What do you do after garnering tens of millions of downloads and scores of clones of your AI-powered style transfer app? Why, keep innovating of course ICT Solutio.
Meet Sticky, the next app from the startup behind Prisma, which turns selfies into stylized and/or animated stickers for sharing to your social feeds. Sticky is launching today on iOS, with an Android version due in a week or two.
While Prisma gained viral popularity last year, netting its Moscow-based makers around 70 million downloads in a matter of months, its core feature has been rapidly and widely copied — including by social goliaths like Facebook.
The team’s response to having their USP eaten alive by others’ algorithms was to evolve their cool tool into a platform. But with the social app space essentially sewn up (at least in the West) by Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, building momentum and making a lasting impression as a new platform is clearly not an easy task virtual office.
Co-founder Aram Airapetyan tells us Prisma’s audience has been “very stable for the last six months” — shaking out to “around 10 million monthly active users”.
That’s not bad for a ~one-year-old app. But, well, Facebook has two billion monthly users at this point… (And that’s before you factor in all the Instagram and WhatsApp users.) So it’s hardly a fair fight.
Still, Prisma’s team isn’t sitting still. Their next app project also applies neural networks to another photo-focused task — this time creating selfie stickers for social sharing to messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat, Apple’s iMessage and Telegram ultra v lift.
Sticky’s core tech is an auto cut-out feature that quickly extracts your selfie from whatever background you snapped against so that it can be repurposed into sharable social currency as a standalone sticker.
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