When you have an idea for a product and the market you want to enter is crowded with competitors or has one giant leader, chances are your product won’t get noticed. Founder of social mobile platform Elasitas, Calvin Kizana, was in this position in 2011, having sold his company to a Malaysian venture. He was itching to start something new and saw an opportunity to fix Instagram. Problem is, he’s not gonna be able to fix Instagram directly, so he built PicMix, a photo sharing app which launched on BlackBerry in early 2012.
Like a lot of other iPhone owners, Kizana is on Instagram. He signed up early on and found the format endearing and exciting but after some time, he realized that he and many other people tend to juggle through several different apps to get the looks that they want for the photos to be posted on Instagram. Some of the popular apps include Diptic, Snapseed, Camera+, Phonto, Filterstorm, and Squaready. They all serve different purposes and add elements to the photos that aren’t available on Instagram.
If he were to enter that market however, his idea would be end up becoming just another app for Instagram. There’s an opportunity in owning the stream but even photo sharing apps with their own streams and collections such as Camera+ haven’t been able to take on Instagram’s might. PicPlz, a photo sharing app which was out long before Instagram was conceptualized, even gave up.
Kizana had the benefit of having sold his previous company, so he built a team of developers and designers to come up with the app. He decided that the launch platform would be BlackBerry. He said, “everyone was saying about how the BlackBerry is dying, you should go to iOS or Android, but the BlackBerry market in Indonesia was still huge, the opportunity was still there”. On top of that, Indonesian BlackBerry users had been looking for their own Instagram, many of which ended up buying iPhones just so they could use Instagram.
At Elasitas, Kizana worked closely with many mobile operators domestically as well as internationally. He also often dealt with content owners and publishers. This combination gave him the network that he needed to help push his app.
He and his team pushed out the first version of PicMix on BlackBerry OS in March 2012. It was a simple photo sharing app with filters and frame options. For some reason, two months later PicMix registered its first million users with zero marketing budget and no actual marketing campaigns. Apparently he had tapped into the pent up demand for a simple photo sharing app on BlackBerry. Mirroring the story of Instagram and PicPlz, a Singaporean app by Risto Mobile called PicStory had been in the market earlier, offering something similar for BlackBerry users, but PicMix seems to be the more popular of the two. Both apps have also been made available for BlackBerry 10 and Android.
Based on member requests and feedback, PicMix began to have additional features such as customizable frames and stickers. Kizana believes in offering a straight up simple product, but with PicMix, there was overwhelming demand to have additional features. He said, “the thing with Instagram is that you often have to use all these other apps to add text, to show multiple photos in a single post, to add frames, you go through two or three different apps or more before you finally post the photo, so we built some of these into PicMix, make it more convenient for our users”.
After 13 months, PicMix is about to register its 10 millionth user this week according to PicMix meter that’s available on its website and more than 140 million photos have been uploaded. That makes for an average of 14 photos per account. Comparatively, when Facebook announced its acquisition of Instagram in April 2012, Instagram had 30 million users sharing a billion photos. That’s an average of 33 photos per account after 18 months since launch.
PicMix grew faster than Instagram in their respective first quarters, reaching the first million users in just two months, whereas Instagram did it in three. It’s worth noting that PicMix was a BlackBerry exclusive app for much of its first year and only just introduced its BlackBerry 10 and Android apps a couple of months ago. An iOS version is coming with a Windows Phone app being considered.
Indonesia makes up about 35% of PicMix’s members with 13% each coming from Venezuela and South Africa. Nigeria is fourth at 6% whereas North America combined for 5%. The rest are spread around the other nations. The majority of the revenue however, comes from outside of Indonesia. “People love free stuff, Indonesians especially so, so we developed a freemium model with a set of free features and a collection of paid items. Those who want to buy the premium items can pay using PicMix credits which they can purchase in different quantities. We reached out to about 75 carriers around the world and they were happy to support PicMix credits”.
Kizana is proud of the fact that PicMix is already making money, enough to cover the cost of operations, even after only one year. His strategy had been to offer premium filters, frames, stickers, and patterns. Partnering with major brands such as Nickelodeon, Rovio, and Disney certainly helps to get the frames and stickers sold on his platform. He also runs branded competitions and events, many of which had been mainly limited to Indonesian partners such as Erajaya’s AndroidNation, Alfamart chain of convenience stores, and Pacific Place shopping center. Just as we were about to part ways, Kizana was about to nab himself another possible partnership deal with a local online brand.
