The vision of Pop Inc. is to add color to everyone’s digital communications.
This vision leads to our mission: give creators the power to earn more, create more, and make everyone’s life more exciting.
We do what we do at Pop because we want to make it easier for artists to earn passive income, while making it more fun for people to express themselves online. If it’s easier for artists to earn passive income, artists can be more creative and take more colorful risks (since they don’t have to worry about paying their bills!). To support creators, we give them simple tools that monetize the newest creative outlets. First we had FilterPop. Now we also have StickerPop. Both are successfully capturing interesting market opportunities that we’ve uncovered and are having a real impact on the lives of the artists in our ecosystem.
One of my favorite stories from our artist community comes from Tahsin, a designer from Bangladesh. He used his almost $10,000 in earnings to pay for a surgery for his mother, which ended up saving her life. Tahsin told us: “I love you all. It helped me pay for my family’s healthcare. All money I earned is spent on my father and mother’s healthcare. You have no idea how much Pop contributes to my life.” When I started Pop, I never imagined that it would be something that changed and even saved lives.
As it became apparent that Pop would start to grow a lot, I wanted to really get our company culture honed in. I wrote our culture deck when we were just two co-founders looking to make our first hires. I decided to make sure we had our culture locked in before we brought employees on for two reasons: (1) you can’t organically inject culture into a company that has employees and (2) I saw my previous employer fail at culture. They confused culture with perks. For example, they had something called Beer Friday where everyone stopped work early on Friday to hang out and drink beer. This is a perk, not culture. Culture is a reason to come to work, besides making a company money.
The most important aspects of our company culture are our core behaviors. Our core behaviors are: C.O.L.O.R.
Here is what each letter means:
1. Creatives First: Consider how our creators work to earn a living and making that process better.
2. Over Serve: You go above and beyond what is expected to help those around you.
3. Learn Fast: Always find ways to learn faster and better.
4. Open Communication: Say what’s on your mind, while always being respectful.
5. Respect Time: Place value on your teammates’ and creators’ times.
While each of our values are important, “creators first” likely tops the list on importance. We must deliver an unusually great experience to our creators. This is because our business is creators’ income and rent checks — a responsibility we do not take lightly. We exist because of, and in service of, creators. There is a creator behind every graphic on our properties and we treat them as human beings, not users. As we scale, we will do everything we can to make sure we always treat our creators as humans. As a business, we will invest in community happiness and creator care. These teammates will be on the front lines of taking care of our creators.
To take care of our creators, we recruit and retain high-performing, empathetic, and COLOR.-driven people. To be a good fit for the Pop team, you cannot be just one of those things. People that embody those three traits join us because they are here to help creators get paid, they will know that the work they do with us is important, and they will want their individual work to directly contribute to team efforts and the overall company mission. By hiring COLORful people, we can build a better world for our creators.
So what’s next for us? We’re laser-focused on bringing the digital goods economy that is thriving in Asia to the rest of the world — and it’s working. We’re continuing to grow FilterPop, but are beginning to ramp up marketing efforts on StickerPop, with the help of some really exciting features we’re about to launch and major partnerships.
