Overnight success rarely happens overnight.

“I remember saying that I was just waiting for hockeystick growth. That doesn’t happen. You don’t just sit there, and all of the sudden there’s a lot of growth,” he said at PandoMonthly in San Francisco today.

Hockey stick user adoption, like what he experienced with his next startup, Instagram, came from making a major change. Burbn was intially a check-in and communications app in a sea of a million check-in and communications apps. He realized that the thing he liked most about Burbn was the photos that the app’s 80 other active users shared. He decided to throw all his eggs in that basket, and boom — hockey stick growth.

“We took in data about what our users were doing and focused in on that. The second we focused on what people were doing, it became a phenomenon,” he said.