1 billion for an app
2012 was the year of big news! Facebook bought Instagram for 1 billion. Mark Zuckerberg's strategy is buy, copy or kill. At the end of every meeting he seems to shout 'domination' and he is good at it. The world was turned upside down because never before had so much money been paid for an app from a small company that employed 13 people at the time and that had no business model.
Today, Facebook, which owns Instagram and Whatsapp, is one of the most powerful companies of all time, buy bulk sms service alongside Google and Amazon. You can imagine that Zuck did not like Systrom's manual approval of ads. He even demanded that Systrom raise a billion dollars by the end of 2014, because he wanted to earn back his investment. After all, he had already let the app do its own thing for 2 years. That freedom had been a condition of the founders when selling it. The first cracks in the Zuck-Systrom relationship will undoubtedly have appeared then.
Uploading a photo has never been easier
The simplicity was the power of Instagram: celebrities and musicians finally posted their own stories. Uploading a photo is easy, while Facebook pages were maintained by their team or managers. This is one of the main reasons why Instagram became so big. The first celebrities on Insta were Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber , and not much later the entire Kardashian clan. But also actor and tech investor Ashton Kutcher and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey took care of PR for the app within the tech scene.