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Tool and platform to create and sell webcomics
Storyboarder is a tool and a platform for anyone to create, share, and sell webcomics. In East Asia, the webcomic (or digital manga) industry is an $12B market and rapidly growing to the rest of the world. Webtoon, the largest company in the space, generates $100M / month in revenue. However, their addressable market is limited by their content creators, who need know how to draw. Readers are desperate for a greater variety of stories in webcomics. Through years of working with filmmakers, we’ve built extremely easy to use storyboarding software that has 700K users. We’re democratizing visual storytelling to everyone. We’re working on the next generation that, through advances in video game interfaces, ubiquitous 3D compute, and AI, will allow anyone to easily create scenes, pose characters, to create webcomics. Storyboarder is backed by Y Combinator (W23), David Karp (Tumblr Founder), Andrew Kortina (Venmo Founder), and other product focused investors.
Sumugi (formerly Storyboarder) is an all-in-one platform for creating, sharing, and reading comics and visual stories. It enables 3D scene creation, 2D layout, asset libraries, and a marketplace/community for creators to collaborate and publish.
Users build scenes in 3D, pose characters, and capture the shot to arrange on a 2D canvas. The Creator Studio supports building in 3D, posing characters, lighting, and arranging assets, with features like a growing asset library, import of user assets, VRoid model support, flexible framing, a virtual camera, and final 2D composition with visual effects. Workflow steps: Build Scenes -> Pose Characters -> Frame the Scene -> Finalize in 2D; includes real-time lighting changes, reusable scene sets, and a rich toolkit for character expressions, dialogue, and camera control. It also offers a marketplace/community and resources such as tutorials and guides.
Who it’s for: Comic creators and storytellers, from professionals to hobbyists, including writers who want to visualize scripts, VRoid artists, and TTRPG roleplayers.
Hiring/traction noted via ongoing product updates and community engagement (Discord, tutorials, user stories); active user community and creators sharing assets and stories.
Charles Forman is the co-founder of Storyboarder. With a background in computer science and design, Charles is passionate about building great product experiences that make the world a more enjoyable place. Prior to co-founding Storyboarder, Charles was the founder of OMGPOP (YCS06), a gaming startup that gained international recognition for its popular game "Draw Something". OMGPOP attracted millions of users and was ultimately acquired by Zynga for $210 million.
Joe Watkins is the co-founder and CTO of Storyboarder. Prior to Storyboarder, Joe lead a computer vision/machine learning team at Google before working on generating maps with machine learning at Waymo. Joe's passion for web-native fiction played a significant role in inspiring Storyboarder's design. As a teenager, he was captivated by the potential of the internet to tell stories in new and exciting ways, and spent countless hours exploring different forms of digital storytelling.
Storyboarder is a tool and platform that enables anyone to create, buy, and sell webcomics.
Storyboarder launches a tool and platform that lets anyone create webcomics by generating panels from scenes and dialogue, host episodes as series, and monetize after readers reach a threshold. It targets readers and creators by lowering entry barriers for webcomics and expanding a $12B market now to a broader audience.
From the original launch (Mar 2023) — may be outdated.
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