Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Hovhannes Avoyan for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Hovhannes and here’s what we discussed about-

1. Generative AI’s Impact: Disrupting industries, altering content creation.

2. Jobs and Creativity: Visual communication becoming a career skill.

3. Future of Visual Creation: Potential transition to physical products.

4. PicsArt’s Differential Advantages: Encourages fun, gamified creation experiences.

5. Gen Z as a Market: Tailoring products for youth, focusing on creativity.

6. Tech Companies as Media Companies: Technology focus defines Picsart, not media.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Hovhannes Avoyan is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and scholar. He is the co-founder and CEO of Picsart, a suite of online photo and video editing applications. He also served as President of the Union of Information Technology Enterprises of Armenia (UITE) from its inception in 2000 until 2015. He is a member of the American University of Armenia Corporation Board of Trustees.

EPISODE 145: From Pixels to Products: Pioneering the Future of Visual Creation with Picsart’s CEO Hovhannes

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Hovhannes Avoyan who is the CEO and Founder of Picsart.

Hovhannes Avoyan: Great to be here. Thank you.

Don’t have time to read? No problem, just watch the Podcast!

Or you can just listen to it on Spotify!

The Rapid Fire Round!

Saksham Sharda: So describe what your organization does in one sentence.

Hovhannes Avoyan: Picsart is the largest creative platform with over 150 million monthly active users doing 1 billion edits every month. So 1 billion times content is created on our platform every 30 days.

Saksham Sharda: How long does it take you to get ready in the mornings?

Hovhannes Avoyan: 30 minutes.

Saksham Sharda: A most valuable skill you’ve learned in life.

Hovhannes Avoyan: Creativity.

Saksham Sharda: How do you relax?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Reading books.

Saksham Sharda: A habit of yours that you hate?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Procrastination.

Saksham Sharda: Work from home or work from the office?

Hovhannes Avoyan: I like both.

Saksham Sharda: The most embarrassing moment of your life?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Admitting that I am wrong.

Saksham Sharda: How many hours of sleep can you survive?

Hovhannes Avoyan: I can skip one night. But that will be the maximum.

Saksham Sharda: Your favorite app?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Picsart.

Saksham Sharda: Biggest mistake of your career?

Hovhannes Avoyan: The biggest mistake of my career is trying to be too safe and not trying to make mistakes.

Saksham Sharda: First movie that comes to your mind when I say the word technology?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Avengers.

Saksham Sharda: How many cups of coffee Can you drink in a day?

Hovhannes Avoyan: 10.

Saksham Sharda: Favorite Netflix show?

Hovhannes Avoyan:  I don’t know.

The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: Do you believe that images created by AI need to be governed by ethical principles and abide by laws and regulations?

Hovhannes Avoyan: To some extent, to the extent that it’s not slowing the progress. And it’s not stalled slowly, you know, it’s not putting local companies to this advantage.

Saksham Sharda: And speaking of CO creating with developers and powering engaging and interactive experiences, what kind of problems would you think your new API offering would solve?

Hovhannes Avoyan: It’s the lowest barrier to creativity and makes everyone an artist. I think that’s the biggest promise of this technology. It’s similar to how smartphones make us photographers. Generative AI is making everybody an artist. And we need to see how the world would look like with everyone being an artist.

Saksham Sharda: And so what will be the future of generative AI in that sense?

Hovhannes Avoyan: It’s hard to predict, but it’s disrupting many industries as of today. And it’s going to impact the way we create content. And it’s the past no-return point. So we need to embrace it and live with that, and use this as an advantage and not as a threat.

Saksham Sharda: So do you think people are going to lose jobs as the biggest scarce grows?

Hovhannes Avoyan: If we are smart, we shouldn’t lose jobs we just make. We should adjust, we should adapt. And we should use this as an advantage and not as a threat.

Saksham Sharda: So do you agree that much like good written and spoken communication, the ability to design compelling content is becoming part of the basic career skill set?

Hovhannes Avoyan: Yes, I believe so. I think compelling and good visual communication is an important skill. Photography was a mastery that required a month of training and expensive equipment years back. Now it’s everybody’s skill. I think the same will happen with creativity and visual communication. I think everybody will find a way to convert the narrative into their visual art or visual picture to communicate.

Saksham Sharda: So in the same logic, what would be the next barrier after this?

Hovhannes Avoyan: It’s going to be more complex. So we started doing still images, so it will be more 3D and videos like the next steps. So I don’t know what potentially the third big milestone will be in how to convert this visual virtual thing into physical products.

Saksham Sharda: So lots of leading venture-funded design startups have a lot of overlapping business models. What are the sources of differential advantage for Picsart?

Hovhannes Avoyan: First of all, Picsart is one of the largest platforms. And I mean it, we have the largest number of active users creating on our platform. We also are very much encouraging fun creation. So it’s very much designed for Gen z’s, and teenagers to create something fun. And to these fun use cases, Gen Zs build skills, which ultimately they are going to use for their jobs or businesses. So that’s the most compelling part. So we kind of gamified the creation experience and made it fun and interesting. So everybody can do it. Our slogan was when we started, our slogan was Everyone is an artist. And finally, we see our dreams come true.

Saksham Sharda: In what ways have you seen that Gen Z as a marketable community differs from previous generations?

Hovhannes Avoyan: We have a less expensive premium with engaging with the previous generation because our product was designed for Gen Z. So I started because I still start with building products for my daughter. So you know, having a focus on young people was always in our DNA. We want to be a product that helps them to be creative, spin out, or be confident in their creative skills, and help them to develop skills they can use in their life.

Saksham Sharda: Do you agree that the majority of tech companies will look like media companies in the future?

Hovhannes Avoyan: I don’t think so. I think technology is a big part of our company. And we are seeing ourselves more like a technology company than a media company in a sense. We are investing heavily in technology, we want to be on the frontier of innovation. I think innovating the way the technology is going to be used by our pro users is a very important mission of Picsart and in companies like us.

Saksham Sharda: Alright, so the last question for you is, what would you be doing in your life if not this?

Hovhannes Avoyan: I would love to do so I went before starting to do entrepreneurial things. I was a professor at the University I was lecturing and education is an important part of myself. I like educating, training, and sharing my knowledge and the reason I’m very excited about our mission of Picsart is because we are educating people. We are educating people at scale. So education will be my second best thing.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Hovhannes Avoyan who is the CEO and Founder of Picsart.

Hovhannes Avoyan: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.