World famous brand that few know is Armenian

If the number of employees of a company grows nearly tenfold in the course of five years, if everything starts with an investment of several thousands of dollars and leads to the investment of millions of dollars when millions and even hundreds of millions purchase that company’s products, then it’s clear that you’re dealing with a successful and well-established business. There is such a company in Armenia, and that company is PicsArt app/photo editor that sells its products to over 250 million people around the world.

This is perhaps the most famous trademark created in Armenia. This mobile app allows one to edit pictures, get different kinds of collages or create them from scratch and post any edited or created picture on social networks. This Armenian mobile app successfully competes with large world-famous brands such as Instagram, which is one of the world’s largest social networks.

However, the millions of downloads, users and international recognition and other successes didn’t come easy. The founders, Hovhannes Avoyan and Artavazd Mehrabyan, came up with the idea of PicsArt startup in 2010. However, before that, they had come quite a long way, starting from 2008 when they were creating various apps, programs and games.

“The idea was born during a long process. Until then, we had had different game apps, small tools, program apps and more. We had also had various programs for processing pictures. Over time, we saw which of them worked better, and after several tries and experiments, we created PicsArt. This isn’t a new system. It is a tool for processing images and pictures, but we were the first to create a powerful tool that we joined with several tools with different purposes and applications. We got a program that includes painting, collages and photoshop. Later, we created a community where our users can share their works, meaning we also created a social network. The market responded very well, and we now have many users,” PicsArt’s co-founder and executive director Hovhannes Avoyan told “Ankakh”.

When they first started working on this project, the co-founders had a team of 15 employees. Today, the company has more than 150 employees, most of which work in Armenia. It took nearly three years to create PicsArt and another five years to reach this level, but the results say a lot more. Increasing the number of creators and employees tenfold means that the company has nearly 150 high-paid jobs since the average salary here is over $1,200 dollars. Throughout the years, the company has solved all issues related to business, technical issues, work, creating and more. As Hovhannes Avoyan put it, one day you might think everything is wonderful, and the next-everything is very bad.

“Success doesn’t come easily. Before creating PicsArt, we had worked for many years. You need to work hard in order to achieve success. Don’t think a wonderful idea born today can lead to success tomorrow. That’s not how it goes. After creating five different companies, I can say that hard work lies at the core of success. When working on startups, you can’t come up with only one idea and achieve success with that idea. You need to constantly be ready to make changes and reformulate the idea based on the demands of users or the way of use. It takes year of hard work, and the ups and downs can cause a lot of stress. But the major guarantee for success is the team of creators,” Hovhannes Avoyan mentioned.

People in Armenia think all one needs to start a good business is to have capital, support, sponsors and such things. PicsArt and the four to five companies created before PicsArt by Hovhannes Avoyan started with small investments. The founders did many things on their own, and in the IT field, as Avoyan presented, if two or three programmers join you in starting something, you can achieve great results. Success usually doesn’t come after the first or second attempt, but requires hard work so that at least one of the many attempts is successful, but that’s a different story. According to Avoyan, most of the new ideas born after the creation of the company have failed, and that’s normal in practice.

“You can make quite a lot of mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the more you learn. There’s a peculiarity here. If you did something that helped you achieve success, that’s great. If it didn’t help you achieve success, then at least you’re learning something and will do a better job next time. Anything we do is an experiment with positive or negative consequences, but an experiment with negative consequences is also positive because it teaches you how you can succeed next time. After 300 or 400 attempts, a new idea or initiative can lead to success,” Avoyan says.

Any program, app or IT product with 250 million downloads is a big number. Of course, in this sense, PicsArt is quite a successful project, but Avoyan emphasizes that there is still a lot of work to do and that the company needs to grow.

“You have to try a lot of things to be successful. If you sit and wait, success will never come to you. The more you try, the higher the chance for you to succeed because every attempt can be the key to success,” the executive director of PicsArt mentioned.

The guarantees of success are the $10 million dollar investment made by Sequoia Capital venture fund in February 2014, as well as the $15 million dollar investment made by the same fund and Insight Venture Partners in June 2014.

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