Media tried to trample us but only helped us reach out to 1,000,000 users and make money. The story of MakeApp. Ashot Gabrelyanov Follow Nov 28, 2017 · 9 min read

“White supremacist”, “misogynist”, and “Putin’s spy” are just a few of the names I was called in the US during a week of hype surrounding our MakeApp project. Was I surprised? Yes, I was. Here’s why.

We are a team of just 10 developers and graphic designers. Our flagship product is the AI-based augmented reality app called Magic. It uses emotion recognition for games and 3D masks.

AI/AR based app Magic

It grabbed Apple’s attention and was featured on the App Store time and again.

Magic on the AppStore

With Magic, we were developing a photo-realistic digital makeup technology.

While experimenting with it, we found out that neural nets can both apply and remove makeup.

“Hmm, that might be interesting,” I thought and suggested that we tap the market using this feature.

All our Russian team members voted in favor of launching this experiment. Only one team member, Pir, my close friend and a US citizen, was against it.

He argued that the US media would dismiss this feature and accuse us of sexism. Having lived my whole life in Russia, I could hardly understand what he was talking about. I could not realize what was wrong with this makeup removal function. I listened to all the arguments and decided to keep this feature and release the app.

The first MakeApp version appeared in the App Store six months ago. We posted it on Product Hunt and caught the eye of Ryan Hoover, its founder.

“Oh, that’s great,” we thought and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning to check my email, I could hardly believe my eyes. My inbox was bombarded with dozens of emails from journalists from Japan, South Korea, and China. They all asked me for an interview and comments about MakeApp.

I went to the kitchen and made myself some coffee. I understood what was going on after I looked at the stats. We blew up the Asian market, went viral and topped the App Store ratings.

AppStore in South Korea

MakeApp became Asia’s top story. Look, Japan’s TV presenters are loving it!

Abema TV

Asian media were positive about our project, and Twitter users were really excited too. My American friend’s concerns have proved unfounded. “Asia loves us!” — he messaged me.

Media in China, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand were teeming with very favorable headlines. MakeApp became a bestseller in just one day.

The project was so celebrated in Asia that China’s Tencent announced that they would develop a competing product.

“Cool! Media and users love us! We are on the right track,” our team cheered and continued to pursue this technology.

Half a year later, we added video processing to MakeApp. I thought it would be great to post the news on BoredPanda. I decided to take celebrities’ videos and pictures as sample images. Their looks are well-known and users can easily recognize them without makeup to see how the technology works.

I prepared photos and GIFs, published them, and shared the links in relevant subreddits.

BoredPanda editors saw the material and shared it on their Facebook pages. We were amazed to see Europe explode this time. MakeApp took the UK by storm, followed by Germany, Sweden, Italy, and others. The Daily Mail repeated my experiment and tested out the app on stars. MakeApp hit the news headlines.

The Daily Mail’s main page

Our happiness knew no bounds! Everyone was thrilled! Everything went great.

Well, it was — until the US media took notice.

“A male Russian propagandist is behind an unflattering AI app that shows how women look without makeup” was the Business Insider headline that marked the start of our story in the USA.

I was disappointed to find out how unprofessional journalists are in these and some other “quality” US media outlets.

My correspondence with Shona Ghosh showed that her primary interest was to hype the clickbait story rather than to investigate the app and technology. “Russian-Kremlin-spy-sexist-racist” — heck, this guy is a dream come true for the yellow press!

From our correspondence, I became aware that her agenda was to make me into a wicked monster and the app into a spawn of hell. Which I mentioned to her.