Recently a photo-sharing application for iPhone called Instagram won “iPhone application of the year” as voted by Apple. I thought to myself “really?” because sharing photos is not exactly new. I’ve had an iPhone for a few weeks now (after spending years on Android I made the switch) and recently I installed the Instagram application to find out more.
Wow! The first thing I noticed was how easy it was to setup, and get started. It demonstrated great utility. Utility means useful or beneficial: it’s easy to get started and use, you’re sharing your experience through photos rather than just via text updates, photo effects can be applied easily (it’s effectively commoditising photo manipulation), and all your photos are stored onlne and are accessible easily. Great utility.
Next, it asked me about my other web presences – Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr and more. Immediately it connected me to other users I know through other connected media. It demonstrated a great community so you’re excited to find that others you know are sharing content using the application. This leaves you with the expectation that the content and experience you will have will be valuable and memorable. This expectation came true within moments of sharing my first photos as others immediately “Liked” and commented. You can view my photos here.
At Saasu these ideas of utility and community are ones we strongly believe in. We want our users to enjoy using Saasu, discover and realise the benefits for their business. They become our community and tell their own communities about us. We’ve seen this grow our business dramatically over the years and it’s allowed us to maintain fanatical pricing as we don’t advertise in the traditional sense.
Think about your own business in terms of utility and community. Are these areas you could improve on or learn on from the Instagram experience?
Recently at the annual “LeWeb” conference in Paris conference, the CEO of Instragram spoke about his vision for their company. I hope you draw us much inspiration from this as I did.