[Marco Arment has the best take on what Instagram did](http://www.marco.org/2012/04/15/instagram-independent), that I have read. But after reading his take I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the plan all along, to sell to a another company for big money, and if that plan is “ethical”, or whatever you want to call it.
That is: if Instagram’s plan was to get huge and sell to another company, then the plan is essentially a greedy plan. Because the plan *must* be to grow as fast as possible at all costs, doesn’t matter if people like the service so long as they use it (the way I think most people feel about Facebook).
However, if the plan was to create a great service and figure out the money part later, then the plan was a stupid — but noble. They were creating something out of passion, but naively assumed making money off of a free product later on would be easy — it’s not.
Of course there could have been a great plan to make money in place all along, allowing them to create a great free service that they were passionate about, but we may never know that.
I don’t think the first option, being acquired, could have been the business model. The service was/is just too good not to have a passionate group behind it. You can feel that in the app.
So the only leaves the last two options.
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