Inspiring and Igniting that Creative Spark

PicsArt founder and CEO Hovhannes Avoyan shares his concept, vision, and strategies for this creative storytelling platform

Social media platforms like Instagram have transformed imaging from a mundane, capture-and-share activity into one of creative storytelling. Therefore, it is imperative for any imaging business to scale up to a level that caters to these new trends and roll out competent platforms to engage the millennial community that drives these changes. PicsArt is one such platform that has successfully managed to do this. Here we have HovhannesAvoyan,CEOandFounder, PicsArt, to share the success story of the platform with SmartPhotography readers. As an entrepreneur who founded many successful startups in your career, what was the thought process behind the development of PicsArt?

PicsArt is something very close to my heart. While many know me as an engineer and an entrepreneur, just a handful might know that I applied to an art school before I decided to study engineering, but I was rejected. Fortunately, I did well at engineering.

However, the love for art and the experience I had trying to get into art school motivated me to build a company where I could help others pursue their creativity.

Another experience that inspired the building of PicsArt was when my 10-year-old daughter came to me in tears because she had shared her artwork online and was bullied. That very day, I decided to build a safe space where anyone could share their artwork and collaborate in meaningful ways without judgement, fear, or ridicule. I am on a mission to create a supportive environment where anyone can easily make, edit, and share their creations with the world and also feel inspired by fellow creators. Creativity is inherent to everyone. When they can share their art with the world, it brings them joy. This is why I started PicsArt.

As a platform targeting the large pool of millennial users, how is PicsArt different from other similar platforms in the same space? What are its USPs?

PicsArt offers a very unique combination of thousands of creative tools, content, and a community of creators who connect around shared interests. For example, photography, art, K-pop bands, celebrities, or video games. Today’s mobile-savvy generation prefers to communicate visually, and we help them do that.

Dozens of apps offer various forms and special effects, but we have consolidated all these features into an all-in-one platform where you can do anything and everything from a single place. Also, unlike other editing apps, we are platform-agnostic, which means we enable users to share their creations on any messaging or social media platforms. We also have AI and machine learning in a place that helps us to stay ahead of the curve. By leveraging the most up-to-date and cutting-edge technology such as Apple and Google’s AR Kits, we are always advancing our use cases and growing along the way.

AI-enabled processes have taken a major place in image editing. Where do you think this technology is heading?

AI has become instrumental in helping businesses across industries be more efficient and scale efficiently. As for the photo and video editing industry, I would say that most designers would gladly leverage AI to remove the repetitive and mundane aspects of their job to accelerate and enhance their work.

At PicsArt, we use AI in several ways, but ultimately, it helps us to make

complex edits quicker and simpler. It enables us to improve the overall user experience. With more than one billion images edited a month on our platform, we have a lot of insight into people’s editing habits, behaviours, and patterns which enables us to build AI-powered tools and processes — all with utmost regard for individual privacy.

All metadata we collect is used to directly improve the user experience. We can surface the tools they want or are most likely to use. It is a virtuous cycle — data helps to improve our product, a better product increases usage, and increased usage generates more data making our AI even smarter. This cycle is what helps business like ours not only sustain, but also scale.

Could you elaborate on the journey so far of PicsArt worldwide in general and India in particular?

PicsArt has come a long way since we began in 2012. We have grown year over year mostly through word of mouth and search. In 2018, we launched subscription, and we now have more than 150 million monthly active creators across the globe. 80% of our growth has been organic, which saved us tens of millions of dollars in marketing expenses, but we still rely on paid acquisition, co-marketing, and growth strategies.

We are also one of the few platforms that consistently engages with our community members and localises most of our content. With new content and weekly curated photo challenges in more than 30 different languages, we continue to inspire and ignite creativity across our entire creator base. To stand out, we remain focussed on a very core demographic – Millennials and Gen Z – which helps us curate content and build features that are more relevant, timely and likely to trend.

India is one of our top thriving markets. In 2020, we recorded a 45% increase in monthly active users (MAUs) in India alone and a 43% jump in app downloads. We also found that the average time spent by users in India on the PicsArt app increased by 53% shortly after the country was ordered to shelter-in-place. We see users in India using PicsArt to make edits and creations around holiday and seasonal season. Because of this, we cater a lot of our template content in India for this very use case.

We have just bid adieu to 2020, which many term as one of the most challenging years in business, but which also ushered in an allimportant chapter in digital and online transformation. How different and important was 2020, the lockdown period in particular, for the platform?

Despite shelter-in-place forcing most of us indoors, 2020 was a year of growth for PicsArt. With remote working and schooling being the new norm, people had more time on their hands. They were looking for ways to channel their boredom, relieve stress, and ultimately unleash their creativity, and we help them do exactly that.

We saw a 20% jump in global editing activity, solidifying our easy-to-use tools and features, and we continue to lead in monthly active users in the photo and video editing space. Even more humbling, PicsArt was the 18th most downloaded app in the world last year.

In India, PicsArt emerged as one of the top apps used by Indian women to enhance their photographs, as per a December 2020 Google study. The study also found that women in India feel enthusiastic and empowered showcasing their edited photos and selfies, and cited PicsArt as one of the most widely used photo editing apps in India.

Looking at a post-lockdown scenario, how different do you expect the future to be for digital and online platforms like PicsArt?

I think digital platforms like PicsArt will become even more important in people’s lives in the post-lockdown scenario. We are already seeing this happen with video conferencing and chat platforms. More people are going online for entertainment, value, and connection, and PicsArt gives users this and more.

As businesses and consumers increasingly adopt online banking, video conferencing, remote education, online shopping, etc. we will be spending a lot of time with our devices - but with that extra time, we’ll start to rethink the kinds of the community we can create through them.

As for PicsArt, it has always been an app that people turned to, even before the lockdown, to curb stress and boredom. It is now even more true today.

As for India, it has become a very important market for PicsArt, and we have seen tremendous growth in terms of usage and downloads. With our easily accessible and simple-to-use tools, we think we can continue to help equip India’s socially active Millennials and Gen Z’ers with creative editing tools that do not require extensive training. We also plan to add even more templates, stickers, and creative content centred around national celebratory days.

What strategies and steps do you have in mind in expanding the platform beyond the scope of millennial users, particularly to social media and creative professionals?

PicsArt was built on the premise that anyone can be creative regardless of their skillset. Nowadays, the barrier to learning something new — a language, designing a logo, how to meditate for example - is easier than ever thanks to technology available at our fingertips. We can become masters of a skill in a shorter period of time. We can watch a YouTube video, take an online course, or even sell goods we make online. This is what today’s creators do.

For years, PicsArt has been known for our robust, all-in-one mobile photo and video editing app, but we discovered that 30% of our users rely on PicsArt for professional purposes. They are business, they are designing a logo or T-shirt, or making a fun Instagram story for their company - and they want to do those things on a larger screen. They are using creative platforms to help them with their side hustle, and this is why we ultimately decided to bring our mobile tools to the web – to help today’s creator economy.

Social media has fuelled the creator economy. It provides marketplaces where creators can make their living, and PicsArt is here to help fuel the creators.