Robb Report Malaysia celebrates five leading Malaysian ladies who are recasting the world in their vision, driving the agenda in altruism and the professional spheres with verve, determination and hard-earned wisdom. We are honouring them as trailblazers and continuing the series here is Piktochart CEO Goh Ai Ching.
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In 2012, with a grant from the Malaysian government’s CRADLE fund, Piktochart was born. By 2018, the company, touted by Forbes as a cloud-based infographic and presentation solution for “the graphically challenged” had reached 11 million users. The company’s Penang-based CEO Goh Ai Ching isn’t your typical tech-preneur. With a knack for honing in on her customer base, who they are, what interests them, and even where they hang out, Goh and her premise of making life easier, is what Piktochart is all about.
“Even when the market is shifting in direction of the latest fads, one remaining wisdom is when we stay anchored to who the customers are and just anticipate what needs they have, there will always be an opportunity to creatively reach out to them,” she explains.
She believes that with all that’s happening in a world where economies are in rapid flux, it will counter-intuitively reinstate things back to the way things are. “Everyone just wants a human connection,” Goh says emphatically.
The reasons that Piktochart has taken off Goh says is because “people want authentic and real relationships”. Heading a company that does visual communication, she has come to realise that more and more it’s about people and their “wants to carry out their best message in a time-starved environment and we need to build products that are more able to do so,” she adds.
According to her, while so much that has been talked about how AI and personalisation will become mainstream for every company that has a digital presence, the consumer will ultimately go for “a brand that listens, understands and speaks to them like how a person would.” Technology on its own, she says will not necessarily be transformational. Rather, the game-changing effect will centre on how companies are able to make the most of technology in order to achieve the goal of being more human.
When asked whether she’d anticipated how Piktochart would become the success it is today, Goh reveals an all-too-human trait: modesty. “Not at all. I still do not consider it a success [in relation to] where we’re at today,” she says.
