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We liked that Reface is a verb, and we really wanted to become a neologism like ‘to google’. We wanted to see reface as a term in the Urban Dictionary. But in the process, we decided that the name was too technological, and changed it to Doublicat, as in double and duplicate.

It did not go well. First red flag was our investors struggling to pronounce Doublicat at the meetings. “Double… cat? How do you spell that?” Then we noticed that in the App Store, people basically enter the name as they hear it and try to search for dublikat. That’s when we realized we need to bring Reface back.

It was scary: the word of mouth was our main promotion channel after all. We were afraid that people who saw or downloaded Doublicat in the App Store would be confused by Reface appearing instead.

But a major investor told us: until you have millions of users, no one will care. And we took a chance. The renaming was not advertised in any way — we simply changed the name overnight, pressed the button and began to wait for the result. It was painless.

Lockdown made the world truly global: there are no borders, because everyone has Zoom. Doesn't matter if you are a company from Ukraine or from Silicon Valley.

So, it was the middle of summer, covid everywhere, we were working on improving the app, adapting our marketing, inventing something, and suddenly we got a new version of the technology that does a better face swap. We come up with a new format for the app and decide to move from gifs to short videos 10-second.

By mid-June, we had about 10,000 daily active users. We launched new technology, new content and subsequently began changing our marketing strategy in terms of buying. Before, we tried to buy users who tend to make a paid subscription, and then we have switched to people who simply like the application. Installs became our main marketing goal.

And the app takes off. Each video has our watermark, and the quality is so cool that we attract new people from Facebook. They make a video, share it, friends see it and go: “Oh, that’s an awesome app, I want it too”. As a result, we had 10-15 installs per attracted paid user.

Most of our traffic is organic, but without the right marketing kick, probably nothing would have happened. We tried a lot of approaches to find the local tactics that worked.
The jump from 10,000 daily active users to 2-3 million occurred in three months. We realized that people definitely need our application.

This meant a fundamentally different company strategy was needed, with less effort on B2B: we are the app company, and around this we build a strategy, model, and so on. The boom had started with Asia. We did not focus on it purposefully: the Asian market perceived us better, there was a lower cost of attraction, so we allocated larger budgets there. Thailand took off first. Within a week, we got to the first place in the App Store there. An unrealistic amount of traffic was pouring, Thai media, bloggers, YouTubers wrote about us. It’s a shame we did not understand a single word in Thai.

At some point, we realized that Asia is cool and all, but we are aiming at the Tier1 market, the most competitive in the world.You can be successful anywhere, but if you are not successful in the US, you are not in the big league. And we have defined our Everest is to succeed in the App Store in the US. We tried different approaches — improved the product, content, marketing. At some point, an unexpected problem arose: there were so many users that our servers could not cope. All ML processing takes place on Google servers, and all technology runs on video cards. There was a moment when Google ran out of spare graphic cards in the region because of us. It all got sorted out, but when you get a message like that, the initial reaction is wow.

It’s all about vision. We’ve raised the bar for our goals. Yes, we managed to create an app that became popular worldwide, but what comes after?

We thought, “what are we going to do when the hype dies down”? And decided to set extremely ambitious goals. I don’t like comparing our product with TikTok, but when TikTok was starting out, no one really understood what it was either.

We want nothing less. We are building a content personalization platform. People are much more eager to engage with content they are featured in. I like a video much more if there’s my face in it. With the help of machine learning, we personalize a person’s experience — and that’s but a fist step in the list of technology we plan to introduce in a span of a year.