Naman Lahoty

In the ever-evolving landscape of global content consumption, there are rare instances of Indian founders leading the charge. One such pioneering venture, building a global consumer tech platform for webcomics, is Dashtoon, aiming to democratize the creation of digital comics and enable storytellers worldwide to create illustrated content with ease and speed.

When I first met the Dashtoon team, pitching their webcomics idea, I had no clue what webcomics were, let alone an understanding of the global market. In my mind, comics were merely a childhood hobby. After all, how large could the market for kids’ superhero comics potentially be? Fast forward one year, I’m hooked on Dashtoon comics. It’s now my bedtime ritual to view episodes of Secret Billionaire, Betrayed Bonds & Epic Evolution. The stories are so gripping that I even paid for it, a rarity for a baniya like me who still uses friends’ OTT accounts.

I’ve now experienced our initial thesis first-hand – quality content trumps format. People love to consumer good quality content regardless of the medium – be it short videos, audio stories, podcasts, or webcomics. What Dashtoon is building can serve as an alternative to Netflix.

In the past 10 years, media consumption on mobile in the US has grown exponentially from 45 mins/day to a staggering 4 hrs/day, fuelled by new & diverse content formats. Webcomics, we believe, will take away some share of this screen time.

But why webcomics? And why now?

Visual stories are much more engaging as it fuels imagination and offers a better experience. Webcomics serves as a natural progression for readers of text stories & novels. And a mobile-based, vertical scroll format fits well within existing user behaviour. While video is the most engaging format to consume, the cost of production is insanely high. Not every piece of content can be produced in video. Additionally, the time to create webcomics is significantly less than creating videos.

Thanks to GenAI, the complexity of webcomics production has significantly reduced. This not only enables the conversion of high-quality content into comics at a lower cost and faster pace, but also creates the opportunity for building a UGC platform, making it mainstream.

Simplifying comics creation is one thing, but building this business still remains complex. Figuring out & licensing content for US consumers, driving global user acquisition & retention and tackling technical challenges in consumer-facing GenAI apps demand an all-star team.

In Sanidhya, Lalith & Soumyadeep, we found a deadly combo of content licensing expertise, US consumer GTM experience, & tech muscle for a GenAI-focused consumer app. Having collaborated for a year, I’m certain that this is the team from India to build this business.

Don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself. Download the Dashtoon app here.

Read more on the founders’ vision and the technology fueling this platform on TechCrunch and Forbes.

Enterprise sales is a journey, not just a transaction. It involves complex project management spread across 100s of emails, telephonic conversations, project management tools and many ad-hoc documents. Add to this, the extensive collaboration and alignment that is required between multiple stakeholders in buyer and seller organizations.

The sales closing process involves multiple steps like demo, RFP, ROI calculation, feasibility review, solutioning, security assessment, vendor onboarding, deal structuring, etc. to name a few. The process typically goes on for 6 to 12 months and then transitions into implementation, onboarding and training processes to ensure that value is delivered to the buyer.

To traverse this complex journey smoothly, the sellers create a Mutual Close Plan – aka Mutual Success Plan (MSP). Good sales people do this jointly with the buyers, as the word “mutual” should suggest. MSP outlines the key milestones, intermediate steps, target dates along with owners of milestones from buyers and sellers side. MSP is geared towards not just closing the deal, but also ensuring that the buyer is able to get the maximum value from the partnership. Typically prepared on excel sheets and uploaded on CRM on a weekly basis, the MSP is the single source of truth on the progress of the project for both sides.

However in reality, multiple versions of the truth exist. Sales leadership often falters to find the latest updated version of the Mutual Close Plan for their quarterly projections. Missed follow ups and deadlines are still common due to lack of discipline and visibility. It was quite surprising that technology has not yet been leveraged to make Mutual Success Plans more efficient and effective.

Enter BuyerAssist.io – our recent seed investment.

BuyerAssist is a collaborative platform shared between buyers and sellers to drive clarity and alignment at each step. It digitizes the creation of Mutual Success Plan creating better visibility leading to faster value realization. With automated reminders, checklists of action items and flagging potential risks, BuyerAssist makes account executives more disciplined.

It also empowers the buyer to get actively involved in the process enabling seamless exchange of information at one place instead of multiple email threads. Additionally, it helps seller organizations plan and collaborate effectively by giving better visibility to the progress of each deal.

To summarize, BuyerAssist delivers 3 core value propositions to sellers:

1. Faster time to value for buyers (lower sales cycle and higher renewal rates)
2. Better alignment and collaboration between buyers and sellers
3. Better visibility to internal support teams and sales leadership

We believe that this is a perfect timing to build such a solution. Two decades back, sales stack meant just “CRM” which was effectively a pipeline management solution. Over this time, there has been a continuous segmentation of this stack – sales intelligence, sales readiness, sales enablement, conversational intelligence, incentive management, etc. Surprisingly, the last mile of this process – closure – which most sales people will tell you is the most critical step of sales, has not been rethought. Need for such a solution has only gone up in the last 18 months with the pandemic as buyers and sellers have become more comfortable in remote collaboration.

In Shyam, Shankar and Amit – the ex-MindTickle trio that co-founded BuyerAssist, we see a perfect blend of domain understanding and complementary functional expertise. The team is uniquely poised to solve this problem as they have themselves been through multiple enterprise sales cycles, built enterprise products & businesses and understands what it takes to build trusted relationships with enterprise customers. They have seen that journey from a very early stage to a scaled up enterprise software company.

Shyam was in GTM leadership roles and understands the fine nuances of enterprise selling. Shankar has done frontline enterprise sales while Amit is an engineering leader who has built enterprise grade products. Their personal affinity for the problem coupled with a desire to build a large impactful business led them to start BuyerAssist.

BuyerAssist has already started delivering value to their design partners and recently opened up their beta product to new customers. The team’s commitment to build a world class product and deliver true value to their customers is heartening and we feel privileged as well as excited to partner with them.

We are also delighted to partner with Emergent Ventures who bring significant experience in building Enterprise SaaS businesses in the US.