He started with a sticker store nobody outside Korea knew about. Today Stipop's little images ride inside Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe - one line of code at a time.
The idea did not arrive as a spreadsheet. It arrived as a feeling that something small and joyful was getting left out of the internet. In Korea, people layer their chats with stickers - little characters that carry a mood a text message cannot. Tony Park looked at the rest of the world and saw those same conversations running flat. In 2017 he decided to fix it, and Stipop was born.
Park co-founded the company with Daniel Cho, a friend he had known since boarding school. The two had been roommates years earlier, and somewhere between late-night conversations they landed on a shared conviction. "We spent lots of time together and naturally talked about the future and how it would be great to start our own company," Park recalled. When the moment came, the partnership already had a decade of trust behind it.
Stipop did not begin as the developer tool it is known for today. It started as a consumer app - a store where people could browse and download stickers made by artists, some free after watching an ad, some paid. That decision to run their own app turned out to matter more than the app itself. It pulled in creators. "We were able to gather so many artists because we actually began as our own app," Park said.
The pivot came from listening. At a conference in San Francisco, app owners kept approaching the team with a version of the same request: could they pull Stipop's stickers into their own products through an API? It was a product the company had not built. The founders realized the store was a doorway, not the destination. The real business was becoming the infrastructure behind everyone else's stickers.
The turning point had a location. Park points to the day he boarded a flight from Seoul to Santa Monica, where Snap keeps its headquarters. "It happened last year when I flew over half of the globe from South Korea to Santa Monica, where Snap's headquarters sat," he said. Stipop became the first Korean company accepted into Yellow, Snap's exclusive accelerator - a signal that a sticker company from Seoul could hold its own in the center of the messaging world.
From there the momentum compounded. Stipop joined Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch and opened a second base in Santa Monica while keeping its roots in Seoul. The pitch to developers was disarmingly simple: add a single line of code, and your app gets a fully customized sticker feature drawn from a global library.
It is easy to underestimate a sticker. Park does not. Under his direction Stipop's stickers found their way into some of the most-used communication surfaces on the planet - Google's Gboard, Android Messages and Tenor, Microsoft Teams, plus creative tools like Canva and Adobe. One Google partnership alone drove 600 million sticker views in its first month.
The competitive choice underneath all of this was deliberate. Rival services hired in-house artists. Park went the other way, building an open network of thousands of freelance creators around the world. A sticker that lands in Seoul is not the one that lands in Sao Paulo, and no single design team can speak every visual dialect. Stipop's user base grew in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa precisely because the art came from everywhere.
Park is a graduate of Korea University, and he spent roughly five years living in the UK when he was young. That time abroad shows up in the way he built Stipop - global from the first sketch rather than a Korean product hoping to travel later. He and Cho founded the company at 25, and Park is candid that he wishes he had started even sooner.
Asked what he would tell a younger version of himself, he offered a short list that reads like a founder's field notes - practical, a little self-critical, and hard-won.
There is a thesis behind the hustle. Park believes Korea sits a few years ahead of the US in how stickers are used, the same way K-webtoons and messaging apps like KakaoTalk previewed shifts that later went global. If that pattern holds, the market for digital stickers could expand many times over - and Stipop is positioned as the layer underneath it.
Stipop has never stood still. It went from a consumer store, to a B2B API, and more recently toward a platform that helps independent character creators earn a living from their work - a home for the people who dream up the little characters in the first place. The through-line across every version is a belief Park returns to often: that ordinary people, given the right tools and a real opportunity, can create something valuable.
Park's ambition is not really about stickers, even though stickers are the product. It is about the texture of a conversation - the difference between a plain message and one that makes someone smile. He built a company to carry that difference across languages and borders, and he did it by trusting artists he had never met and partners on the other side of an ocean. For a founder who wishes he had started sooner, he has covered a remarkable amount of ground.