A new creator startup for animators and writers has raised $2.5 million. Read the 16-page pitch deck its founders used.
The company began its pitch with a clean "pre-seed round" cover page.
It then touted how Kierzkowski and Kozera have successfully built and sold two other startups, FameBit and Podcorn.
In one sentence, the company described its core product:
Storiaverse is a platform that matches the best writers and animators to create animated original short stories in a new, immersive read-watch format
The team then described why it made sense to build Storiaverse now.
"Why now?" and "Why this type of company?" were common questions from investors during pitch meetings, Kozera told BI.
The company listed two categories of creators that it planned to work with: animators and writers. It pays both groups to make content for the app.
The Animators: The democratization of animation tools and software has created a massive rise of independent animators. Yet, they lack a platform and means to profit from their creations.
The Writers: Independent writers are often buried in obscure journals, their work delivered in archaic and unengaging formats, going unseen and unmonetized.
The company wrote:
Streaming and multimedia have transformed consumer habits, driving demand for visually appealing and narrative-driven storytelling experiences.
The company cited a statistic from The Business Research Company's "Manga Global Market Report 2023," which predicted the global manga market would cross $12 billion in 2023.
"The Animation Space is Booming," the company wrote, citing a $394.6 billion market-size estimate for global animation in 2022 from research firm Markets N Research.
The company then pointed out that the next generation of consumers are interested in books, with more than 100 billion views on the #BookTok hashtag on TikTok.
Storiaverse described its target audience and the types of stories they prefer.
Target Audience
Men aged 18-34. It includes action, comedy, horror, and science fiction stories.
Women aged 18-44. It includes drama, romance, and slice-of-life stories.
A title slide introduced a section of the deck that focused on how the product would look and function.
The company's consumer-facing product is its iOS and Android apps that users can download to "read-watch" stories.
Its content-management platform for creators is focused on receiving submissions from writers, matching content with animators, and curating final products before they're pushed to consumers.
While Storiaverse wasn't generating revenue when its cofounders were first pitching the idea, its pitch deck provided a few ways that it may make money down the road.
Storiaverse planned to roll out a "freemium" model where some content is available on a limited basis and a subscription option that offers full access to its content library.
Subscriptions could provide access to serialized content or the ability to pay to unlock second parts of stories, Kozera told BI.
The company does not yet offer a subscription option, instead opening up all content to the app's users during its early growth stage.
Storiaverse could also make money through product placements, where a brand is inserted into a story, or merchandise sales tied to characters or ideas that appear in Storiaverse stories.
The company is also thinking about different ways to execute content for brand partners, such as working with a major comic-book publisher to do spinoff stories of certain characters, Kozera said.
"Right now we're really focused on building an audience and introducing audiences to the 'read-watch' format and just building really great content and a really good product," she said. "We're definitely always going to have a free component as well. That's really important to us. We really want to be accessible."
As many investor decks do, Storiaverse closed out its pitch with a "Thank You" slide.