the app that deleted itself - by Swastika - stratnotes
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the app that deleted itself<br>How Instagram was built by deleting almost everything Kevin Systrom had already made
Swastika<br>Jul 07, 2026
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Kevin Systrom spent five months building an app called Burbn. Then he deleted almost all of it and became a billionaire from what was left.<br>Shipping fast and iterating constantly is real skill. None of it matters if the thing being built isn't the right thing yet.<br>Instagram’s real origin story is Systrom deleting almost everything he had already built, and keeping the one thing a hundred users kept quietly using anyway.<br>That’s the whole story. Here’s how it actually happened.<br>Thanks for reading stratnotes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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Burbn
It started, as many stories in Silicon Valley do, with a guy at a desk, building something just to see if he could. Before it was a billion dollar app, Instagram was just a quiet idea taking shape in Kevin Systrom’s head.<br>Kevin had always straddled two worlds. He loved the creative side of things, especially photography, but he also understood systems and structure. At Stanford, he studied management science and engineering and got a look at the startup world through the Mayfield Fellows Program. He interned at Odeo, crossed paths with the early Twitter team, and turned down a chance to join Facebook. After college, he joined Google, working on products like Gmail and Calendar. But he wanted more. He applied to Google’s Associate Product Manager program, didn’t get in.<br>The creative pull had been there for a long time. During a semester abroad in Italy, Kevin’s photography instructor handed him a Holga, a plastic toy camera known for soft focus and strange distortions. At first it felt like a downgrade. Then the images started coming out imperfect, emotional, oddly timeless. They didn’t just show what something looked like. They made it feel like a memory. That experience planted a seed he’d come back to years later.<br>Restless at Google, Kevin left for a startup called Nextstop. He had no formal programming background, so he started teaching himself to code at night, just for fun, building small experimental side projects. One of them combined Foursquare's check-ins with the points and social mechanics from Mafia Wars, and that project became Burbn , a name that also nodded to his fondness for bourbon. He built the earliest version in HTML5, with no real design work put into it yet, and passed it along to friends to try.<br>At a VC meetup at the Madrone Art Bar in San Francisco, Kevin caught the attention of Steve Anderson from Baseline Ventures. In the winter of 2010, Anderson offered $250,000 in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz matched the offer quickly. But the money came with one condition. Kevin couldn’t do this alone. He needed a cofounder.<br>That’s when Mike Krieger entered the picture. Kevin often brought his laptop to a café in the Mission District, where he kept running into Mike, a fellow Stanford grad and Mayfield Fellow working on his own projects while spending his days at Meebo, a real time messaging startup. Kevin showed him Burbn and made his pitch. They worked together on small features during evenings and weekends, just to see how it felt. It clicked. Mike left Meebo and joined full time.
Kevin Systrom (on your right) and Mike Krieger (on your left), the product minds behind Instagram. Kevin brought the vision, Mike shaped the experience. Together, they built a product that made sharing photos fast, beautiful, and addictive. Source: The New York Times<br>On Mike’s actual first day working on it, Kevin told him the truth without softening it. Burbn wasn’t going to survive. Foursquare already had too much of a lead. If they wanted a real shot, they had to simplify.<br>The data behind that call wasn’t dramatic. Burbn had somewhere around a hundred users. But the real signal wasn't only usage, it was the shape of the market around it. There were already dozens of check-in apps competing for the same small space Burbn was in.<br>Kevin and Mike looked at what Hipstamatic was doing at the time, a popular app that made phone photos look good but had no way to share them anywhere. The gap between that and something like Facebook’s sharing and commenting was what they decided to build toward. Everything else about Burbn, the check-ins, the plans, the points, the badges, got cut. What survived was a photo, a caption, a comment, and a like.<br>This was what good product managers do. They listen, observe, and adapt. They let go of ideas that aren’t working, no matter how much time or effort went into them. Kevin didn’t try to force Burbn into success. He looked at the data, watched how people actually used the app, and found the real behavior worth building around.<br>Kevin wrote the backend. Mike designed the iOS app. The prototype was basically an iPhone camera app with social and commenting functions. The...