Instagram: Ruthless Deletion

Kevin Systrom taught himself programming at Stanford. In 2010, he built Bourbon, a location-based check-in app with 5,000 users. The app was cluttered with too many features. Systrom watched usage patterns. 72% of interaction was photo sharing. Every other feature registered below 5%. He faced a choice, build more features, or remove everything, but the one thing people wanted. He deleted seven months of work. He removed the check in function, the social graph, and everything else. He stripped down to one feature, photo sharing with instant filters. He renamed it Instagram. He launched with 1,000 followers on day one, 25,000 in two weeks. Growth was exponential because each photo shared was a discovery vector.