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Did you know? +200 million of Instagram’s users have more than 50,000 followers? With 50k followers, you can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands. Here are 13 other facts I learned while reading @sarahfrier "No filter" (you won't believe the 7th)
1/ 6 million users have +1 million followers 
2/ Kim Kardashian West has 157 million followers and makes about $1 million for a single post.
3/ Before cofounding Instagram, @kevin Systrom was offered to join both Facebook and Twitter early. To most, that would have been a mistake worth regretting for their whole life, but it won't for Kevin.
4/ Funnily enough, the offer to join Facebook was to build facebook photos. Big WHAT IF!
5/ While Insta is definitely an example of an instant success, it was a pivot of an app called Burbn (don't ask me how to pronounce that) which had happy users. Decision to pivot was probably not that straightforward. Good call I guess.
6/ At the time, it kinda looked to me like a few people launching an app and getting lucky. While there's always a bit of luck, As often, Insta's success was mostly the result of very opinionated founders, a bold vision and hard work.
7/ An example of how contrarian insta was is the reshare button. It was considered a best practice in social app to increase engagement and virality. They did build it but never shipped it.
8/ The two initial killer features were 1/ automated posts on other social platforms 2/ Filters. Funny how these are not a thing anymore.
9/ Random: Kevin worked in the same company as @jack Dorsey in the past, and met Marc Andreessen at a party (a16z invested 250k shortly after). Jack also invested a small ticket personally.
10/ Dorsey was one of the first power users, sharing automatically his daily instagram posts to his 1.6m twitter followers.
11/ Given these facts, you might wonder if they could have had the same success without being based in the Bay Area 
12/ Twitter considered multiple times acquiring Instagram. Very early when Dorsey started seeing the traction, multiple times later on. Another big WHAT IF.
13/ Acquisition: We all remember the price tag of 1 billion. But 75% of that was in facebook shares. If I'm not mistaken, Facebook's valuation then was 80b (right before IPO). Current fb market cap is 642b. Do the math.
I do recommend the book. Interesting and inspiring.
A few other good resources on Instagram's story:
- @tferriss podcast with Kevin: https://tim.blog/2019/04/25/kevin-systrom/
- @m2jr podcast with both founders: https://podcastnotes.org/starting-greatness-with-mike-maples/instagram-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-starting-greatness-mike-maples/
- @AcquiredFM episode https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/episode-2-instagram
A few other good resources on Instagram's story:
- @tferriss podcast with Kevin: https://tim.blog/2019/04/25/kevin-systrom/
- @m2jr podcast with both founders: https://podcastnotes.org/starting-greatness-with-mike-maples/instagram-kevin-systrom-mike-krieger-starting-greatness-mike-maples/
- @AcquiredFM episode https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/episode-2-instagram
