How One AI Feature Supercharged Photoroom’s Growth

So when the first model went out from stability GI in July 2022 with commercial license it was obvious for the front that that was the moment where we could uh build an adjacent product to remove background. So we have a Facebook community group where we share our updates and where they test the product etc. And they were telling us, "Wow, this is this is big and this is uh amazing." And the Wu effect, you know, that you want to see when you open an app. By having this new W effect around, I import a photo, I generate a background. I got what the product is about. We decrease dramatically the CPI by 10. Welcome to Subversive, a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category defining companies and

innovative startups. Let's get into the show. My guest today is Olivier Learie, the VP of growth at PhotoRoom, a powerful web and mobile photo editing tool used by millions of creators, sellers, and entrepreneurs worldwide. In this episode, I talked to Olivier about how Photoroom Room's breakthrough AI powered product innovation allowed sellers of online products to replace photo backgrounds in a fraction of the time.

We discuss how this new product feature unlocked additional organic growth opportunities for photo room and improve the efficiency of its performance marketing campaigns, ultimately allowing it to expand into new international markets, including Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil. All right, welcome Olivia to the Subversive podcast. I'm super excited to have you on today and to talk more about Photo Room, one of the top photo editing tools on the market and you all have been growing like crazy over the last few years. Um, we're going to talk a little bit more about that story today.

But before we do, would love to start with just a little bit of background on Photo Room, what it is, and what makes it different than other photo editing apps and a little bit of background on you and how you made your way to Photo Room. Hi. Hi, Phil. Thanks for having me today. Um yeah so photo room photo room is an AI photo editing app. Our goal and what we do is helping and enabling seller um having great pictures that sells online. So we are enabling them to list their product online but also how they can market their product do social post logos etc. We are we are coming from becoming we we used to be a remove background feature app and now we are building more of AI creative agency solution for any sellers about me how did I learn at photo room so I'm working in app marketing for well more than 10 years starting in gaming uh in Berlin at ruga went back to France to lead the marketing and growth for

Molotov a Frenchity similar to Ulu platform And uh and when I met the founders 5 years ago and I will maybe can share a bit more about this. It was kind of a no-brainer for me that they were building what a rocket ship and I was just had to jump in. And you were one of the very first employees, weren't you Olivia? You joined, as I understand it, in 2020, right around the time the pandemic was first getting started. So talk me through what Photo Room looked like when you joined the company as one of the first employees and then how it's evolved over the last 5 years. Yeah, exactly. Um well when I joined it was two founders Matt Elliot and one iOS developer and indeed uh two founders did an amazing job in finding a market fit in a matters of weeks few months they went just getting into and uh and they already had this uh fast iteration loop of weekly cadence testing fast speaking to the user every

day and bringing and removing the friction and the pain point for the user. And when I first met them, um, yeah, for me it was kind of obvious that I I I should join them and help them grow faster because the product as a market fit the numbers was already crazy. The initial numbers and yeah, they were building so fast that it was obvious for me that we were we were into something. That must have been so exciting. And having been the first employee at a startup before, I know how exciting those early days can be. Um, last question before we get into the core topic for today is just there are a lot of photo editing apps out there and there have been more and more in recent years. For obvious reasons, the creator economy is exploding and there's such a need for photo and video editing software. Um, what is it that sets Photo

Room apart? What is it that makes you different from some of the other tools out there on the market? Yeah. Um it's a mix of we are targeting and people we are useful for people selling online and um and people who sell what they want especially in in when they yeah what they want is speed what they want is accuracy and uh and we just released a study with the marketplace saying that 73 people of uh sellers consider that of people buying online uh rely on the product photography and uh and this This is our differentiation is because we have the best technology around background removal and generating background.

We have the accuracy and this is what matters for people. This is for sellers. It doesn't matter necessarily for you or me when we do a picture and we send it to to our friends. You know, you do I don't know Christmas or holiday picture. If the if the background remove is not perfect, that's fine. You can use Apple own text. That's fine. But if you sell online, you want this to be perfect. And especially as you mentioned in the creator economy, the side economy, you don't have time and you don't have the money to organize photo shooting uh do everything by yourself etc etc. You want a tool that removes the friction in a matter of seconds and that's unique selling point basically. So I think that's such a great segue into the inflection point that we want to talk about today and

that is in 2023 you all launched this new what you call automagical AI powered feature for background replacements and it really was automagical. I mean it dramatically sped up and improved the quality of um adjusting these backgrounds and replacing them with creative backgrounds to help empower sellers which is your target customer. Um, so this was right on the heels of chat GPT hitting the mainstream in late 2022. I guess my first question is how was photo room able to release this feature so early in the AI era and before many of your competitors? Yeah, it's a good question and uh uh I didn't mention this when I met the founders but some things that strikes me in 2012 is uh so our CTO used to work in ML and AI um studied this and he was already working into that and our CEO used to work in photo and video editing app for already almost 10 years at that time and his previous company was already a video

AI company at a time where AI was not cool you know I mean not as cool as after GPT and uh and for them it was obvious that AI will also change photo editing for everyone and uh and that it was just a question of when and not a question of if that we will be able to uh produce this kind of new tool. So we are more waiting for breakthrough technology than understanding when it happens if maybe we could do something out of it. So when the first uh model went out from stability uh in July 2022 it with commercial license it was obvious for the founder that that was the moment where we could uh build an adjacent product to remove background and we were the best position because of this let's say product and tech intuition from the founder and also because to be able to generate a nice background you first need to remove the background. If you are not good at removing the background, even if you

generate something, it doesn't look good. And uh but even with this, it took us seven months to iterate on the tech because it's not only about being able to generate the backgrounds also to be able to generate a background on a mobile app and on a mobile app as you know and as many everyone who is listening to us, you don't wait for 10 minutes. You can't wait. You are not on a desktop where we can let you know okay we will send you by email uh the results in 10 minutes and you can do something else and go back in 10 minutes and you have the results. No on mobile you need to have the answer you can wait a few seconds but that's it. So we had a lot of iteration about the product about the tech and uh and at the same time we're working on more how we can market that how we can leverage this coming feature into our acquisition uh strategy and everything kind of came together in the early days

of 2023 when we were able to see some good results uh from like you you input you input an image we remove the background you tap on one suggested or you generate your own background and boom, you have the results in a matter of seconds. It happened in January, February, 2023. I know we're going to talk about all of the growth opportunities this unlocked. But before

we do that, let's go back to why was this such a breakthrough for your target customer, this proumer customer who is creating all of these visual assets and then using them to sell products or services online. Um, what was it specifically about this new feature that really changed the game for them? and then we can get into uh what you saw in the metrics and then what you as the growth leader did to really harness the power of this new feature to accelerate growth for the business. So for room we were removing background and that was perfect for people reselling on the market places like Poshmark, Neo, Vintage etc. Because of course you have a tons of image.

You take picture of all of them. Use the batch mode function from photo room. Everything you remove you upload. Perfect. You can sell. But that works for people who reselling. If you have your Shopify brand, uh if you have your Shopify store, if you have your Etsy store, if you have all of this kind of store, well, you don't want a white background. You want something that either fits your brand or that is potentially seasonal or you want to put uh your your product photograph your product in context, you know, like if you are selling, I don't know, a cup of coffee on a white background, okay, you can sell it, but it's much better if it's sitting on a on a desk, you know, on a nice wood desk, etc. And uh and uh that's why it was super relevant for current audience but also for an adjacent audience of people sending online that we were our product was not totally it was we were helping them

already to remove the background but we were not getting to the extra step of putting the product into a context. Got it. And it sounds like it also significantly accelerated the speed at which consumers were able to do this. like what sort of what sort of latency did it require prior to the launch of this feature to remove a background and replace it with one that was more branded or customized for their needs and then and then what percentage of that time did this feature launch cut out the equation? I don't know exactly for before but what's it show is they had to remove the background instantly and then they could play a bit with a set of background we were uh offering them but many of them was uh using photo room at that time with other tools you know with more creative tool uh to then put the product photo with a perfect background removed on another tool to then be creative and leverage other type

of templates and now with this in a matter of uh wait you are downloading photo room, opening uh importing your product picture, remove background is a question of less than one second, two taps and you have your image. So in potentially I don't know but 15 seconds from download to I mean let's say 1 minute from download to export you have your product uh into in context and you can just save it or export it to uh to your store. And when that's such a huge change, I think speed is such an underappreciated feature in and of itself. But the difference between, you know, having to wait 30 seconds versus a couple seconds to be able to go through this process of removing the background and replacing it with the one you want and then seeing the new finished product and being able to iterate on it is pretty significant. So when did you know

that this feature was going to be a big hit? Was there a particular moment that you and the team remember or a particular metric that you all were looking at and it was clear that okay this is going to be huge at which point you and your team started to think about how you could then leverage it into more growth for the business. We didn't have any doubt that could be huge. We had maybe we maybe didn't realize how big that could be for for us. uh at the same time again following the founders's intuition on this one that anyways this was the future and kind of the white background you know people selling on white background on eBay or Amazon is a kind of how to say that it's a kind of um act for people to because it's better to sell on a white background than on a background which is not nice you know but in the end you prefer to sell your product uh in context with your brand it it should sell more and better, you

know. So, we were convinced that was anyway the product direction we wanted to go. What we didn't know is how how fast and how much we would be able to scale this and put this to uh in front of the eyes of as many sellers on worldwide as possible. And so, you saw an immediate response from your customers. there was a lot of positive um user sentiment around the new feature. Yeah. Um what sort of impact did it have on the metrics and and where did you see it start to impact? Was it user growth? Was it subscriber growth? Was it revenue? Was it all of the above? Um and then we can start to talk about what sort of organic and paid acquisition opportunities that it unlocked. I mentioned product vision, but also something important is uh our community. We tested uh the product within our community. So we have a Facebook community group where we share our updates and where they test the product etc. And they were telling us

wow this is this is big and this is uh amazing and the wow effect you know that you want to see when you open an app and we had it with remove background two years before like immediately and magically perfectly remove the background. We had this wow moment and then we add it again in a way and with something adjacent and we were like okay product vision it fits tech vision we are the only one being able to put that on mobile and community is happy we should just do ads and see how it goes you know and uh and our goal at that time and the way we'll see growth so far at photo room is mostly you know subscriber growth and uh and uh and that was our main goal are we able to grow uh our subscriber base with this feature and biomia which makes sense. I mean subscribers are the fuel for your business. That's what's driving subscription revenue growth. Um so let's get into the organic opportunities this unlocked and then we

can talk about paid acquisition and

let's start with your premium model. So as a first question, what features on photo room are free versus what features require a subscription and then we can talk about how the free user experience contributes to organic growth um from your user base. Yeah, historically the um the vision we have is that we want to give uh uh access to the vast majority of user to AI for photo editing. This is the vision and that goes with for example background removal. I mean it's not unlimited but is almost unlimited at photo room in the free version. You can do like 250 without any watermark today.

I can go into this later but at that time we had the watermark but it was for free. Uh and um what we were people were paying mostly to generate uh to remove background by batch. Uh that was the main driver of subscription with removing the watermark. Uh as many premium apps, you know, especially the photo editing, you have the watermark by default, which is of course one of the initial organic group that when you start uh is super powerful for for small or starting apps because basically it's free branding and um and when you start it's amazing. So people that some of the user pay to remove it and some of our user were paying to be have access to the batch mode when we launched this AI feature and so that we call AI backgrounds which magically add a background. Uh we put it indeed in the premium tier so the pro subscription and since then we have our vision is most of of the AI feature are behind the pay wall. So this has

been our approach like generating shadows with photo room having some AI ret etc are behind a pay wall and today in 2020 mid 2025 we are moving again into giving a bit for free and we are moving into a most AI company are doing which is you give a bit for free if you want more or if you want very specific feature you need to upsell but for two years we have been putting most of our AI features behind behind the payroll and that makes sense uh both because those are some of the most valuable features but also because you know more and more companies are spending non-trivial amounts of money to be able to support the underlying LLM costs to support these AI features. What would

you say is the aha moment for a new user on photo room? Like what's the moment when they realize even before they subscribe that photo room is this powerful tool that's different than what they've been able to find elsewhere? And then um how does that aha moment influence how you think about which features go before and after the pay wall for photo? First moment for sure is when we ask them in the on boarding to remove the background they import a picture and it removes the background and the first onboarding of photo room super successful was just this you know we had the splash screen as to import a photo remove the background you are into the app. when I jump for room that was it only this no login no question no pay wall nothing strike to the product and people were amazed by this and Apple took it as an example etc because of course this is the best experience you can give to a user then when you grow of

course it's not enough you when I join after a few months we implemented the payroll in the on boarding then we're like okay but we don't know what our user are doing so we want to ask question and test login etc But at the end of uh at the end of the day, you want your user to get the value prop and the moment during the onboarding. If you don't do that, uh you can't scale and you don't get the value, people leave, etc., etc. Yeah, that's so well said. And I find that the best consumer and proumer subscription apps show don't tell, right? Their onboarding experiences, they don't tell you why this product is special. They actually show you ideally within your first few minutes of using the product. Dolingo is perhaps one of the best examples of this. They don't tell you why Dolingo is this unique gamified language learning app. They just take you through your first language lesson in whatever

language you choose. And then at the end of it, you get your points and you get your streak and your first badge and you understand, oh, this is different. This makes language learning fun. So, it sounds like you all did the same thing with your onboarding experience. You come in, you immediately upload a photo, you remove the background, you understand how quick and easy it is to

do. You talked a little bit earlier about the watermark and how powerful the watermark was for driving top offunnel awareness of photo room driving viral adoption. Can you talk a little bit more about that loop? Like what is the experience of a free user um removing the background or altering a photo but then if they're not a subscriber uh at least if if they if they're beyond a certain limit of of non-watermarked photos, they've got the watermark and so that spreads awareness. How does that loop work a bit? as you said. So the historically you were taking a picture, you had the watermark as soon as you export your photo, you save it and uh and we were able to see that people on in online group, Facebook communities, Reddit, etc. they were sharing uh photos with photo room brand and we even find some small business owner in the middle of nowhere that are printing flyers with photo room logo. M it's freeing as you

say so and give some word of mouth and this combined with the fact that remove background is one of the biggest keyword of the app store on Google search as well you get this kind of loop of uh you have the best product in terms of technology people recognize it because they see the logo and they associated the brand to the one of the biggest keyword of the app store and that help us grow quite fast in the ranking and get some organic traffic but at some point when you draw I don't remember exactly when but uh after this AI background uh scale you want to think again about this because yes it's free it's freeing but at the same time it's determinating the your free user experience and ultimately your activation or or your free user retention and when you want to build a company uh for the very long term and you want people to stay uh as long as possible you challenge yourself you're Okay, it's free bonding but people start

to know about photo room. We are not dualingo of course canva of course but start it's starting uh so you consider removing it and that's what we end up doing removing the watermark uh around a year or a year and a half ago uh and we remove it after having tested the impact on activation and retention free user versus what we were losing in terms of review. Yep. And we and we did this tradeoff about uh yes we are happy to I mean happy we are okay uh to to to lose this percentage of uh subscriber for the sake of long-term uh subscription I long-term free retention and long-term conversion and I'm so glad you brought

this up because I think this is a tension that every subscription business faces or at least every premium subscription business right which is on the one hand the more value you give away for free the better your MAU retention is going to look and the more at bats you give yourself to convert free users into subscribers down the line, you also presumably get higher net promoter scores and more viral word of mouth. But on the other hand, if you're too generous and if you give away too much value for free, then you hurt your trial start rates or your trial conversion rates, your subscriber conversion rates, even your subscriber retention rates because at some point your subscribers realize, well, if I can get 80% of the value for free, then why am I paying for this service? So, how have you all navigated that tension as photo room has evolved and what are some of the, you know, the inflection points

or the changes in the evolution of the business that have caused you to rethink the right balance there? Yeah, I think it's a mix of data and uh and product vision in the sense that we want to align as what's good when one of the value proposition of foot room is we our tool if your tool is great if the suite of tool are great for seller they should be happy to pay more because we are helping them making more money and it's amazing for a growth leader to to work for a company that you know you will grow If you do a good job uh to help your customer, you are not like you know when I was working at gaming or at Molotov um in TV consumption, this is not exactly the same. You don't have the same alignment of interest with your customer. So and with photo room or value proposition again is accuracy and speed.

So if we provide accuracy and speed for the user and if we provide tools in the pro plan or IOT plan to do their job and to do marketing and listing faster and with more accuracy then they will be happy to pay more which are just bringing them more value. So this is a bit the product vision and in that case you want people to come you want people to come back not frustrated you want to give them a better experience if they're casual user because you or me we are potentially let's say casual user of photo room and at some point we decide to start our own company.

If you have been happy using photo room for free and remove background for free when you were doing basic casual editing, you will likely come back to remove the background for your business and maybe at that time you will pay. And this is this is the bet and as soon as then comes the data as soon as you you are not determinating too much your revenue metric and retention metric then then then product vision should uh should be the should be the decision maker.

Yeah, I love that. My interpretation of what you said there is a lot of consumer subscription apps, certainly games are a good example of this and that's the example you brought up. You know, it's somewhat extractive. It's it they're going to pay a certain amount of money, but the value they're getting out of your product often times is for entertainment. In a worst case, it's empty calories. And so there's only so much they're going to use your product.

Whereas for a proumer subscription product and in many cases your customers are proumers using photo room to run their business, you're actually helping them to generate more revenue and to expand their business. And so you can grow with them and it allows you to play the long game a little bit more because your net revenue retention should be very high if you have a good product. So this gets into the last question I wanted to ask in this section which is just, you know, you you launched this AI powered feature for background removal in early 2023. It sounds like your creator network really blew up talking about it online in forums like Reddit.

um how did they help to then accelerate viral adoption of the product? Yes, this is um uh something I realized earlier in 2021 when I was alone still uh I was hiring my first person in the growth and marketing team and uh with with our CEO we're realizing that photo room was a kind of the hidden uh hidden tool weapon for seller. So when you were when we were going into depot reseller or Poshmark reseller group, everyone was like, "Oh, I discovered this tool. It's amazing blah blah blah blah blah blah."

But it was a kind of, you know, hidden hidden thing. And we were like, "Okay, it's good that people love it because it's always better to have 10,000 people who love your product, you know, but we want most people to know about it." And we start noticing that some people were spreading the word about it on Tik Tok like random people in a way you know not even big creator but people were just oh by the way I discovered this tool I did a Tik Tok about it it's amazing it removing the background on two seconds and we start reaching out to them and telling them and one of the basic of growth is you start by things that don't scale you know so I was reaching out to them and saying okay you did this video can you do two more for a few a few a few hundred bucks. Yeah, why not? Then you have one, two, three, five that speak about you and in an organic way even if it's a way of advertising and uh and we

saw it was working quite well for us and uh we expand this during the 2022 uh year for remove background but at the end of 2022 we had if I remember correctly around 60 to 70 creator working with us and promoting regularly photo room and photo confer. So when this AI background uh tool went up and go went out uh of course we rely on them to uh split the world and uh and expand uh the content and uh uh and the education of this future around this future. Got it. And I

think this is a good transition into our last set of questions around paid acquisition. So it sounds like you have this creator network. They already love Photo Room. That's part of why you recruited them. They're creating a good amount of content organically about Photo Room, but then you provide financial incentives for them to create even more content or to promote promote their content on various channels like Tik Tok or Instagram. Um, let's talk about how this start this product launch started to impact paid marketing efficiency. So, why did this new feature have such a transformative impact on your paid CAC, your paid customer acquisition cost? At the same time as we were raising this feature, I on boarded a UA team of two people and we were able to focus specifically and the timing was kind of perfect, you know, even if not plan like this and they decided to be extremely focused on doing creatives and

a lot of creatives about this AI to AI background feature because it was as I told you it was kind of obvious for us that that was the wo effect was big. So the wool idea was to how to do creative that uh gives this woo and you know you get the for room the best has always been this before after or a sentence a bit of controversial sentence to catch your attention but before after is what has always been working for photo room or product is visual on Instagram or Tik Tok of course it's obvious and uh and this team has been yeah focusing on building creatives and tool to generate creatives during uh during during during a year and uh and with this work ethic of you test creative on Monday on Tuesday Wednesday you get the first results you do iteration you ship them in your main meta Tik Tok campaign and you do that every week every week you look at this at the c you look at the RA of your

campaign and you just scale and uh and it has been uh amazing to see how fast we have been able to scale because Something that we didn't plan was that not only I mean page UA is mostly a question of creative and the signal you send to the network but creating is a big part of u of uh and of course your product should convert but that is a given if you don't have a product that converts well then marketing become and growth becomes much more complicated uh but so you you a strong part of it is creative and um by having this new w around I import a photo, I generate a background, I got what the product is about. We decrease dramatically the CPI by an amount of 10 and uh that was huge and that help us run campaign on Android in markets in big markets like Brazil, Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia where usually for subscription apps it's hard to monetize and and to make paid acquisition on Android. And this feature had two

benefits. It decreased the cost of acryan user because we were able to generate new creative. We were the only one having this on mobile at that time. So it was like a blue sand. We were the only one. We had this w effect going into Instagram feed and the real and everywhere. And at the same time we were targeting an adjacent uh segment of user which was SMBs and people selling online not only on marketplaces. Mhm. So some people in those huge markets Android markets but uh were able to pay when usually they pay less because uh because this is Android for many reason Android people pay less than on iOS. Let me break that down because there was a lot of great stuff in there. And so what I'm hearing you say is um you had already been running paid ads obviously to acquire users on Photo Room, but with the launch of this new automatical AI feature in 2023, your atomic ad unit that was working best for you, which was

these before and after shots, the photo before you remove and replace the background and the photo after you remove and replace the background got significantly better, which had two profound effects. The first was you were able to generate much better creative with this UA team that you hired. The second was those ads converted at a higher rate because you now had a more compelling core product experience. And so that dramatically brought down your paid cap and it unlocked some international markets where previously your CPI, your cost per install was prohibitively high. But now that it had come down significantly, you were able to acquire users cost efficiently in

those markets. Which channels were performing best for you? You mentioned Tik Tok and Instagram. Were those the two primary channels you were paying for ads on? Yeah, Meta was for us at that at that time by far the biggest channel and the one that scaled the fastest because many small business owner are people like you and me at the end of the day you know they are consumer on the personal life and consumer or SMB on the professional lives they are on Instagram on Tik Tok and on YouTube all of them.

Uh the difficulty is to catch them. It's not to to know where they are and um but yes definitely there are Got it. So Tik Tok and Meta were your primary channels and obviously given the nature of your product there are opportunities to actually use photo room tools in order to improve and accelerate your own creative process. So how have you used some of your own photo editing tools on your ad creatives? Yeah, it's interesting. But of course, when um um when they want to when we have a new creative idea, as they told you, it's before after. So, it's about the product and uh and um it's very important for us, but I think it's very important also for the audience to when you can put the product first in your marketing, everything is easier. And uh and the way that your creative team is using the product is um of course shooting the way they use the product and then how they play with the editing etc etc was a way

for us to have more compelling and more um uh impactful creative room we just released like three weeks ago um an an API to generate visual at scale. Basically, we want any brand, any e-commerce to be able to generate ads, static ads just with our API. And uh and today we are building our own tool to be able to leverage this uh API to generate static ads for Google campaign. And we and we we are using it now, you know, to generate static ads. Uh we just use a bit of prompt and prompting and our own API. And from one one product photography, we can generate uh thousands of ads in different languages and with different uh backgrounds, etc., etc. And this is amazing to be able to use your own tool, you know, to be more efficient and uh and uh more impactful.

Yeah, it's such an uncommon advantage because you get to use and refine your own product and more deeply understand your customer needs because you're using it for your own ad creatives, which are then accelerating the growth of your business. So, it's such a virtuous flywheel. You talked about your creative team earlier and the process of okay, we come up with creatives on Monday, we review them on Tuesday, we're constantly looking at payback periods and rorowaz.

Um, how has your well, how big is your

creative team and and what are the roles of the members of that team and then what is the process they go through for creating ads and how has that changed with AI? So, so Cedric who join us who lead the UA team I quite fast someone the creative team J who has been building everything from scratch for us. So on and um so she's a she she's a creative strategist. Mhm. But at the same time she's coding her own tool and uh so she has a background in in filming. So she has a lot of ideas about which kind of ad work. She has an amazing storytelling skills but at the same time she has been building her own tool to for example you have a good content that is working you want to translate it into 20 languages.

Now I mean she she build a tool leveraging 11 labs and other API to be able to do voice over adding music automatically and she did that uh a year and alphos that was also an um unfair advantage in a way because that was all of this was quite new. So I think for page view team and creative team they should embrace AI and they should embrace coding and having strong creative skills plus a good knowledge of how to use AI you create like I mean we do 400 ads with a two people team 400 ads a month with a two people team and this that's only possible uh because we have the tooling that they have built themselves to to make this happen and it's funny you mentioned that number 400 ads per month because that was the exact same number that Miranda Payne who leads growth at Rona used on our last episode and so there seems to be kind of a benchmark of what these creative teams are capable of and I'm excited to see

how those numbers change over the next couple of years because with all of these AI tools like Sunno and 11 Labs it just feels like it's accelerating more and more uh and you mentioned some of the same tools that Miranda and her team use at RA as well. So let's close before

our lightning round with this question around international expansion because you mentioned that you have this breakthrough product launch. It reduces CPIs that unlocks the ability for you to expand into some of these lower GDP per capita markets where maybe previously it just wasn't costefficient. It sounds like you're also using tools like 11 Labs to be able to translate ads into other languages. And so what has that process looked like and what are some of the countries where you've gotten the most early traction? So the way we we see international front room is we have English speaking market and like top English speaking market US UK where we as any subscription app if you want to be successful you have to be successful there and then we map all of the markets with a mix of uh what we call strategic market and more like regional leader market etc etc and strategic market are mostly markets where we think uh we can

take a competitive advantage because who will be the first one to enter the market or market that if we want to be successful as a company we need to be big there and for example Brazil is one of them but Japan and Korea are also some of them and the more we run at I want growth at Froom the more I believe that Japan and Korea you should treat them separately you really need to think about the markets I mean you need people in the in Korea or in Japan Japan or Korean and Japanese people in France if you find them but that knows deeply the market. It's not just about translating and changing a few templates in the app.

It's really about getting deep in the culture, understanding the willingness to pay, understanding um yeah how they approach SAS, how they approach mobile subscription, how they approach all of this. This is to me very different from the rest of the world where I it's our experience at food room. They're not saying it's the same for every everybody but western approach tends to work at least uh in a decent way everywhere in the world. So of course we localize of course we translate then in core markets we try to go a bit deeper we work with local people to imp through the translation to have um specific for example in Brazil we have templates for mer li because this is the biggest marketplace in Brazil etc etc but a successful ad like a really winning creative ad in the US usually it's not a bad ad in Brazil or in France you know uh and uh and because of this we we scale our creative process

just by translating and putting voice over on top of our ad and it worked decently. It's probably not one I it's 8020 you know for 80% of the user it's working and they don't get offended. Of course we have a few comments here and there but at the scale we are it's working. So what I'm hearing you say and this resonates because we saw very similar patterns when I was leading the product growth team at Quizlet and a big focus of ours was international expansion. We started in what we called the Anglospheres. So obviously the US was our largest market by far but then we had the UK, we had Canada, we had Australia, New Zealand and then we started to expand into other European and Southeastern Asian markets. often it's Germany, it's France, maybe it's Spain, and then you mentioned Japan, South Korea. And one of the things we found, which it sounds like is consistent with Photo Room's experience,

is for a while you can get by with just translating the product, localizing the currencies and the prices of your subscription. And and in many cases, it sounds like for you, using the same ads that performed well in the US, obviously translating them and adapting them on the margins, but for the most part, that worked. But at a certain point, you get to this inflection where you need to more deeply localize the product experience, not just for the language, but for the culture. And you mentioned Japan and Korea are two countries where that's particularly true. Germany is another one that I've I've heard can be different just because privacy considerations are so much more important in Germany than they are in a lot of other countries. So how have you

adapted some of your gotom market playbooks say for a market like Japan or Korea that is culturally so different or for a market like Brazil where you know the the average spending power of a consumer or proumer customer might just be lower. Is is there anything you've done differently in those markets to get early adoption? The biggest difference for Japan and Korea versus rest of the world not necessarily in the go to market but the way we are structured is we are working with local agency while for the rest for all other markets I rely on the international team grow team I build out of Europe of I mean we have people from Brazil, China um Poland like many many different nationalities in Europe but because of this um culture mix we are able to challenge yourself or you know quickly get a sense of is it totally off or not. But for Japan and Korea, we have a dedicated agency for Brazil and for same for Thailand and

Mexico. something that help us scale there is also introducing the weekly and that was going so we iterated a lot and transparently at the very beginning uh I don't know if I share this already before online so you will be the first I was a bit uh suspicious about going to weekly because I had this image of apps asking for crazy weekly price trying to scam a bit the user you know and I was like do we really want for to be that kind of app but well someone from my team challenged and then turn the founder saying let's try let's test let's look closely at the numbers and before taking a decision based on what we feel let's just get some insight so we we run into we run the test and what we realize is uh photo room user are either people who use photo room every day because it's critical for their business and they takes a yearly or there are people that use photo room from time to time y often

but from time to and uh and those user were taking the monthly because but as most of mobile apps we had a monthly and a yearly plan. Yeah. And but monthly was they just take it because it was a cheaper price compared to yearly. So when we introduced the weekly all of them were like okay I can even get a cheaper price so I will go with the weekly. But for us a weekly plan a lot of everything blah blah blah we was making is making much more money than a monthly plan because people come more often to because it's cheaper they come more often or they stay a bit more etc. And all that to say that we introduced the weekly because we found out that it was bringing more revenue but more importantly it was fitting better our user needs but the introducing of weekly price also give access I mean it improves accessibility of our proure in many markets with lower GDP.

I think those are both such great insights and I to sort of sum that up what I heard was you have these two different archetypes of markets. You have Japan and Korea where there are some real cultural barriers for a western company to understand the local customer context. And so you hire a local agency and they help you navigate these cultural differences and make sure that you're adapting not just the language of your product, but the look and feel and positioning of your product to match the local context. Whereas in markets like Brazil or some of these other lower GDP per capita markets that you've expanded into recently, the biggest bottleneck is really just the accessibility of your price point. And so one way of solving for that is changing your subscription price to better reflect local willingness and ability to pay. Another is moving from annual and monthly plans only to weekly

subscription plans, which are much more accessible for a customer that just doesn't have a huge amount of disposable income to be putting against a digital subscription, even one that's very essential to their business. So, I think those are both two great insights to end on. Let's get to our lightning round.

So, I'm going to ask you a series of rapid fire questions. Um, we'll do about half a dozen of these. Uh, these can be short one to two sentence responses. And we'll start with one I always like to ask, which is, what is your favorite part about working at Photo Room? And what's one thing that you achieved? I think my favorite part so we are remote and remote company and my favorite part is the transparency. No DM at full room on Slack. Everything is transparent on Slack on notion. Everyone knows exactly where we stand financially where investor what's going well, what's not going well. And that goes also with a culture of accountability in a sense. When things are not going well, people are not afraid to share that this is not going well. And uh and that's fine um because because everything is transparent. And uh another interesting point with full transparency is the speed speed of iteration. You

know uh you were a growth leader and many growth leader are listening today you have meetings most of the days and you can't be uh you first you don't want as a person looking at 6 p.m. that you have 200 DMs. That's one thing. And two, uh you you don't you are probably not always the only person with an information. So rather than asking me or any uh anyone in DMs a question that will unlock unlock you at let's say 2 p.m. you ask it in a public channel and it's likely that someone has the answer.

Yeah. And so you are unlocked in matter of 10 minutes rather than 4 hours and it's been compound. And uh um and last thing which is great with transparency is now with all the tool it's super is much more easy easiest to create a knowledge base you know you plug one or two tools and you are able to query the your slack channels and your notion database and get answer about anything that is happening in the company and this is uh super powerful. Yeah I love that. I mean, you hear all the time about the benefits of transparent cultures, and it's something that I feel like more and more tech companies are really doing, not just paying lip service to, but one of the underappreciated benefits is speed.

Because when everything's out in the open, people are able to just react so much more quickly. And it can be painful at times, like there are costs, but on the whole, you're able to just move so much faster and resolve problems so much quicker. And so, I love that answer. This next one's going to be tough. What's the single most amazing photo you've ever seen created using photo? I think what's amaz um shops fully made out of photo room like online shops Shopify stores Instagram page and you can see not only not necessarily only with a watermark you know because now we remove it and people are usually prouser but you can see that it's generating by photo room by how it's built etc and every time we share something like that on Slack and like yeah it's likes to see that we are useful. You know, it's not only uh they are using your product, but you can see that they use your product to run their

business. Yep. Yeah. Well, and you mentioned before how rewarding it is to be working at a company like Photo Room where your product is directly contributing to the livelihoods and businesses of your customers. I worked at fair for a year and you know, these product photos are so important for these online storefronts now. And so a company like yours that's allowing these small mediumsized business owners who are already juggling so many balls every day to be able to improve the efficiency and the quality of the photos they're using to be the face of their business is pretty transformative. Um if you weren't a growth and marketing leader what would you do instead? I think I would be a teacher.

Yeah I I I like explaining concept. I like uh sharing my knowledge with other people and u yeah teacher would be a good one. any particular subject that you would most want to teach? No, that's probably that's why I'm teach a generalist. Um, what do you think is the secret for maximize the impact of new product features with viral potential? We've spent most of the episode today talking about this breakthrough AI feature that you all launched in 2023. How do you harness that as a growth leader? I don't think we are super good at uh at maximizing varity. I will take one photo room example and maybe then zoom out a bit. But at photo room I think what we are good at is capturing a trend an AI trend around photo putting it into the app and then spread the word and in a way we spread the word with paid because this is where we are super good at but it also then has a secondary effect which is worth of most about your

product and as we mentioned creator mentioning it and people speaking around then about blah blah bl this is our way today but I'm not sure and it's not we are not the best doing this kind of variety. I do think that one point to maximize organic is to leverage your product as much as possible. Putting your product in front of your brand campaign. Putting your product in the center of uh of of everything is a way to maximize your organic. Then you have all the things about speaking at the same time on every channel about your product to maximize the impact of building viral loops. But not every product can be viral. You know, we are we are photo editing, but we are photo editing for sellers. So, by design, this is not as viral as other apps that can do avatars, for example. Y and our product is not viral by design. So, I'm not sure we should force it, but what we should do is put the product in front of

uh our marketing. Yeah, I think that's really well said. And I think the mistake some companies make is they either say, "Well, our product's not viral and they don't lean into organic word of mouth at all, or they try to force a square peg into a round hole and turn their product into a social network and it just doesn't work because that's not how their product naturally operates." You know, Facebook gets credited for building the first modern product driven growth team roughly 15 to 20 years ago now, and their biggest insight was that their product was the number one asset for driving viral growth. Obviously, they had a lot of advantages because they were one of the early social networks. And so, their product was truly viral, but there are still some core concepts and principles that almost any consu consumer product can use in order to put its product first, make it top of- mind um in in the

psyches of their customers and then just generate a little bit more word of mouth on the margins and then you use that word compounding earlier. There's compounding benefits to that over time. Yeah. And it's a balance, you know, it's a bit as the same debate as brand versus uh performance. Um to me if you just start by saying you will build uh you will grow by working your brand I don't think that works. Uh you need you need to a pull you need to to to a pull in the market you need to make it uh in front of the user first then you start growing then your brand start becoming bigger so you can focus a bit more. It's a bit what we did you know by removing the background we had the background we had the watermark the watermark was our prefers brand loop it brings world of mouse then we got a bit bigger thanks to play we remove the watermark and then we can expand our later our brand by saying

well we are doing more than just background we agency it's a balance you know depending on when in your lifestyle as a product and as a company you are yeah well and what I heard there was at a certain point you didn't need the watermark anymore because your brand had already become come so strong and ubiquitous that you could remove it, improve the freezer experience in the process and you're already getting word of mouth because people just love your product at that point. Yeah. Um so last question here before we wrap up. How do you think AI will continue to change photo and video editing in the years to come? Well, I mentioned it at the very beginning of our interview which is uh five years ago when I joined uh that was a pitch of our CEO that AI will change photo editing forever and mobile is where you take pictures. So this is where everything start and pro is added at the center of this. Uh now 2025 we

all use AI every day. I think every I mean there's a new model even better every week. I think we are not far from a moment where um you and me won't be able to generate to distinguish what generate and what's real. And I think when we will be at that point that will make AI the default for selling online because it will be as good as what you can see uh do by yourself and do in reality. Last thing is I mean other topic is maybe I mean for us is also not only AI change as the outcome but also how you interact with the photo. Mhm.

Today we mention you you mentioned and you are right there is tons of photo editing app on the market. But they all have their own selling points, some difference in the product etc. But we are still on the historical usage of you have a picture, a photo, you edit, you have an editor blah blah blah blah. Is it that uh natural? Maybe with AI with AI we will come to a world where editing will be driven by voice you know and maybe you won't have me starting a picture and you iterating starting design and you iterating on it but me just saying a prompt to photo room and you just iterating on my prompt by adding something and uh the next picture will be an iteration a prompt iteration basically. I have no clue about this but uh but it would be interesting to follow how this evolve. I agree. It's an exciting vision and the tools themselves are are interesting and fun to watch evolve every week. As you said, the pace

of innovation has been so rapid. But what I find even more exciting is the opportunities that the tools create in people's lives. More and more people are leaving traditional jobs and becoming creators and doing what they're most passionate about. Um and doing it in countries that previously just didn't have access to these technologies. So super exciting note to end on. Anything that you want to say to the audience before we wrap up here, Olivia? I think we should people, you mentioned it, we should people should grow leader should uh not overlook speed. Speed is by far what compounds the most uh in startup. This is your most precious asset and this is also time the most uh the constraint you are working against. So if you don't move fast enough compared to your big competitor, you will die. But speed compounds very fast. So think about how you can think how you can make speed compounds

in your team. So I mentioned transparency. Uh of course AI tools are also helping that. And uh and that would be my my last uh feedback on this is yes. Think about how you can make your team uh work faster. Yeah, I love it. Speed is transformative and it compounds. Great note to end on. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Olivia. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.