined Instagram on the first day and the traffic was so overwhelming that they could not even return home until 6 am the next day

HITTING MILESTONES

Instagram hit a million users in 3 months and did not take long to reach 10 million users - in less than a year.

It was growing at double the speed as compared to Facebook or Twitter as they took roughly 2 years to reach that milestone

EXPANDING USER BASE

For a year and a half, Instagram was only on iOS and grew to around 30 million users and was ready to hit the Android store on April 9th, 2012

SMASHING NUMBERS

Within 24 hours of launching on Android, more than 1 million users joined the platform and within less than a month, the total number of users crossed 50 million

By this time, Instagram was adding roughly 5 million users every week!

THE BIG VALUATION

Instagram was acquired by Facebook on April 9th, 2012 for a whopping $1 billion