Instagram’s trick to hide slow photo uploads and beat competitors

@tech_founders_club

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Selling · Mobile App

Elite Reads: Book Summaries Appseen in 7 videos →https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elite-reads-book-summaries/id6742244361 ↗

Why it worked

The video explains a clever technical workaround that significantly improves user experience by making a common process (photo uploads) appear much faster. This provides immediate value and a 'wow' factor, making the content highly shareable and relatable to anyone who uses such platforms.

Summary

The speaker shares a trick used by the Gmail team to make uploads appear faster by pre-loading them in the background. This technique, when applied to Instagram by uploading photos in a 512x512 resolution and processing them in the background, made the upload process seem almost instantaneous to users.

Structure

1Introduction to the Gmail team's upload trick
2Explanation of the pre-loading strategy
3Applying the strategy to Instagram with specific dimensions
4The perceived speed and user reaction

Product placement

The video discusses a technical trick that makes uploads appear faster, implying this trick is relevant to the promoted app, Elite Reads: Book Summaries App, which likely benefits from fast loading times for its users.

Original caption

Instagram’s trick to beat competitors #startup #techstartup #technology #startupfounder #ycombinator

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On-screen text

Instagram’s trick to hide slow photo uploads and beat competitors

Transcript

Hey when I worked on the Gmail team, you know what they did? When you typed in your username or your email address, even before you've entered in your password, like the probability once you enter in your username that you're going to actually sign in is extremely high. So why not just start loading your account in the background? Not like sending it down to the desktop, that would be a security issue, but like load it into memory on the server, like get it ready, prepare it. I always thought that was so fascinating and unintuitive. And I was like, Mike, why don't we just do that? But like, we'll just upload the photo and like assume you're gonna upload the photo. And if you don't, forget about it, we'll delete it, right? So what ended up happening was people would caption their photo, they'd press done or upload, and you'd see this little progress bar just go and it was lightning fast. Okay? We were no faster than anyone else at the time, but by choosing 512x512 and doing it in background, it almost guaranteed that it was done by time you captioned. And everyone, when they used it was like, how the hell is this thing so fast?