Simplify Life: What Can You Remove?

How to be happier with less.

Instagram started as a mobile web app that was in many ways similar to Foursquare: check in to locations, make plans (future check-ins), earn points for hanging out with friends, post pictures, and much more. At the time, it was called Burbn.

A few weeks later, the idea pivoted. In the words of co-founder Kevin Systrom: “We decided that if we were going to build a company, we wanted to focus on being really good at one thing.”

They saw mobile photos as the opportunity. They cut everything in the Burbn app except for its photo, comment, and like capabilities. What remained was Instagram.

The rest, as they say, is history.

One of the reasons Instagram was so successful is because it removed what is known as Product Debt.

By focusing on only having the core feature that the majority of the users needed, they narrowed down to a very specific niche, acquiring early adopters that were eager to share the app (following the Diffusion of Innovations).

They removed complexity, thus reducing technical debt. Code didn’t have to be rewritten for scaling down the line because most of it had been removed.