North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring, and as a leader, it's your job to deliver. If you're wondering where purpose-driven leaders direct their time, team, budget, and energy, you'll find out here on the North Star Leaders Podcast. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of this show.

Remember, purpose isn't what you hang on the wall. It's what you do when the choice is hard. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Ali Albazaz.

Ali is CEO of Inkitt, the AI-driven entertainment company. Ali, welcome to the show.

Ali Albazaz

Thanks for having me, Lindsay. Great to catch up this way again.

Lindsay Pedersen

I know. It's really good to see you. It's great to have you on the show.

To start us off, Ali, what is the most energizing part of your job that others would never guess from the outside?

Ali Albazaz

I'm a software engineer. I love problem-solving. I think being in this entertainment industry and being a software engineer is just such a cool playground to try out all these software building principles or the product management principles and applying them to creating best-selling books and creating blockbusters and figuring out how we A-B test cliffhangers and how do we improve a generation of AI movies now.

Just tinkering on these things. It's not a typical CEO job being so in the weeds and actually being on the innovation front. I definitely put two or three hours a day being really deep in the weeds and figuring those things out because that's actually the most energizing.

I love that building and solving the puzzles. Yeah, that's super fun.

Lindsay Pedersen

Tell my audience a little bit about Inkitt, what you're building, the brands underneath Inkitt.

Ali Albazaz

Yeah, absolutely. The overarching thing that we're building, we call it the operating system for storytellers. The idea, the vision is that we help storytellers write a million-dollar novel systematically and then turn it into a movie with a click of a button and making it as easy as that.

The way we're achieving that right now is we have three different apps. We have the InkIt platform, then we have the Galatea platform, and then we have Candy Jar, which is our third platform. There are three distinct separate apps, which are interconnected.

Through this system, we're currently helping a new storyteller make a million dollars in sales every seven days. The way it works is on the InkIt platform, there as a storyteller, you have access to a community of readers and writers. You go and you can start writing your novel.

You get help from the community. You can get help by the AI to finish writing your novel, to improve your novel, to test different titles, to test different covers. You can see what lands or what doesn't land with the community so you can refine and improve your story.

What we do there is we see InkIt as a content discovery engine, where we discover the most talented storytellers. Once we discover a great story, the story moves to Galatea, which is our premium e-book distribution app, where we sell the stories directly to consumers. There, we start doing tests on the stories, seeing how do we tell the story the best way possible.

How do we improve the beginning of the story so that we increase the start to finish reading the first chapter rate, which is an incredibly important metric so that people get into the story. We test different versions of how do we slice and dice the storytelling to improve the reading experience. We're doing a lot of tests.

That's how we are systematically creating these million-dollar novels by constantly iterating over the stories. Then, once we have a million-dollar novel, that's when it moves to the third platform, which is Candy Jar, our streaming platform primarily focused at romance audiences. That's where we turn it into a romance movie, which you can consume right now over the Candy Jar app.

Actually, recently, we started our partnership with Prime Video, where you can now watch it on Prime Video. It's going live very soon. There's multiple things right now in the making.

That's how these three apps are interconnected. The overall mission really is helping storytellers achieve their vision, be able to tell their story, and superpowering them with technology and with AI so that they can reach massive audiences, and they can build their franchises across formats.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love it. I'm partial to all three of these brands, especially Galatea. I love these brands.

I love what you're building.

Ali Albazaz

Thanks to you for working with us a couple of years ago to really figure out the positioning for these brands and what they mean to our audiences. You did a phenomenal job. I'm a big fan of yours.

I read your book, I think, three times or so. I'm a big fan of figuring out who we are and what we stand for.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. Thank you. Ali is the ultimate star student who not only read my book three times, but had the whole executive team and maybe even everybody in the company read it so that when I talk to somebody in your company, they're playing back to me things that I have preached.

It's pretty neat. It's our branding Bible here. Speaking of that, and this is what you started with, you consider yourself a product person.

You're an engineer, and you're deeply interested in the excellence of the product itself, and you consider yourself new to brand. What was it that lit you up about brand that made you want to even have a brand Bible at Inkett, that made the whole idea of brand strategy relevant for a product-driven leader like you?

Ali Albazaz

What I started to realize was when we started to hit something like, I don't know, 50, 60 million or $70 million in annual revenue, the way we were operating was extremely scrappy. We were running ads on meta in whatever is the most converting way. Then when we would go and actually talk to the consumer who had seen our advertising or so, or had maybe installed the app and uninstalled it, we would go and ask them like, hey, we are from Galatea, or we're from Inkett, or we're from Candy Jar.

They wouldn't really know who we are. They had seen some ad and then clicked on it, and it felt kind of like by accident, and they didn't remember anything about it. We kind of realized like, hey, we're building this huge company.

We want to build a company that still is there in 100 years from now. People look at it, and they're like, oh, wow, these beautiful brands. That's something that we're really proud of even in 100 years.

Something like a Coca-Cola or something that people like.

Lindsay Pedersen

Disney, yeah.

Ali Albazaz

Disney. That's kind of where it became clear to me like, oh, there is a really important piece of the puzzle that we're really missing. Then when I started to read a little bit about branding, and we're like, what's your brand strategy?

What's your positioning? Who are you? What's the branding ladder?

Then I realized, oh, wow. We actually, I think if you would go around in the office and ask people, everybody has probably a different understanding of it, and there is no alignment, and we don't actually actively communicate it. Then I started reading a bunch of branding books, and it became clear to me like why, for example, Instagram and Facebook are two different apps and not the same.

They didn't merge them into one, or why I forgot what is the upper level from like Hyundai or Honda.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, the master brand architecture, yeah.

Ali Albazaz

Yeah, so they have like one brand for like the cheaper consumers and one more for the expensive ones, and like those kind of things like Toyota and Lexus, I think, right?

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, yeah. Like Toyota is the mother brand. You're actually saying something different from what I thought.

You're saying there's sort of the down market. There's the upmarket version, the Lexus to the Toyota, the Acura to the Honda.

Ali Albazaz

Right, exactly. And then in my past work, I felt like, "Oh, yeah, you would just, like, put them all into one," or I didn't really understand that. And then, like, starting to read about brand, that kind of made me realize, "Oh, no, you actually need to have, like, a very crystal clear brand positioning."

And then, once you're able to communicate that in a very crystal clear way, that's when you're positioning yourself as an expert in that area, and that's when you start building trust with the consumers, that you're like, "Hey, Galatea is the romance app, and it will always be a romance app, and we're, like, the expert romance, and we help you have me time, and that's why it stands for what it stands for."

And being able to very clearly articulate that helps you then communicate that clearly to them so that they can then clearly communicate that to their friends and family, and then that kind of, like, becomes your brand. And then that's, like, how they will remember it, so that when we call them two months later and you're like, "Did you install Galatea?" and they're like, "Oh, yeah, that app about the romance specialist e-book app," so that they recall who we are. And that became very important to us.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, well, and what I hear you saying is you build this 60, 70, 80 million in recurring annual revenue, and there was sort of a point where, well, two things happened. One is kind of like that low-hanging fruit of just sort of like throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what's – the value of that started to decrease, like you've sort of already picked the low-hanging fruit. That was like one moment, and then also the durability of the brand became really important to you.

Like we actually want to build something that's going to be around in decades and decades, and there was a little bit of friction between we just do meta ads and we want to be the Disney of the 21st century, and so you wanted to sort of close that. I'm wondering if there was another pain that you were in that was sheer economic pain because you had not done the brand positioning, like price – willingness to pay and kind of like price-sensitive. Was it just like we want to be around on a long time, so we need to do our brand right, or was there a truly like if all you cared about was profit, would you have still done it?

Ali Albazaz

The primary reason was growing beyond where we were back then, right? Like $70 million was like when we were then, and then like we realized we wanted more word of mouth. We had very little word of mouth because people didn't know even what to say to their friends and family, and we wanted to kind of grow beyond that, and that's what the brand positioning helped us achieve.

Like, you know, we defined the brand ladder, that we're like the romance specialist, that, you know, we help you get absorbed into delicious romantic stories. You know, which you helped us like have like a joyful recharge, and like we started communicating that everywhere on the product, and that started to kind of like help us increase the word of mouth. Word of mouth made us grow.

We ended up having like ads that started performing better. We have now just announced that we just reached a million paid subscribers, so we're like significantly grown past that, and that's helped us really kind of like nail our brand positioning for the apps that we have, which have been around romance. And as we speak, actually, that's kind of like a really cool thing I'm really excited about now is like now that we figured out like the entire kind of romance audience, we have had this tremendous growth.

We're actually going now also beyond romance and to other genres, so there is like a big announcement that is coming actually this week where we are announcing a new app, which is going to be our fourth app, and it's going to be called Ironblood. Ironblood is going to be our new streaming app focused on superhero action sci-fi movies, and we're basically using the exact same flow, exact same pipeline, helping authors achieve their dreams, but now just also beyond romance and also helping authors who are writing superhero action stories tell their stories in a movie format, so yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

I'm so excited. This is the first time I'm hearing this. I'm so excited.

I have so many questions. I'm like stumbling over myself. Well, what I hear there is, yeah, you did get to an economic ceiling where the cost of customer acquisition in the old way was no longer, and so word of mouth and customer evangelism really was necessary to continue to grow, so there's sort of like a scale inflection point where you needed to have that crystal clarity in order to get your audience to have recall and evangelism, which then allows them to grow, and they can't have that without crystal clarity. They're just not going to be able to know what to say without you feeding them, and then because of that scale, it allows for sort of synergy with the other brands. It allows you to launch new brands like Ironblood.

Wow, this is so cool. Yeah.

Ali Albazaz

This was something you helped us define, and you helped us, and you said, hey, Galatea could become this kind of app where you could have all the genres, or you could become this romance specialist, right, and that's the path that we took, and Galatea is now the romance specialist, and Candy Jar is the romance streaming platform, and that's why there will be no superhero action movies on Candy Jar, but they will be on Ironblood, so being able to communicate that and having a name that resonates is very important.

Lindsay Pedersen

And I'm curious, and you don't have to answer if this is confidential, but the target audience for Galatea skews heavily female. Yes. Candy Jar is not the same demographic as Candy Jar, but also heavily female.

Is Ironblood not so much? Are you now balanced or more male?

Ali Albazaz

Yeah, so Galatea is very female. Candy Jar is very female. Inkit is more mixed and diverse, and we're taking the stories from Inkit for Ironblood.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. That's the part I was missing. I see.

Ali Albazaz

Yeah. It's still the same pipeline. It's still the same pipeline, still discovering great authors on Inkit, and then directly going to Ironblood.

And yes, like for when you're talking about superhero action content, it tends to be like majority male. There's a lot of women who also like action and sci-fi, but you're right. It's majority, then it's going to be male.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. That's cool. One of the things that I really enjoy about your team is even though, at least in the case of Galatea, not as much Inkit, but Galatea and Candy Jar, it's a very female audience and you are a mixed male and female team, but that doesn't stop you from empathizing with a very female audience.

So the fact that you demographically are different from your audience did not impair your ability to deliver a really big empathetic promise to them. I admire that because it's sort of a different leadership skill and sort of a Jedi mind trick to like get inside the head of somebody who's really quite different from you and serve them in a way that is different from how you would want to be served by an ebook, for example.

Ali Albazaz

That's right. Yeah. As a guy having built NAB with Candy Jar, we are the largest American microdrama company.

Galatea is the second largest reading platform after Kindle. So I have an all around focus around romance and really having dabbled down on these brands. We have Tate Diggs on Candy Jar.

Oh, I love this. And we just announced this partnership with the All-American Rejects who did a microdrama, the band, really like dabbling down on these things. I must say, like, it all comes from the team.

You know, you're right. Like I'm not the audience myself. I try really, really hard to empathize and understand.

I speak with a user at least once a week, and I've been doing that for over 10 years. I use the products, read the books as much as I can, but I'm not the user myself. So that's why it is incredibly important to have an incredibly good team who has a better understanding than I have, and they're making the shots.

They're making the decisions. All I can do is I can say like, hey, I think we need to have a brand strategy. Let's align on that.

And then like, okay, we write it down and like give that to the team and say like, hey guys, this is the alignment. You go run with it. You make the decisions.

That said, I must say also as a tech company in San Francisco with 55% of female, it's also a bit of an anomaly. So we have quite a diverse team.

Lindsay Pedersen

That is an anomaly, and I did not know that. So part of this is you're kind of talking about your way of leading, being a leadership team, not just a single leader. Tell me more about the culture and like maybe tell me about a moment where you really felt like we got the culture right here.

Ali Albazaz

It's easy to in hindsight to now do that. It was incredibly hard in the beginning and getting like the ingredients right. First of all, you need an amazing team.

You need to have a team that understands the users who has the curiosity to understand the users or are the users themselves. And then it's all about like creating rituals and things that actually help them be more connected to their readers. Right.

So, for example, like every week Monday, we schedule a call with a user with every single anchor, with every single person who works here. They have a phone call and that kind of like switches. Like, you know, one Monday is with Inkit.

Then the next Monday is Gautier. The next Monday is Candy Jar. And then like every person is scheduled for a phone call.

And you pick up the phone. There is like, we give you some guidance of like roughly like, hey, these are the topics we're interested in this week. But it's primarily around like building that empathy and understanding.

And like you pick up the phone and you realize at some point like, oh, wow, like three out of like five phone calls I have with Gautier users. There is a baby screaming in the background. Oh, my gosh.

Why is that? That's so interesting. It sounds like a lot of moms are, you know, are.

It gives you like additional learnings and understandings. That's been an incredible thing. The other thing we do is like every week Wednesday.

So today at 12, we get our lunch delivered. And 12 or 15 is when our screenings start. So the movie that we're releasing this week, Friday is always screened on Wednesday here to the team.

And we collect feedback. We get ready for promotion and so on. So the team gets to watch the movie like two days earlier.

And we do that every week. We watch it together. There is feedback on like for romance movies.

There's like the attractiveness of the guy is incredibly important. And I have become quite an expert. So we talk about like the attractiveness of the guy or like how the chemistry between the main actors are like, you know, how is the camera work?

And we discussed the movie and the team has been able to like really put themselves into the user's shoes and have this understanding. And I think we have reached a point now that the team that is at Inked today is either the user themselves or they're like, they have very high EQ to put themselves in user's shoes. And that has led them to all the successes that we have, you know, like reaching a million in paid subscribers, Tate Diggs coming to us like big Hollywood people coming to us.

The biggest micro drama actors only want to work with us now. They don't want to work out elsewhere. Candy jar movie quality isn't always a standout across like all the micro dramas that you hear out there.

That's kind of like the feedback that we keep hearing is. And the reason we get that feedback and the reason these people come to us is because we're not trying to copy anybody else. We're not looking at the competitors and saying like, oh, I don't know if you're how familiar you are with the micro drama space, but there's like a hundred plus apps originated in China that came to the space that are trying to do this.

They're like all about your money. They're like all about kind of like squeezing every cent out of the user, creating content that it doesn't really feel good watching. You feel at the end of the day.

And we don't do any of that. Like we we're not looking at them and we're like, Hey, you know, they're look at how they're like monetizing. Let's copy that.

Or so we do not, we actively don't. What I keep telling the team is talk to the users, understand them. Let's create something we think they're going to love.

And that's what matters at the end of the day. And that's what we've been focusing on. Like probably 99% of our energy goes on like deeply understanding the users.

And there's maybe 1% on like, let's see what the competition is doing, like be able to look left and right. But like being user focused has been an incredibly important piece of our culture.

Lindsay Pedersen

There's so many things that you said that I love. First of all, there's ritualizing customer empathy building with a weekly user call, I think is so neat. And there's nothing that replaces what happens when you hear a baby crying in the background.

There's no survey. There's no even focus group that can make real to what life is like for that person. And by kind of instantiating it with ritual like that, that is so powerful and the weekly together viewing, viewing the creations themselves is there's something celebratory.

And now because you've been talking to users every week on Mondays, you can view it as though you are that user, or you can step inside the head of whoever you consider to be the audience in a very like immediate way. I love that use of ritual.

Ali Albazaz

And then when you say like Lindsay, when we did the workshop with you and you said like, Oh, you know, at the end of the day, we're giving people like a joyful recharge. And then once you hear that, like, that's kind of like the theory and like we have like we are brand posters, like our entrance like here and like everybody reads them. But then like once they have those phone calls and they create that empathy, then they understand like, Oh, so that's the type of joyful recharge.

So they have a stressful day. Now I understand it when they say like they have a stressful day, what kind of a stressful day? And then they hear the baby in the background and you're like, Oh, the mom is, you know, like, Hey, yeah.

Like, you know, when I put the baby to sleep, then I read some Gautier or watch some candy jar. And we understand what are like the type of interactions that we need to build in the user interface. We don't interrupt them.

You know, we want them to be like really deep into the story and like it helps one prioritize much better.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's a really powerful word here because there's so many directions you could go, but it helps you prioritize who's Sally. How is Sally or ex Debbie going to perceive this story? How is she going to experience it?

I feel like we could talk for another hour and I would still be just scratching the surface of things I want to talk to you about, but I want to let you go soon. But before I do that, I have five rapid fire questions to just fun, single word answer to finish us off for you game.

Ali Albazaz

Sounds good. Let's do it.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. If you were going to walk on stage, what song would you like to walk on to?

Ali Albazaz

Oh my God. There is this, I don't know the name of the song, but there is this song where in the movie Rocky, where he's like running up the stairs. Of course.

I have the tiger.

Lindsay Pedersen

I have the tiger.

Ali Albazaz

And then there is the other one with the trumpet. I forgot what that one is. There is the, there's like a symphony version of that as well.

Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

We're going to put that in the show notes. That is. Yeah.

That's epic. Okay.

Ali Albazaz

It's called gonna fly now. Oh, I'm a fly now. Yes.

Lindsay Pedersen

I am impressed that you know that. Okay.

Ali Albazaz

Because that's like when I started running my running playlist, that's the first song.

Lindsay Pedersen

wow. Okay. And now I'm learning something new about you.

Okay. Next question. What is always in your refrigerator?

Ali Albazaz

Actually, like, you know, I don't cook that much. So our fridge is often very empty, to be honest with you. We order.

Lindsay Pedersen

Nothing's in our, nothing is always in our refrigerator. Yeah.

Very little.

Ali Albazaz

Very little. There's no constant. Maybe. Oh yeah.

Right now there is always like a milk bottle for the baby. That's definitely in there.

Lindsay Pedersen

Okay. Milk bottle for the baby. What is your wind down ritual at the end of the day?

Ali Albazaz

Right now is putting the baby to sleep. That's my job every night. And that's fun.

So I like, yeah, did that last night and he was very happy and putting him to sleep and seeing him at night. It's fun. Beautiful.

Lindsay Pedersen

That is beautiful. What is something that you are surprisingly good at?

Ali Albazaz

Maybe like. To the point earlier, finding hot guys for our candy bar movies. That's a, it's a skill built over the last two years.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. That's a knack that you have. That is a knack for Ellie.

Okay. And last but not least. Are you an early to the airport person or a cutting it close person?

Ali Albazaz

Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm usually very last minute.

Very last minute. Always like hope in the Uber. Like, I'm going to make it.

I'm going to make it. I think every Uber driver hates me because I'm like, Hey, can we do a little bit faster, please?

Lindsay Pedersen

You need that adrenaline.

Ali Albazaz

Yeah.

Lindsay Pedersen

I love that. Oh my gosh. Such a fun conversation.

My friend. As we close, how do people learn more about you, about Inkit and all of the brands you're building?

Ali Albazaz

Go to. Inkit.com. There you find the links to Inkit, Galatea and Candy Jar.

Follow on our social media. We have the Inkit page, the Galatea page and Candy Jar page. And if you're looking to join a company to build the future of entertainment, it's the right place.

We have many, many openings. Inkit.com slash jobs.

Lindsay Pedersen

Awesome. Okay. Thank you so much, Ali.

Ali Albazaz

Thank you for having me, Lindsay. It was, this was super fun.

Lindsay Pedersen

Thanks for listening to this episode of North star leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North star leader, whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com.

Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North star leaders.