With Version 2.0 On Fire, Instagram Zooms Past 10 Million Users

Mg Siegler

MG Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. Previously, MG was a general partner at CrunchFund. And before TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked... → Learn More

Monday, September 26th, 2011
Screen Shot 2011-09-26 at 10.47.49 AM

Six days ago, Instagram pushed version 2.0 live in the App Store. A big time upgrade with a focus on the camera, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom expected signups to pick up some significant steam. But it was more like they caught fire.

Over the weekend, Instagram was seeing a signup rate of over one new user a second — roughly 75 per minute, Systrom says. This pushed them past the 10 million user milestone.

Remarkably, it took the hot startup Foursquare just over two years to get to 10 million users — Instagram did it in just under a year. It took Twitter and Facebook well over two years to hit the milestone as well. Even more remarkably, Instagram has done it while being available only on one platform: iOS.

Remember too: this is a company with just six employees still.

With the new surge, Instagram has cracked the top 10 free apps in the App Store once again. They’re just ahead of Google+ and the only apps in front of them are games.

You can find Instagram in the App Store here.


Company: Instagram
Website: instagram.com
Launch Date: March 2010
Funding: $57.5M

Instagram is a free photo sharing application that allows users to take photos, apply a filter, and share it on the service or a variety of other social networking services, including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, and Posterous. The application is compatible with any iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch running iOS 3.1.2 or above or any Android device running Android 2.2 or above. In an homage to both the Kodak Instamatic and Polaroid cameras, Instagram confines photos into a square...

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