The Instagram model to gain early product traction faster
Original Publish Date: July 15, 2020
The early days of Instagram offer timely lessons around gaining faster product traction without incurring significant costs. Sadly, these lessons get overlooked for the much more glamorous story about its acquisition by Facebook.
Yet, it’s worthwhile to turn back the clock and study the early day efforts of Instagram to drive both user growth and engagement.
“Evangelists”
Instagram created a realm of exclusivity around its product by the way it chose the folks to target initially. The founders picked the first few users carefully. Since the app’s focus was on turning ordinary moments into extraordinary moments through pictures; the first few users were mainly established photographers, designers with a good number of twitter followers. These ‘artistic’ users set the scene for the content and design aesthetic that the app will gradually become known for.
The concept of ‘influencers’ is popular now, but the initial set of handpicked users would qualify as the first set of influencers. On a side note, the influencer marketing industry is on “track to be worth up to $15B by 2022, up from as much as $8B in 2019”.
Community
How many of you have had the chance to check out an “InstaMeet”? An InstaMeet is “a way for people in the Instagram community to meet one another and take photos around their city together”. One of the brilliant moves by the Instagram founders starting out was to create a venue for Instagram users to meet the app team and interact with other users.
Think about this stroke of genius. An InstaMeet (at least the initial iterations) created a relaxed venue for Instagram users to share their experiences, meet the ‘product evangelists’ in the likes of photographers, designers, and offer feedback on the product. The founders of Instagram were so particular about creating curated experiences that even the list of ‘suggested users’ to follow during the early days was handpicked by the Instagram team.
One added benefit of creating a community of people who regularly use your app – you can get a lot of your work done for free. I’m not sure if the Instagram team deliberately did this, but they were able to get volunteers to help with app translations, organize their own local InstaMeet meetups, share tips for better pictures, and so on.
Networks
Given the timing of its inception; Instagram made the most out of existing networks created by many of the popular apps around the time. Instagram removed restrictions to cross post across apps and offered a one-stop option to post pictures to other popular apps at that time including Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, to name a few.
This ‘cross post’ strategy removed any hesitation of a new user to download the Instagram app and continue to use it. Additionally, it offered a simple way to curate your content to your followers in different networks. The biggest benefit of this strategy was new user acquisition. Users who were not part of the Instagram tribe noticed its logo in different networks and immediately started to download the app.
“You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just attach it to a new wagon.” – Mark McCormack
Getting creative with your execution plan
A typical business plan sometimes discounts the exact details behind the journey to gain product traction or scaling up users. Think about the execution section of any average business plan. This section almost exists as an afterthought. Furthermore, it starts to look like a checklist item for the person or team to trudge through to get to the end of the business plan.
The early journey of Instagram offers a creative playbook involving evangelists, a self-sustaining community, and strong networks to gain product traction. You may not be able to replicate this playbook exactly for your product. Instagram’s early success indicates the need to take a second look at your stereotypical execution plan. Identify the ‘few elements’ that can undergo some reworking in your execution plan to supercharge the evolution of your product and in extension your business too.