Just the Essentials

Geek Wire on the success of Instagram…

Burbn had attract­ed a core fol­low­ing of users, but was not exact­ly tak­ing off. Upon fur­ther eval­u­a­tion the founders noticed that photo upload­ing was the strongest and most used fea­ture. Instant­ly, they cut all other fea­tures, kept with upload­ing pho­tos and moved for­ward with the newly mint­ed Insta­gram. Sys­trom resist­ed being all things to all peo­ple and in the end sold his 15 month old com­pa­ny for $1 bil­lion. Think about that for a sec­ond. By remov­ing most of his prod­uct and get­ting down to the essen­tial, he dras­ti­cal­ly enhanced its value.