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PicBadges – Create and share your virtual badge online

PicBadges is a social platform, which allows its users to create and collect virtual badges. Their story is a great example for why it’s always important to keep on going, because opportunities can be found in the most unexpected places.

After Moti and his team came up with the idea for PicBadges, which was making a simple way for people to add badges to their profile pictures on social networks, they needed to find a marketing strategy. They decided to look for an event which was interesting enough to make everybody want to add badges to their profile pictures, and they found one – the world cup of soccer. They believed that many people would like to have the flag of their team attached as a badge to their profile picture in social networks. Unfortunately, due to technical difficulties, they had to postpone the launch by several weeks, just enough to miss the world cup and the great marketing opportunity.

At the same time, Moti and his team were asked by several friends of theirs, to create a badge of Gilad Shalit – the Israeli solider who was kidnapped by Hamas and was held somewhere in the Gaza strip. Though in the beginning Moti felt he did not want his platform to become a political tool and especially did not want to be identified as an Israeli platform, eventually he accepted this request and asked his art and design director to create this badge. Moti then went for lunch with some friends and offered one of them to use the new badge. His friend agreed and was even enthusiastic about it. By the time Moti came back from lunch, all the servers of the company went down, in something he describes as a bigger hype then what was described in the movie “The Social Network”.

Today, PicBadges already has over 16M users and more then 3M badges created, what comes to show how important it is not to let small setbacks and challenges keep you from executing your ideas.

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