Instagram Surpasses 4.25M Registered Users, Is Now Posting 10 Photos A Second

This is Alexia Tsotis with Tech Crunch and I'm here with Instagram founder Kevin Systrom.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming.

Absolutely.

And you just got off stage, where he inadvertently announced, I guess-

It wasn't inadvertent. No.

Advertently announced his 4 million or 4.25 million-

Right !

-Registered Instagram user. So a month ago you were what 3 million?

Yeah, so we were growing at about 1.2 million per month right now.

That is amazing.

But every month it changes. It wasn't that way when we last talked, but what's fantastic about Instagram right now is the love that community has for each other, and bringing people into the community. And it's growing because of that awesome community.

So what was your highest trafficking day?

Highest trafficking day, so, not in terms of traffic necessarily, but in terms of like user sign-ups was this past Sunday and there were about like 40 per minute signing up, so it's pretty crazy.

Was there anything that instigated this or this was just a random occurrence?

It's not a random occurrence. It's just like every weekend breaks the last weekend's record and I think that's a function people spreading it to their friends, and people discovering it. We're in the top 40 in the app store right now, in the free apps, and I think that helps a lot because people discover it in other ways as well.

You were on stage with David Karp from Tumblr. Do you see any similarities in the growth of the two products or have you learned any lessons from the way that he manages his user growth explosion versus the way Instagram does it, or?

So I think one thing, we were talking backstage, one thing we both really agree on is the importance of growing your team and making that a priority. We're four people right now, and we're excited to say that we're hiring. We want the best people that are willing step up to the challenge of the growth that we're seeing and I think both David and I firmly believe that great teams build great products, you know, and-and that's how to maintain that growth that we're seeing.

You should hire Tiffany West, the Flickr designer.

Oh.

That wrote the blog post about what Flickr could improve.

If she can code.

If she can code. Tiffany, if you are out there and you can code, give Kevin, shoot Kevin.

Just give me a call.

So you've got ten photos per second. You've got, you've got the highest user signups on Sunday, 40 user signups per second.

Per minute.

Per minute.

Per second would be pretty awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'd be growing a little bit more quickly if it were per second.

1.25 million users in a month.

About, yeah. I mean I think growth is really, like, it's increasing I think because Instagram is just becoming more mainstream in the sense that you can discover it just about anywhere. People like Rosie O'Donnell signing up, Jamie Oliver. You just start to see it everywhere and that's a testament to people having a lot of fun with the product.

So, do you plan ways to take advantage of this massive scale?

Yeah so, you know, there are a lot of interesting things coming and some of them we're working on today and I think what's exciting about Instagram is the community that's growing underneath it. I think that's, you know, if we look back on Instagram as an accomplishment some day, I wanna point out the community and say like, you know, we were able to grow that, because I think at the end of the day that's what keeps us running.

Awesome. Thank you, Kevin.

Absolutely.