Piktochart Co-Founder: Female Entrepreneurs Less Stuck in the Mud When the Going Gets Tough

We released our Startup Asia Singapore 2013 infographic, and it’s looking pretty thanks to the folks at Piktochart. Our friendship with Piktochart goes a long way and across countries, too.

I met Ai Ching (pictured right), co-founder at Piktochart two years back when I visited the Chinaccelerator space in Dalian and watched her pitch at its demo day in Beijing. For some loyal readers and supporters at Tech in Asia would also know that Piktochart was one of the Startup Arena finalists at our Startup Asia Singapore 2012 event as well.

And it’s also encouraging to know that Piktochart has since acquired more than 170,000 users, is currently profitable, and has an upgraded infographic builder. For today’s post, we wanted to know about Ai Ching and the Piktochart team a little more, and fire some questions about her philosophy as a female entrepreneur.

Tell us a little about yourself

Ai Ching: I love hardware although I am not an engineer and lately, my number one shopping site is Kickstarter. I did experimental psychology at university, and prior to starting up, I spent 15 months at Procter & Gamble (P&G).

What does your startup do, and what is your role?

Ai Ching: Piktochart is a web app that helps non-designers create beautiful infographics. We’re envisioning that text-based blogs would slowly morph into number-based infographics someday, and our vision is to present information in the most beautiful way possible.

I currently take charge of recruitment, a little finance, analytics, partnerships, UX, customer relationships, and ensure that the Piktochart’s team keeps shipping new code (or removing code bloat). My main focus for 2013 is on growth – both at company and personal level. I hope to have more partnerships with other companies and ensure that each and every one in the team takes away something valuable for the year.

How and why did you get started in this industry?

Ai Ching: When my co-founder, Andrea Zaggia, and I quit our day jobs, I was very fascinated with tech startups but had no business ideas in mind. Andrea and I both loved design and had great designers. And when we saw that the idea of infographics was going to become a permanent trend and there was no infographic editor out there, we wanted to create one that people could use.

Did you face any challenges in particular?

Ai Ching: Similar challenges that any startup would face – Hiring, growing, expanding, and looking for investors who would be like mentors to us 🙂

I understand that you stayed in China for a while to develop Piktochart. Care to share more? How did you seek help from relevant mentors, especially when you are in a foreign land?

Ai Ching: We were quite fortunate to find Chinaccelerator as they had a huge network of mentors who were mainly expatriates based in China. Finding a mentor who is experienced in our sector, be it data or presentation, and with the passion to really help us, is not easy. Regardless, we managed to get a couple of them.