Halfway through their third year of law school, Colina and Hripsime Demirdjian gave their parents a call. Law wasn’t really their thing, the twins explained. They were dropping out to pursue a career in emoji.
“As you might imagine, they needed some convincing,” Colina says. “But Moji Edit was ultimately our calling, and we leaped in with all our faith.”
Moji Edit is an app that lets you design your own personalised emoji, which can then be shared in messages as well as all corners of the social media universe. It’s a passion project for the 27-year-olds, who had no prior tech experience.
“We’ve always seen emoji as this unspoken language,” Hripsime says. Gifted social media users, they had launched an Instagram account dedicated to emoji, and it quickly exploded.
“So we said to ourselves, why not launch a social experiment during the summer holidays, when everyone’s off, and see if our followers would be interested?” says Colina.
Followers were interested. Within a week of sending out an exploratory survey, the twins had amassed an email list of 50,000 names. “It was so rewarding,” Hripsime says. “We really felt like we had the green light.”
No one could have expected that growth in that amount of time. Emoji were popular, but nobody was offering that customised experience like we were.
In happy news for the two (and their parents), the bet paid off. Not long after its July 2016 launch, Moji Edit had 300,000 new users. Today, it’s garnered more than 6 million downloads, with 10 million (and counting) emoji created.
“No one could have expected that growth in that amount of time,” says Colina. “Emoji were popular, but nobody was offering that customised experience like we were.”
The Demirdjians’ fingerprints are all over Moji Edit. They came up with designs for the app and the avatars. Although they had no formal business training, they managed to write a business plan. When it came time to code the app, the twins took a crash course in programming alongside their developers “so we could really understand the core features we were building in”, Colina says.
Today Moji Edit is run by a team of eight – and the company is leaning into ARKit, exploring the potential of 3D models and avatars.
“People ask us whether you need tech experience to enter the tech space,” Hripsime says. “And I think our answer would be that if you have the perseverance, motivation and ability to learn, you can accomplish anything. It’s really about the mind-set more than the skill set.”