December 27, 2019

Nour Chamoun’s Forbes 30 Under 30 discusses the power of storytelling

Nour Chamoun

Featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and being the cofounder and Chief of Product at Scopio, a tech-focused photo marketplace, Nour Chamoun keeps adding more bullets to her resume.

After graduating from the Lebanese American University with a BS in Graphic Design, Chamoun did her Masters in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York, where she met Christina Hawatmeh, the initial founder of Scopio.

“Christina had the idea of connecting citizen journalists to media outlets. She reached out to the Parsons program where I was doing my Masters at the time for design and development help. I loved the idea so, together and with some help, we built an AI-driven search engine that would allow media outlets to search for breaking news photos and videos on social media and license them,” explained Chamoun. 

“When we first started building our search engine, we realized how much of a challenge it was to not only create a Google search equivalent for social media platforms that uses machine learning to find relevant content, but also how much of a complex system it was for customers to grasp, let alone to use as a service. So we eventually pivoted to a marketplace of over 200,000 photos submitted by photo creators from around the world on news and other topics that we sell to businesses.”

Today, Scopio’s mission is to make stock photography more diverse, authentic, and affordable. The platform identifies rising photo creators from over 150 countries, titles and tags their photos, then licenses them so they become easy to use anywhere. Today, Scopio has about 7,000 subscribers who use photos and around 13,000 artists who contribute to its library. It’s made up of a small dedicated team of 8 full-time engineers, designers, and editors and a part-time marketing team.

At Scopio, Chamoun leads the engineering and design teams. She has previously worked in design firms in New York and Beirut on a range of products including websites, web and mobile app design and development.

This young cofounder and LebNet member was recently featured in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list and praised for her hard innovative work. She hopes this recognition will open doors for the cofounders in their future fundraising plans to scale the company. 

Looking back at her short yet fruitful career, Chamoun believes that to sell an idea successfully one must perfect their narrative. Founders tend to overlook the importance of storytelling when they are trying to get people’s support, she said, but “when you’re an early-stage startup with little traction in the beginning, I would say that the most essential parts of your business are the founders and the story. With the scarcity of data, you need to sell the idea and its potential,” she concluded.