Saurabh Bhatia has spent 20 years in tech, but comics have been with him since his father handed him an issue of X-Men in 1990. Growing up in India in the nineties meant train journeys, A.H. Wheeler stalls, and stacks of Nagraj, Chacha Chaudhary, Archie, Jughead and Richie Rich. We bonded over the fact that I kept my own Archie collection in a wooden box covered in newspaper until I was 35, and Saurabh had done exactly the same thing with his.
That lifelong love turned into something concrete in 2017, when Saurabh ran a Kickstarter campaign for a comic book he had written. He’d been freelancing as a writer for years, tech articles, ghostwritten university essays, short sci-fi, a published book, a screenplay, so writing a comic was the logical next step. He found strangers on Facebook willing to critique his first draft, got his story into a 20-story anthology, and the Kickstarter raised around six thousand US dollars. Two volumes went into print.
What happened next is what became Comix.one. Every creator he spoke to had the same problem: a campaign in February, another in August, and nothing in between. Communities built, then lost, then rebuilt from scratch. Saurabh started DM-ing comic creators on Twitter and LinkedIn, including the head of marketing at DC Comics, who responded. The comics industry, it turned out, is surprisingly accessible and down to earth.
Comix.one is the in-between he couldn’t find anywhere else. It’s a marketplace, a crowdfunding platform, and a community space in one place, so creators don’t lose readers every time they move between tools. Creators keep 85%, the platform takes 15%. Compare that to Amazon, where creators hand over around 65% and then have to fight an SEO game in a crowded marketplace, or subscription platforms where 300-400 reads might earn a creator ten or twenty cents.
The full journey matters to Saurabh. Some creators come in with a finished book from a past Kickstarter and go straight into the marketplace. Others arrive with an idea and an artist, run a crowdfunding campaign to pay for production, handle fulfilment to backers, then decide whether to pitch to a publisher or distribute directly. Comix.one supports all of it, including the parts creators hate, like marketing and web kits.
Print on demand came through last year via Comix Wellspring, the biggest comic book printer in the US. Saurabh messaged people on LinkedIn, they responded. Creators from Australia, the US, Canada, Mexico and the UK are already shipping print-on-demand books to fans in America. There’s a print partner in Canada now, and a recent one in China for crowdfunding fulfilment, both introductions made by creators in the Comix.one community.
For two years Saurabh worked on Comix.one alone. He went from zero creators to 100 in year one, doubled it in year two. Then his sister joined to build the front end, and the catalogue jumped from 200 books to 2,000. He’s also brought in PR help from people who used to run PR at Archie Comics and manage creators at King Features, the syndicate behind Popeye and Beetle Bailey.
On funding, Saurabh is deliberate. He’s not chasing VC money. He’s watched well-funded platforms like Comixology and Zestworld raise millions, then drift away from what the community actually wanted, buying billboards in San Francisco and Forbes features for an audience that doesn’t read Forbes. He’s had investors suggest AI translation features while actual human translators sit in his community. His answer is to grow slower and keep the focus where it belongs.
He recently left his CTO role and now runs Comix.one alongside a small consultancy, with his sister working on both. When he’s not doing that he’s on Discord answering creator questions at all hours, or recording his own podcast, Freshly Pressed, where he interviews comic book creators.
Saurabh lived in Taiwan for a year and a half before moving to Sydney eleven years ago. He’s been to Adelaide and is already in conversations with a small press here called Amplify Press, and knows about Papercuts, the indie comics festival.
You can browse Comix.one at https://www.comix.one, download the iOS app, or email [email protected] if you have a creative idea. A bunch of first issues are free.
Links
Guest:
Website: https://www.comix.one/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/comix_app
Twitter: https://x.com/comix_app
YouTube:
Host:
Book the podcast: https://www.naina.co/product/the-100-podcast/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/naina
Website: https://www.naina.co
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5HwVipVYnxARyEjp4onfvp
YouTube:
Watch the full episode on YouTube & Spotify.
