TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — PicCollage is a Taiwanese-founded app based in Taipei that has been downloaded more than 250 million times worldwide.
Speaking on the Startup Island TAIWAN podcast released Saturday (March 18), co-founder and CEO John Fan (樊立勳) said that his app flourished in Taiwan by finding the sweet spot between professionalism and reliability, harnessing Taiwan’s openness to creativity, and having a diverse team.
Fan said PicCollage is a simple app that allows users to rearrange photos with basic photo editing functionality, and was released when the iOS App Store was beginning to gain popularity. He said at the time, he and his developers were lucky to find a middle ground between some of the major companies in the photo collage app market, and the new entrants with little experience.
“We were in between,” Fan joked, “we weren’t too professional, and our app didn't crash.” He said the simple and casual appearance of the app also allowed it to flourish in non-English speaking markets, without needing to be translated.
Fan added that releasing updates for the app every week made him realize that he had found an app that people wanted. He said that for an app developer, being too busy with updates to ask what to do next means you have already found the answer to that question.
Fan attributes part of his company’s success to having an international and gender-diverse team. He also said that many of Taipei’s “little details” such as safety and convenience of transport made it easy to recruit people from overseas, saying that about one third of the Taipei team have moved from other countries to work here.
“The environment in Taiwan is supportive for building creative things,” Fan said, adding that this is underappreciated internationally.
He said when people think of Taiwan, most think of companies like TSMC who work in the background engineering hardware, but that a benefit of working in Taiwan is that his company has “been able to find people who could work for TSMC but are excited to work in a creative environment.”