I'm Tony, and together with my friend Daniel, we created Stipop (https://developers.stipop.io). We help app developers add stickers on chat, comment section, profiles, and live streams by providing an easy-to-install Sticker SDK with 150K+ stickers and a fully customizable UI.
This may sound silly and of course, it is, but did you know that stickers - the big, animated emojis you can send in chat - are sent 17x more than GIFs on Facebook Messenger? That’s almost 400 million times a day! Users, especially Gen Z and Millenials, love sending stickers to express themselves better and stay more connected online.
But the thing is, having stickers in your app can cost up to a million dollars because you’ll need a good 4~5 engineers to build the infrastructure, UI, search engine AND have a content team to sign contracts with hundreds of sticker artists, send payouts and make regular updates every month. We wanted to solve this problem.
We used to operate our own sticker app for iMessage. That's when we first gathered all the artists and knowledge about the stickers. Now, after 4 years, we have 5,000 artists from 35 countries. We hit 200k users before we pivoted to B2B. Back then, we attended TC Disrupt, and many startups came to us asking if they could use our stickers. So we came back, released API, and got our first customers.
Now with Stipop, any app developer can install stickers in just a single day. Stipop SDK has a pre-built UI, so you don't have to design anything by yourself. It also comes with two layouts: a sticker search engine to search for stickers with keywords and a library mode where users can browse and download stickers.
We found that stickers apply to many different app types too. For example, Fingo Africa (YC S21) is a neobank. They are adding stickers to their money-sending feature, so their users can soon send stickers to say thank you instead of just transferring money or send a relevant sticker like pizza to split bills after eating a pizza together. TripTime used stickers for user profile images. We are also on Microsoft Teams to help users search for stickers to send in chats, Blabla live-streaming chat, and soon to be on Canva to provide stickers for image editing and designs.
Our sticker end-users show a stable 40% 8-week retention and helped apps increase user engagement by up to 17%.
We provide the service for free and plan to turn freemium next year. We monetize by creating custom stickers for brands like Coca-Cola.
Please let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or ideas. Your thoughts would greatly help us improve the product!
Here are some I know: Sendbird, PubNub, MirrorFly, Mesibo - this might be a good one to try if your looking for something simple and completely open source.
Disclosure: I'm one of the founders. Compared to alternatives, our main differentiator is pre-built chat UIs (that are still deeply customizable) and a fully integrated notification system.
We don't have an out-of-the-box Stipop integration (yet?), though, but it looks like a pretty cool service to integrate.
Hey, yes I've actually spoken with one of your co-founders just a few days ago and he said he'll be chatting with the product team too. We should look into it!
> We provide the service for free and plan to turn freemium next year. We monetize by creating custom stickers for brands like Coca-Cola.
Seems reasonable.
But I wonder if there is a way to slide some kind of shady user tracking into this system. Maybe Stipop will figure out how to track end users, and sell that data as an extra revenue stream.
I hope it was clear from the tone of my post that I think that tracking individual user behavior (as opposed to tracking aggregate statistics) is a bad outcome, at least for end users.
The data we collect are real basic, like views, subscriptions, comments sort of data that for example YouTube collects. And device language of course, to provide the stickers in correct language. This also helps us suggest better stickers for the end users. Can you help me understand how it can be a bad outcome for the end users?
Whenever individual-level user data becomes a revenue source, it sets up a lot of incentives for organizations to disregard privacy and security concerns around users' personal data, which is often trivial to de-anonymize even if it has no "PII" attached to it. Sharing that individual-level data with advertisers subjects users to immoral surveillance.
Yes indeed, thank you for the note. I totally agree. We should be very careful when it comes to user data. We won't be selling or sharing user data - instead we'll find ways to see insightful information from bulk data, like total sticker send, download etc.
Yes true, some of the clients have been asking about pricing as well and so we are adding a pricing page. Other than brand stickers we plan to add premium options like seasonal stickers, personal curation, premium content, and so on.
Super neat! Years ago after first seeing Kakaotalk I thought about offering the same kind of service. But the service idea also seemed ridiculous to me at the time. I like the way you're doing it!
And I'm not sure why it's taken so long for stickers to come to the US when they've been so popular in Korea at least (dunno if they're as popular in other East Asian countries).
Thanks! And agreed - it did take quite a while to come. iMessage and WhatsApp only added stickers a few years ago and maybe that's why it took a while to get into the hands of the users and pick up the trend. Now we're taking part in that too, so hopefully things accelerate much faster.
I'm Tony, and together with my friend Daniel, we created Stipop (https://developers.stipop.io). We help app developers add stickers on chat, comment section, profiles, and live streams by providing an easy-to-install Sticker SDK with 150K+ stickers and a fully customizable UI.
This may sound silly and of course, it is, but did you know that stickers - the big, animated emojis you can send in chat - are sent 17x more than GIFs on Facebook Messenger? That’s almost 400 million times a day! Users, especially Gen Z and Millenials, love sending stickers to express themselves better and stay more connected online.
But the thing is, having stickers in your app can cost up to a million dollars because you’ll need a good 4~5 engineers to build the infrastructure, UI, search engine AND have a content team to sign contracts with hundreds of sticker artists, send payouts and make regular updates every month. We wanted to solve this problem.
We used to operate our own sticker app for iMessage. That's when we first gathered all the artists and knowledge about the stickers. Now, after 4 years, we have 5,000 artists from 35 countries. We hit 200k users before we pivoted to B2B. Back then, we attended TC Disrupt, and many startups came to us asking if they could use our stickers. So we came back, released API, and got our first customers.
Now with Stipop, any app developer can install stickers in just a single day. Stipop SDK has a pre-built UI, so you don't have to design anything by yourself. It also comes with two layouts: a sticker search engine to search for stickers with keywords and a library mode where users can browse and download stickers.
We found that stickers apply to many different app types too. For example, Fingo Africa (YC S21) is a neobank. They are adding stickers to their money-sending feature, so their users can soon send stickers to say thank you instead of just transferring money or send a relevant sticker like pizza to split bills after eating a pizza together. TripTime used stickers for user profile images. We are also on Microsoft Teams to help users search for stickers to send in chats, Blabla live-streaming chat, and soon to be on Canva to provide stickers for image editing and designs.
Our sticker end-users show a stable 40% 8-week retention and helped apps increase user engagement by up to 17%.
We provide the service for free and plan to turn freemium next year. We monetize by creating custom stickers for brands like Coca-Cola.
Please let me know if you have any questions, feedback, or ideas. Your thoughts would greatly help us improve the product!
You can also take a look at our demo video here: https://link.stipop.io/3Epl9LI
Thank you!