Picture this: Infographs for non-designers
Piktochart, an online infographic design tool, nearly doubled its users to 300,000 over the first five months of 2013. Co-founder Ai Ching Goh told Inside Investor how the US market has become one of Piktochart’s largest, and which business segments are surprisingly taking up the tool.
Q: Piktochart essentially disrupts the job of an in-house graphic designer. Do you think you are replacing this job?
A: We have a motto, which goes: Piktochart helps non-designers to make information beautiful. Because designers can be quite picky, they won’t want to use tools. Piktochart is not trying to take over Photoshop or Illustrator.
Q: Piktochart aims to do away with stale forms of displaying data. What do you think appeals to your 300,000 users the most?
A: In January 2013, Piktochart had 170,000 users, which means that we have nearly doubled that within five months. What we are seeing is that infographics are being used to replace reports and even Powerpoint; our users apply Piktochart to sales sheets and even tenders used to win contracts to get new clients on board. We thought Piktochart would be originally used mostly in the classroom, but this has been proven wrong. The main users are SMEs, as well as start-ups, which use Piktochart on social media as a way to build traffic.
Q: Where do most of your users come from and what markets are you looking to expand into?
A: Our users are mainly part of marketing departments in SMEs, multinational corporations (MNC) and smaller companies. Within MNCs, we have registered users that are in human resources, sales and tech departments, who use Piktochart for internal reporting. Sixty per cent of Piktochart users are from the US and Canada, but most of our traffic comes in organically. We don’t specifically target the US, and we haven’t done any heavy PR or roadshows – there has been virtually no targeted campaign. Our growth in the US stems from the fact that there are a lot of thought leaders and so many people who are informed and searching for new tools. These people then influence others and have helped to spread the idea.
Q: What demographic does Piktochart appeal to the most?
A: We found that school classrooms teaching students as young as 10 year-olds use Piktochart, and this extends to marketing or real estate professionals whose age is around 50 to 60 years who are exploring new forms of presentation.
Q: What is your payment scheme?
A: A monthly subscription to Piktochart costs $29, which gets users another 100-plus themes, 1,000-plus graphics, icons, images, image upload slots and embedding options.
Q: Where did Piktocharts seed capital come from?
We stayed really lean in the beginning, got one designer and one developer on salary and that’s it. In the beginning, it wasn’t very much. We depended on an FFF loan; that is, a friends, family and fool loan. Currently, we have 11 full-time members. We only broke even after the fourth month when the new version of Piktochart was launched in March 2012. Additionally, the Malaysian government, through its “Craddle” programme, gave us a $150,000 grant to push out a bit of inbound and outbound marketing techniques. We are hoping to conduct another round of investment to raise $1 to $2 million by the end of this year from investors that we have already been speaking to.
[caption id="attachment_10503" align="alignleft" width="200"] Piktochart Co-founder Ai Ching Goh[/caption] Piktochart, an online infographic design tool, nearly doubled its users to 300,000 over the first five months of 2013. Co-founder Ai Ching Goh told Inside Investor how the US market has become one of Piktochart’s largest, and which business segments are surprisingly taking up the tool. Q: Piktochart essentially disrupts the job of an in-house graphic designer. Do you think you are replacing this job? A: We have a motto, which goes: Piktochart helps non-designers to make information beautiful. Because designers can be quite picky, they won’t want to use tools....
Piktochart, an online infographic design tool, nearly doubled its users to 300,000 over the first five months of 2013. Co-founder Ai Ching Goh told Inside Investor how the US market has become one of Piktochart’s largest, and which business segments are surprisingly taking up the tool.
Q: Piktochart essentially disrupts the job of an in-house graphic designer. Do you think you are replacing this job?
A: We have a motto, which goes: Piktochart helps non-designers to make information beautiful. Because designers can be quite picky, they won’t want to use tools. Piktochart is not trying to take over Photoshop or Illustrator.
Q: Piktochart aims to do away with stale forms of displaying data. What do you think appeals to your 300,000 users the most?
A: In January 2013, Piktochart had 170,000 users, which means that we have nearly doubled that within five months. What we are seeing is that infographics are being used to replace reports and even Powerpoint; our users apply Piktochart to sales sheets and even tenders used to win contracts to get new clients on board. We thought Piktochart would be originally used mostly in the classroom, but this has been proven wrong. The main users are SMEs, as well as start-ups, which use Piktochart on social media as a way to build traffic.
Q: Where do most of your users come from and what markets are you looking to expand into?
A: Our users are mainly part of marketing departments in SMEs, multinational corporations (MNC) and smaller companies. Within MNCs, we have registered users that are in human resources, sales and tech departments, who use Piktochart for internal reporting. Sixty per cent of Piktochart users are from the US and Canada, but most of our traffic comes in organically. We don’t specifically target the US, and we haven’t done any heavy PR or roadshows – there has been virtually no targeted campaign. Our growth in the US stems from the fact that there are a lot of thought leaders and so many people who are informed and searching for new tools. These people then influence others and have helped to spread the idea.
Q: What demographic does Piktochart appeal to the most?
A: We found that school classrooms teaching students as young as 10 year-olds use Piktochart, and this extends to marketing or real estate professionals whose age is around 50 to 60 years who are exploring new forms of presentation.
Q: What is your payment scheme?
A: A monthly subscription to Piktochart costs $29, which gets users another 100-plus themes, 1,000-plus graphics, icons, images, image upload slots and embedding options.
Q: Where did Piktocharts seed capital come from?
We stayed really lean in the beginning, got one designer and one developer on salary and that’s it. In the beginning, it wasn’t very much. We depended on an FFF loan; that is, a friends, family and fool loan. Currently, we have 11 full-time members. We only broke even after the fourth month when the new version of Piktochart was launched in March 2012. Additionally, the Malaysian government, through its “Craddle” programme, gave us a $150,000 grant to push out a bit of inbound and outbound marketing techniques. We are hoping to conduct another round of investment to raise $1 to $2 million by the end of this year from investors that we have already been speaking to.
