Featuring Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger
Before Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built a 2010 app called Burbn: check-ins, plans, points, photos, a Foursquare-inspired pileup of features nobody loved and the team couldn't even cleanly explain. It was going nowhere. Then they did the uncomfortable thing and looked honestly at their own data, where a single behavior stood out from the noise. Two years later, Facebook paid roughly $1 billion for the result. The company had thirteen employees.
This case is about the courage to delete the things you spent months building once the usage tells you the truth. For founders and operators drowning in roadmap and feature creep, it sharpens the most painful product decision there is: separating what customers actually love from what they merely tolerate, and acting on the signal hard enough to bet the company on it.