Instagram expanded slow. They wanted to stay as lean as possible for as long as possible — and in that, I think, is a lesson.

It took them 2 years to finally release an Android app — it was downloaded millions of times in a day.

Think about how long it took them to expand with the video function.

Or how late DMs came. Comments are even today very unstructured and for a long time they didn’t even make sense at all for popular accounts, since you can only see the latest ones — which are rapidly changing.

Photos bigger than squares, voice notes, video calls, etc — these all came with time and after the basics were really put in place.

Why did that happen?

Were funds an issue? Certainly not after the Facebook acquisition, but my feeling is this:

Because funds could quickly become an issue overnight, since every user was quite costly back then — today’s AWS prices do not apply to 2010 — this could have scaled really fast and truly out of control.

This lead, maybe, to this “as lean as possible for as long as possible” ethos — from which I think you and I have to learn.

There are very few exceptions to this, but keeping it as lean as possible might prove itself to be the tool that allows you to shape what you want, instead of how it may look like: a weapon that’s used for self-infliction.

About Ch Daniel

I’ve updated this signature in July 2020, so older mentions of the signature might not make sense.

I currently don’t write on this blog anymore. I wrote daily for 9 months on this very blog, but now I’m focused on building the CH Group.

If you want to follow my newer articles, check out the CH Group’s blog.

See everything I do here: Chdaniel.com