Picocandy lets you add your own stickers store with two lines of code (#StartupAsia Arena)

Line and KakaoTalk, two of the most popular mobile messengers in Asia, have proven that stickers can not only liven up a text message conversation, they can also serve as a cash cow. Need proof? Line’s DIY sticker shop has pulled in a cool US$12 million in sales since opening about three months ago. Singapore’s PicoCandy was founded for the sole purpose of spreading sticker love to everyone, and it took the stage to pitch at Startup Asia Tokyo 2014 today to help make that happen.

Founder Geraldine Yong says PicoCandy’s business consists of two components. First, their platform provides startups with ready-made sticker stores. Second, it powers existing sticker stores with content. Companies that do not have the infrastructure in place already can take advantage of PicoCandy’s provided SDK and build a full sticker store right into their app with only a couple lines of code. According to Yong, PicoCandy counts established messaging apps such as Viber as one of its clients.

PicoCandy also provides a marketplace for content creators to sell their stickers – not unlike Line’s DIY sticker shop. PicoCandy partners with both brand licenses and designers who actively use their platform to distribute their stickers.

Both the self-serve SDK platform and designer marketplace, which were previously in private beta, will be open to any developer and designer later this month.

Yong believes that PicoCandy’s main advantage over other social networking services that offer stickers is that they are highly focused on localizing content for each country that they distribute to. “We have three types of content: branded ones, which is licensed content that include famous characters from the entertainment industry; designer content that include not-so-famous brands; and localized content,” she explains. “For every market that we are distributing to, from Europe to Asia, we have localized content ready for our partners to just take and go with it.”

Judges’ comments

The judges seemed rather impressed by PicoCandy’s traction thus far. David Milstein from Fidelity Growth Partners Japan, however, had some doubts about their ability to win when put against established brands. He questioned how the team will compete against brands who simply do not want to go through a third-party platform, and thus have to share their revenue. Yong thinks that, with hundreds of partners onboard, and several licensing deals made , PicoCandy has proven otherwise. As an example, she says that they are currently working with big brands from Korea, Japan, and the US. She adds that brands can opt to do deals with every new platform that emerges, but with so many coming up these days, a single platform that provides access to all of them would certainly be more appealing.

Shinji Asada from Itochu Technology Ventures was interested to hear more Yong’s background story – why stickers? She explains that has had this idea for about 3 years or so, even before Line came out with their own line of stickers. Stickers has now become a common way through which people communicate, and she considers it her passion to support this. To Yong, it isn’t just another niche market – it is mainstream communication.

Global Brain’s Yasuhiko Yurimoto was curious how they would be able to achieve success in such a crowded space. Yong explains again that, with the partners they have gotten onboard, the team has proven that there is clearly a demand for their solution. While she admits that there are barriers to entry, they provide something that the rest don’t – a content management system that is fully equipped with features such as tagging, taxonomy, and analytics. Milstein wanted to know if they would be able to predict client performance with their onboard analytics, and Yong affirms that it would give a clear indication as to which stickers are popular in the market of choice.

Taka Hasunuma from Recruit Strategic Partners was particularly interested in how PicoCandy had managed to attain such good traction – what tipped the scales? Yong says that partnering with big names such as Viber had caused their revenue to shoot up sharply .