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New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.

As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.

So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.

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It was nothing more exhilarating than seeing all those people stream in and nothing more crushing than then seeing people posting on Twitter or on their blogs and saying,

oh, another startup that doesn't know how to scale, like, oh, like so clowny.

We were both, I mean, at that point, like, running on zero sleep for two days devastated.

And I was like, this is it. We built this great thing and we totally messed it up.

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

On today's show, how a walk along the beach sparked an idea that turned all of us into good photographers and made Instagram one of the fastest growing apps of all time.

Okay, it's 2009 and Kevin's Instagram is just a few years out of Stanford and doing the Silicon Valley thing. He's working at a travel startup by day and teaching himself to code at night.

And a friend from college, Mike Krieger, is also in the area pretty much doing the same thing.

And after a few months of experimenting, Kevin builds an app. He calls it bourbon and it's a check-in app where you can tell your friends you're at a coffee shop or a bar or wherever.

And Kevin thinks this app has some potential.

I mean, at that time, there were so many check-in apps. There was four square, there was Goala, and there were a bunch of others trying to make it.

And of course, following the trend, I was like, there's something here about the devices and everyone's pockets being available to share new types of information.

And I was like, location is the type of information people are going to want to share. I think the insight Mike and I had along the way was that actually there were more types of information, the fact that these devices had a camera, that would lead to a visual communication revolution where all of a sudden people aren't just communicating with text and voice, but they had the chance to communicate with an image.

But initially, our bet was on location and frankly, just very happy that we discovered the image thing along the way.

So people were using this app?

Yeah. And it was just compelling enough to get a handful of beta users, but I would basically come home at night and just tinker with this idea.

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