v.Vanday

About Vanday

The DAM I always wanted to build.

by someone who helped build Webdam and has spent 20+ years on both sides of the DAM problem — the first decade as a user, the last decade-plus building.

LA · founder, vanday

I helped build Webdam — one of the first cloud-based DAMs — and spent the decade-plus since consulting and training teams on digital asset management. Before that, a decade in advertising and publishing — chasing the same shots, fighting the same folder structures, asking the same "does anyone have that photo of…" question on the same internal channels.

I've watched enterprises spend six figures on tools that take six months to deploy, six weeks to train a team on, and six clicks to find a single photo. I've sat in meetings where someone explained, again, why the "image library" couldn't be searched the way humans search. I've helped roll out platforms so heavy that customers gave up and went back to Dropbox folders. I've watched five-person creative teams pay enterprise prices for features they'd never use.

Nearly twenty years of watching the same pain. Time to solve it once and for all — so I started building Vanday.

What I learned that the incumbents missed.

  1. 01
    Small teams don't need less DAM. They need a different DAM.

    Stripping features off an enterprise DAM doesn't make a small-team product. You have to start from "what does a three-person creative team actually do on a Tuesday afternoon" and build outward from there.

  2. 02
    The thing that breaks is search, not storage.

    Storage is solved. Photos sit happily in S3 buckets and Dropbox folders for years. What breaks is the moment a marketer says "we need that shot of the ceramics from last spring" and nobody can find it. Auto-tagging, smart search, and "type a vibe" was the unlock — and the AI to do it well only got cheap enough in the last eighteen months.

  3. 03
    Pricing should match value, not headcount.

    Enterprise DAMs charge per seat, which means inviting your agency or a freelancer doubles your bill. Vanday charges by usage. Editors are capped, viewers are free and unlimited. The whole org can see the library; only the people who upload count toward your plan.

What Vanday is, in one paragraph.

A digital asset management tool for small creative teams. We auto-tag, auto-crop, search, and publish images and video to every channel your audience lives on. We integrate with Canva, the social networks, and (soon) the Drives and Dropboxes your photos already live in. We're priced for teams that count seats on one hand. And we don't ship anything I wouldn't use myself.

Who I'm building for.

Indie creators with too many shoots and not enough hours. Two-person agency teams that just landed their fifth client. In-house marketing teams of five to twenty-five people whose CMO won't sign a six-figure enterprise-DAM contract. If you've ever asked Slack "does anyone have that photo of [thing]," Vanday is for you.

How I'm building this.

Vanday is founder-led and intentionally small. No VC pressure to grow before the product is ready. No junior support reps who've never seen your data. No enterprise sales process. Just the work — and the first 200 customers helping decide what gets built next.

That's the deal: get in early, help shape what comes next, lock the founding-team rate for two years.

Start now.

Vanday is live. The first 100 workspaces lock founding-team pricing for two years.

LA, Founder, Vanday

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