StoryBoarder - The Future of Storytelling is Here

Company & Team Introduction

Storyboarder is a complete platform for creating, buying and selling creative stories using no-code tools. The company was born a free tool the founders built to help people create storyboards many years ago that amassed over 700k users. When COVID-19 hit and movie production came to a standstill, the team shifted their focus from the movie to their storyboarding software. They set out to build a much more powerful, easy-to-use, and innovative platform than the free tools they released years ago to simplify the visual development process, giving anyone with a story the ability to create and share. StoryBoarder is led by an impressive duo of founders, Charles Foreman (CEO) and Joe Watkins. Foreman is an accomplished entrepreneur with two past exits, including social gaming company OMGPOP, which he scaled to millions of users while creating 37 different games, including the wildly popular “Draw Something” before the company was acquired by Zynga in 2011 for over $200M. His second exit was PictureLife, which he describes as “Google Photos before Google Photos, and better.”. His co-founder, Joe Watkins, led a Google machine learning team and worked as an ML engineer at Waymo. The duo’s initial idea was to combine their skills and knowledge in the AI and gaming industries to foster a new generation of 3D storytelling that is more accessible than ever before. StoryBoarder is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has quickly grown its team to ~6 people.

Product Overview

Storyboarder’s suite of 3D design tools allows anyone to create stunning web comics easily. The company extracts most of the complex aspects of building 3d scenes, such as shot composition, background design, character creation, speech bubble placement, etc., so creators can focus on building what is essential: the actual story. Other valuable features include a multiplayer mode to remove collaborative friction on joint projects, an asset marketplace to buy items you need to help tell your story, and the ability to place bounties to have new assets created by others. The global market for webcomics is already a massive opportunity, but most solutions today require design and drawing skills. StoryBoarder wants to tear down these historical barriers to entry to allow anyone with a compelling story to build a professional-grade 3D scene. People around the world love reading webcomics, but with the skills required to create high-end 3D scenes being so scarce, the industry in its current state is supply-constrained. Storyboarder aims to fix this supply constraint while helping creators get paid for their hard work.

Total Addressable Market

Many readers may read about StoryBoarder and think, “The market isn’t big enough!” but in reality, it is a massive opportunity. In eastern Asia alone, the largest webcomic platforms generate over a billion dollars in revenue annually. Couple this with StoryBoarder’s platform, which is designed to lower entry barriers when creating webcomics and accelerate content development time through tools and automation. According to Data Bridge Market research, in 2021, the global webcomic market was 115M and is stated to explode to over 300M by 2029, growing at a 12.8% compound annual growth rate for the period as the webcomic trend continues to expand throughout the world.

Business Model & The Numbers

StoryBoarder currently monetizes by allowing creators to release their stories through episodes. Readers can read through 5 episodes, and if they want to continue reading further, they must pay around 20 cents. It is important to note that monetization/pricing isn’t a central focus for the team at the moment, as they are focused on building out the platform’s functionality. The pricing strategy can be refined once the platform is released and there are customers to monetize.

Traction

As the new platform is still in development, apart from special early access, traction is hard to measure. The massive opportunity for the StoryBoarder team is that their previous version of the StoryBoarder software gained incredible traction, obtaining over 700k users. When the new platform is released, they can attempt to convert the users of their old tool.

Competitors

StoryBoarder has two main competitors, Webtoon and StoryBoardThat. Here is a bit of information on each:

Webtoon: Webtoon is the bellwether of the webcomic industry. The company was started in 2004 in South Korea and, throughout the years, expanded across Asia, finding adoption the strongest in the eastern region. The company does over 1.2B in revenue annually and has over 100M MAUs. Webtoon uses an ad-based monetization model and takes a 50% cut of creator earnings on the platform. The company has been an incredible success, but what if you’re not a professional design artist and don’t know how to use their complicated CANVAS creator tool? That is where StoryBoarder shines; their software allows anyone to tell a story. Pair this with the adoption potential of Webcomics throughout the Western world, and StoryBoarder’s opportunity is immense.

StoryBoardThat: StoryBoardThat is a much smaller competitor than Webtoon but still has a commanding market presence. Over 30 million storyboards have been created on their platform since being founded by Aaron Sherman in 2011. The company has seen particular success in a historically difficult-to-sell industry, education. StoryBoardThat offers users a free tier to create up to 2 storyboards per week to help drive bottoms-up product adoption; if a user requires additional storyboards, they charge a monthly of $10 for individual use or $25 for team-based collaboration and additional features. The company is based in Boston, Massachusetts and has grown its team to ~10 employees.

Funding

StoryBoarder has raised two rounds of funding in its short life as a startup, with both rounds being raised in 2023. The company’s first cash injection came from Y Combinator's standard 500k SAFE investment. The amount raised from StoryBoarder’s proper pre-seed round is undisclosed at this time but had an impressive list of backers, including participation from funds like Pioneer Fund, Ludlow Ventures, and Rebel Fund, in addition to notable angels such as David Karp (Founder of Tumblr), and Andrew Kortina (Founder of Venmo),