History of Instagram

Instagram was started by 27 year old Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom who was working at nextstop in 2009. Systrom previously worked at Google as a corporate development associate and interned at Odeo, the company that would evolve into Twitter. Systrom was working in marketing but then started taking engineering classes at night to learn code. He created a prototype app of an idea he originally called Burbn, which allowed people to check-in where they are on their mobile web app. Systrom would end up meeting people who lucky enough worked for venture capitalist firms at a party and got them to agree to a meeting to discuss his app Burbn. After the first meeting he quit his job and after 2 weeks he managed to raise $500,000 from the firms. Systrom would then go on to find a team to help him with the app and Mike Krieger agreed. They decided that the app was too similar to other mobile apps and so they stripped out all the features from the app and kept uploading photos, commenting, and liking then they renamed the app to "Instagram". The app was officially launched on October 6, 2010 and its growth was instantaneous. It would soon become the number one photography app gathering 100,00 users in a week and then 1 million in two months. The app only took eight weeks to make with a years work behind it. Instagram was bought by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. Instagram now has over 600 million active users and is still increasing quickly.

Sources:
https://medium.com/@obtaineudaimonia/how-instagram-started-8b907b98a767