Every company today is trying to become a media company, but few are actually succeeding. A Kids Company About is one of them. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I talked to Jelani Memory, the Founder and CEO of A Kids Company About, and I picked his brain on how exactly he went from writing and selling children’s books about tough topics, to overseeing a growing media empire. We talked about the need for authentic storytelling — in books or in your product or brand story — and how by trying to please everyone, you actually please no one. We also got into how to choose investors and what the future of media, particularly for kids, might look like. Enjoy this episode!
Main Takeaways:
- Look For Experience: People are effective when they authentically know or have experienced the problem you are trying to solve. Those people have credibility and also the ingrained desire to work on addressing that problem, thus making them better to work with all around. Everyone is an expert on something, so find where those around you can bring out their expertise however you need them most.
- You Choose Your Investors: When you are raising money, you are choosing who you bring into your ecosystem. You choose who to pitch to and you choose which investments make sense for your business. And even though it might be hard to turn down money, you should say no if and when an investor just isn’t right for you.
- Can’t Please Everyone: When you try to make a product or tell a story that connects with everyone, you actually create something that connects with no one. Lean into what is actually true or unique to you, and don’t worry if it doesn’t resonate with certain people. The people it does resonate with will appreciate what you have done and they will trust you more moving forward.
For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.
Key Quotes:
“I needed to figure out whether there was actually a there there. So I set up coffee with friends and have my little one copy of my book there. And I go, “Hey, look, here’s a thing I just made. What do you think? I made it for my kids.” And they would proceed to read it and they’d said this same thing every time, “Can I take this home and read it to my kids?” And I was like, “Really?” They’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know how to start this conversation, but I do now.” And that blew me away. And after that happens once or twice, you’re sort of like, “Okay, cool.” And then five times, 10 times, 20 times sort of like, okay, I could be making money right now if I just had more copies of these books.”
“We wanted to dive into these tough topics, but who do we want to tell those stories? And I realized that can’t just be, ‘Writers or authors.’ This has to be folks with life lived experience. And so we realized we would partner with folks with those stories to help them create their book, hence was born the workshop process to write a book in a day.”
“I’m a big fan of design and layout, typography, color. So we would focus and tell stories in that way to kids knowing that just visually, that would look different than every other children’s book out there, but might resonate in a different way and challenge both grownups and kids to go, “Can you read between the lines? Can you imagine the story? Can you use this as a jumping off point for a conversation and not just get locked inside of the dragon did this to the bear and then they rescued the so and so from the like…” Those are fine and there’s a million children’s books like that, but there’s only a handful of books that are like ours.”
“We always have to find somebody who’s essentially unimpeachable who has so much credibility, so much standing with that topic, that one, you might think of them as being inextricably associated with it. But two, you’d go, ‘Oh, of course they made that book. That makes all the sense in the world.’ So I made a list of 100 topics that I wanted to do. For topics like cancer or feminism, I was like, I’m not the person to write those, not a lot of experience and zero authenticity when it comes to those subjects. So it was easy to go point your compass in the right direction and find the person who can embody that.”
“We ended 2020 in that spot where I was like, I guess we’ve built a really great business. So I was like, why am I to change it? The thought process was there’s more stories to tell and there’s more storytellers to tell them. And there’s more ways to tell those stories. And because of my background, I knew more about telling stories through audio and more through telling stories through visual mediums, like film and video. And then I had a massive tech background, deploying a consumer electronic device as well as subscription apps and whatnot. So being able to bring some of those pieces to the business felt right and would allow us to scale our ability to tell story to kids and all the mediums that we thought made sense.”
“For any of the entrepreneurs listening, it’s like, you get to choose who you take your money from, not the other way around. And that’s so important. They’re joining your cap table, you’re not joining their cap table.”
Bio
Jelani Memory is the Founder & CEO of A Kids Company About, a company that creates content that takes on hard topics in a way that is geared toward children. He previously co-founded Circle Media Company
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Transcript:
Stephanie:
Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. I’m your host, Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission. Today on the show we have Jelani Memory who’s a founder and CEO at A kids Company About. Jelani, welcome.
Jelani:
It’s so wonderful to be here.
Stephanie:
I’m very, very excited to talk all things, kids and media. I feel like it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. So I’m very excited to have you on the show today. I would love to hear first, what is A Kids Company About and how did you create that company? Where did that idea come from?
Jelani:
Yeah. A kids Company About is a kids’ media company. We make books, podcasts. We’ve got an app or two. We tell stories for kids that we hope are the most important stories that kids ever hear on topics like mental health or racism or social issues or death, cancer, loneliness, boredom, adventure, creativity. We think kids are ready for stories that meet them where they’re at and talk up to them and not down to them and not merely try and entertain them, but empower them. The company started by accident-
Stephanie:
I love it.
Jelani:
… [crosstalk] back in 2018. I wrote a book for my kids titled A Kid’s Book About Racism. I had five at the time with one on the way blended [crosstalk] four.
Stephanie:
Wow. Five kids.
Jelani:
Yeah.
Jelani:
Every kid under the sun feels like they’re in my house. So four white step kids, one brown biological girl, and then one new little baby boy on the way back in 2018 who was born in August. So I wrote a book for them. I wanted them to always feel like they could talk with me, their black dad about race, culture, color, and racism and little did I know that that one little look that I wrote and designed and printed would leave an impact on them, but even more so leave a really massive impact on me based on their response to it. They loved it. They dove in. They asked new questions. They shared new experiences.
Jelani:
And they also gave me the best idea in the world, which was to make that little book more than one book, was to do books on every topic for kids so that they’d stop getting talked down to and start getting talked up to. So that was really the Genesis. I was chief product officer at another company at the time, a company called Circle .I left that company four months for having written my book to go chase this mad bonkers publishing endeavor to make really important books for kids, having no experience by the way really in publishing at all. I fancy myself slightly a writer and a little bit of a designer, but a whole lot of an entrepreneur. And I just was like, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to do this.” Yeah. Nobody is going to make these books and tell these stories. And now two years into it, we have 70 plus books. We have nine original podcast shows, all with different hosts and we have an app full of our hours and hours and hours of empowering and challenging and important video content for kids.
Stephanie:
Wow. Okay. So what were you feeling when you were thinking about jumping full-time onto this idea? Because I’m thinking, okay, chief product officer, that’s a pretty great role, obviously at a company that just got acquired. It was growing quick, something was well there.
Jelani:
Sure.
Stephanie:
What were the feelings, and you’re like, “I’m going to go try this thing.”
Jelani:
Yeah. And I founded the company too. So I had been there for five years. We had just closed our series B funding, so…
Stephanie:
Oh, you founded Circle.
Jelani:
Yeah. I founded Circle.
Stephanie:
Got it. Okay.
Jelani:
And it was a rocket ship for all intents and purposes. So who gets off a rocket ship when it’s halfway to the moon?
Stephanie:
Jelani does.
Jelani:
Jelani does. It was really simple. It was, can this company be fine without me? And the answer was yes. And then two, will I kill myself later if I don’t go try and make these books? And I was like, yeah, because I just could not let it go. It wasn’t a matter of, “Oh, somebody’s going to beat me to it.” It was, “If I don’t do this, no one will.” And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why I believe that. But at the time I was totally right and so the decision was quite easy. Go venture out and start this new thing. Tons of risk there, my wife, a total champ for being on board and look, it all worked out. It’s working out, which is cool, but that wasn’t a foregone conclusion then, but I’m so glad I did it.
Stephanie:
Oh, I love that. So I want to hear a bit about Circle then. What is Circle? So I know kind of the length of where you were versus where you are now.
Jelani:
Yeah. Circle. Well, look, in college, I’m two credit shy from a degree in theology and coin [inaudible] Greek. I became a photographer after college of all things, babies, weddings, and then commercial photography. And then I turned myself into a filmmaker after that, doing stuff for Nike and Adidas and Reebok.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Jelani:
And then a friend was like, “We should start a company together.” And I was like, “Why not? I’ve reinvented myself three times already.” And it was all about giving our kids a great relationship with technology, which obviously is a massive epidemic now, but we could sort of see where the puck was going that we were only going to become more connected. That it was only going to become more fraught and kids were going to get devices earlier and earlier. So we wanted parents to be able to parent in that space with their kids, not necessarily pure restriction or keep them away from the bad stuff, but all about being able to help their kids grow up with a healthy relationship with it.
Jelani:
So we called it Circle hardware, software, consumer electronics, blah, blah, blah. And all managed from an app to manage the devices in your home, pause the internet set time limit, spend times. And we genuinely, we invented at all that stuff. We literally owned the trademark for [inaudible] the internet.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Jelani:
And quite luckily got in contact with the Walt Disney company and they wanted a partner. So we launched the product as Circle with Disney.
Stephanie:
Wow.
Jelani:
Yeah. Back in 2015 and it was incredible. We we were making something that was revolutionary and groundbreaking as well as I think doing a lot of good in a lot of families’ lives and helping parents out, which is a big thing for me. So I spent my early days, I was the founding CEO and I stepped out of that role to focus on product and marketing. And then eventually sort of fell into the chief product officer role and co-founder and learned so much. I’d never founded a company before. I’d never had to manage people before. I’d never had to hire or fire, but I realized I was like, this is what I was made to do. This is so much fun to get to make all day long and solve really hard problems.
Stephanie:
That’s awesome. I mean, it seems like now your history and everything we’ve built up is perfect for where you’re at now. It’s like all your skills are coming together to have this media company for kids, which is really cool.
Jelani:
1000%.
Stephanie:
So when thinking about your first book, you wrote it for your kids. What did it look like when they were like, “Hey, you should make more of these and put it out to the world.” What were the next steps to actually publishing more than just one book and then having different types of books? What did that look like?
Jelani:
Yeah. I’ve never been asked that so succinctly, but I think I have three things. One was validation, the second was research and the third was planning. I needed to figure out whether there was actually a there there. So I set up coffee with friends and have my little one copy of my book there. And I go, “Hey, look, here’s a thing I just made. What do you think? I made it for my kids.” And they would proceed to read it and they’d said this same thing every time, “Can I take this home and read it to my kids?” And I was like, “Really?” They’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know how to start this conversation, but I do now.” And that blew me away. And after that happens once or twice, you’re sort of like, “Okay, cool.” And then five times, 10 times, 20 times sort of like, okay, I could be making money right now if I just had more copies of these books.
Jelani:
So that was sort of my validation of that there’s a there there. The research portion, I didn’t know how publishing worked and so I bought this really wonderful little book called The People’s Guide to Publishing it’s written by a guy who’s run an independent publisher for some 25, 30 years, guy named Joe Biel. And it was everything he’s learned about publishing in that span of time. And it was illuminating to go, oh, publishing’s a really bad business model, like really bad, but it doesn’t have to be. And it was perplexing to me to go, “Why do publishers behave in some of these… why do they do this?” So I was able to sort of like a candy store pick and choose what I wanted to take with me. And then things that I go, I don’t actually want to take that. I think I can bring some stuff from my past, as a startup founder to include in this business model and make something new, which then leads to the third one, which is the planning, constructing what the brand would look like.
Jelani:
Not visually, but structurally the go to market, the publishing process, literally just think about everything from the ground up. And that was a lot of fun. And there were a lot of assumptions made then that quite luckily we were right about a lot of them. We were right that we could workshop and write a book in a single day. And we’ve done that with all 60 plus of our books.
Stephanie:
Wow. A single day. How many pages are these books?
Jelani:
64 pages.
Stephanie:
Single day. That’s impressive.
Jelani:
And I’ll get back to that because [crosstalk].
Stephanie:
[crosstalk] I have a new standard for my producers now. Hillary’s going to be very upset, like in a single day, Jelani said.Jelani:
Yeah, we can do it. We conceived a book publisher as brand. I’m sure you probably have a handful of favorite publishers maybe, but the reality is you probably don’t buy books from them because of they’re the publisher. You buy them because it’s the author because it’s the topic or because it’s a part of a series franchise, that sort of thing. But you don’t go show me all the Simon and Schuster books when you go to the bookstore. You just don’t do that because that’s not how we relate to publishers. But if it could be a brand like Nike or Apple or Netflix, there’s some power there. And then the next part really was about, we wanted to dive into these tough topics, who do we want to tell those stories? And I realized that can’t just be, “Writers or authors.” This has to be folks with life lived experience. And so we realized we would partner with folks with those stories to help them create their book, hence was born the workshop process to write a book in a day.
Jelani:
And then I’m a big fan of design and layout, typography, color. So we would focus and tell stories in that way to kids knowing that just visually, that would look different than every other children’s book out there, but might resonate in a different way and challenge both grownups and kids to go, “Can you read between the lines? Can you imagine the story? Can you use this as a jumping off point for a conversation and not just get locked inside of the dragon did this to the bear and then they rescued the so and so from the like…” Those are fine and there’s a million children’s books like that, but there’s only a handful of books that are like ours. So we launched the business in 2019 with six books ready to ship and six books on pre-order, creativity, depression, anxiety, racism, cancer, and handful more. And it works. Parents, grandparents, therapists, doctors, lawyers, educators, you name it show up and buy these books to help start these important conversations with the kids in their lives.
Stephanie:
Wow. I love that. Okay. So when thinking about, even getting these books in front of people, like how did you get the word out that you had these six books come out ready to be bought?
Jelani:
Yeah. I always struggle with this answer. How do you launch a brand? It’s a combination of so many factors that it’s almost hard to keep track. So let me see if I can, at least elucidate what factors we had. One was we had all these authors who had made a thing with us and naturally they’ve got their own networks and what’s cooler than getting to say, “I wrote a book, come check it out.”
Stephanie:
[inaudible] like your many influencers.Jelani:
There are many influencers. Right? So that was really powerful. The second was, is we had a group of investors, all who had bought into this mission. And so now it’s like, “Hey, we’re launching on this day. I’m going to give you a handful of books and go proselytize everybody you can about what we’re up to and what we’re doing and that these books exist, et cetera, et cetera.” Third was getting a few press hits. So reaching out to local press, press that had covered my previous company, friends who were reporters, anybody sort of beg, borrow and steal to go, “Hey, we’re disrupting publishing, come check us out.” And try and get a few articles written.
Jelani:
And then it’s just pure hustle after that on your own Facebook page, Instagram, you name it. Once people start to show up, I mean, you find out really quickly, whether you’ve got something that people like and understand, or whether you have something that’s kind of garbage or people don’t get. Which is usually the biggest problem is sort of like, “I don’t understand what you’re selling. Can you just tell me what you’re selling.”
Stephanie:
Or why I need it. That sounds nice.
Jelani:
And then from there it usually is a snowball effect where you’re layering on things like affiliate marketing, digital ad spend, content marketing, et cetera, et cetera.
Stephanie:
Got you. Okay. So you’ve got these books out in the world. I’m trying to think about the arrangement with the writers. So like what does that actually look like? Because on one side, I hear you saying like, you don’t want to be a publisher. Like no one thinks about Simon and Schuster ever probably. I want to be the company that you is at the forefront where people are like, “Oh, thank you so much for bringing all these books to me.” But how do you work with writers which within my company, we do quite often, which can sometimes be a struggle where they’re like, “This is my story and it has to fit in this.” And then from my side, I’m like, “Well, this is how the company is, like this is a structure it has to be in,” which kind of sounds similar to you all. So like how do you go about finding these writers and working with them and letting them tell their story, but also fit within the constraints of your company?
Jelani:
Yeah. I think two things, one don’t work with writers and two, make the process lead to an inevitable conclusion. And so on the first point, most of the authors who author with us who create books with us have never written a book.
Stephanie:
So since they got a good story.
Jelani:
They have a good story and actually more importantly, they have an authentic experience. It was very… As I made my book for my kids. My kids responded well to it. My friends responded well to it. As we thought about starting a company, I went back to my book and just asked myself, what works about this? Why does it work so well? I didn’t understand why it was so effective. And is it part sort of the audacity of putting the word racism on the front of the kids’ book? It was part the no pictures thing. It was part the deep into my personal story. But more than that, I had an authenticity speaking about the subject from my own experience that not everyone has. So I thought, oh, then that makes the equation really easy. We always have to find somebody who’s essentially unimpeachable who has so much credibility, so much standing with that topic, that one you might think of them as being inextricably associated with it.
Jelani:
But two, you’d go, “Oh, of course they made that book. That makes all the sense in the world.” So for a topic like, and I made a list of like 100 topics that I wanted to do. For topics like cancer or feminism, I was like, I’m not the person to write those, not a lot of experience and zero authenticity when it comes to those subjects. So it was easy to go sort of point your compass in the right direction and find the person who can embody that. So we found a social worker and a medical doctor who treat pediatric cancer patients to write our cancer book. Duh, tons of experience there, credibility, authenticity. We didn’t even ask them, can you write well, because it wasn’t a part of the equation.
Jelani:
And for our feminism book, really wonderful entrepreneur, Emma Mcllroy runs a really killer brand called Wildfang, just a feminist through and through who bring an authenticity to that story that I could never do. So then what we do is we bring in those folks into a process that takes all the preciousness out of writing. Writing has become this really sort of, I don’t want to say hoity-toity, but that’s kind of the word that I want to use. It’s precious. It’s sort of like, “These are my words and I wrote a book and this paragraph and I just…”
Stephanie:
So offended when you’re like, ah, you got to change this. Don’t [crosstalk].
Jelani:
Exactly.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I experience this quite often.
Jelani:
Yeah. Why can’t it be more about the impact of the story and the importance of the story? And so writing a book in a day kills some of that preciousness where we create some urgency to go, we’re going to do it today. So we can’t be too precious. And two, their primary activity in the workshop is actually not to write, it’s to speak, it’s to talk, it’s to share. Our job is to help sort of package, makes sense of, ask questions, structure their words and edit along the way to go, “I get why you said that, but let’s get to the core of what this is.” And when you complete the manuscript in the room together during that workshop, who wrote what word is unimportant. The question we ask ourselves is first, would this make an impact on seven year old me? And two, does this embody the thoughts, feelings, and ideas of you, the author? And if we can say yes to both of those great. The book is done and it’s unimportant how we got there. And then go through some editing and design and those sorts of things.
Jelani:
But we lead in those processes as opposed to let the author lead. And they’re there as our litmus test and keep us honest, keep us true to the authentic story that they have. Now, what I’ve just described is like, it’s almost hard to call that writing. It’s something else. It’s almost like product ideation or development, but instead of trying to make the author the lead chef, we go, “Hey, come share your recipe with us, and we will work. Come share your ingredients. We already have a recipe. We just need your special ingredients to make this thing.”
Stephanie:
Oh, wow. I love that. I mean, that’s getting into the whole decentralizing everything in a way, where, why would you try and be an expert on everything when there’s experts all around us? You just have to find them and tap into them. I’m sure they want to share their stories or their expertise.
Jelani:
Yeah. And I’d take that further to say everyone is an expert on something and in fact, everyone is definitely an expert on their own story. So we anchor into the personal story in a way that very few kids’ books do. They are all deeply personal. So even a kid’s book about racism should be probably subtitled, like a kid’s book about racism, Jelani Memory’s experience. It’s one. It’s a kid’s book, not the kid’s book. And that’s an important distinction when you’re talking about experience related to a huge topic.
Stephanie:
I mean, how do you think about that when now you said you have podcasts, you have all kinds of media. Like you guys are a full media company now. How do you think about making a best seller or a podcast that does really well or something, but then also being like, and this is one person’s experience. Like this is not the book or podcast about that, it’s keeping it authentic to [inaudible] this person’s and maybe there’s someone who has the exact opposite or different, or 10X that. Or there’s so many different ways to express the story I’m sure everyone probably has a different way of thinking about it. How do you keep it authentic to each individual person that you talk to, and then also have the kid understand that too?
Jelani:
Yeah. I think it’s about being hyper authentic. There’s a kind of storytelling or a way that I think some of us can go about in the world where we try and make ourselves palatable to everyone. And we quite honestly, we do the exact opposite. We try and go so hyper authentic so that it’s easy to understand the things that are the same or like your experience and easy to jettison these things to go, that’s not my experience, but to know this is so deeply their experience that I don’t have to adopt it as my experience. I can know that this is where we differ or depart and still understand them and agree with them with different parts of their story. So we just sort of lean into that. I think with where kids media has gone across the last decade or so, it’s gone into this sort of hyper generalized everything to everybody, biggest box office numbers. How do we reach the most folks? And like Cocomelon comes to example. It’s like if you go that sort of vanilla, is it really anything anymore?
Jelani:
If a free falls in the forest, like will anybody watch Cocomelon. It’s like that sort of storytelling is not interesting to us at all, it’s about being hyper authentic and real. And then being able to hold more than one idea in your head at the same time to go, “I can hear this person and empathize and understand them, also knowing either my experience is different. Or I might not even agree with their experience, but I can value them and see them inside of this book.” That’s [inaudible].
Stephanie:
This is what adults need also.
Jelani:
I mean, is what… 1000%, kids are good at this.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I feel like kids actually are better. I mean, it just so many people these days they feel like are so, they’re polarized on one side or the other and there’s no way to even see the human behind an issue. And then it’s like, okay, that person’s completely written out. Instead of being like, that could be definitely their story, that could have definitely happened to them. However, I might not resonate with their truth or their belief system around X, Y, or Z, but I still see them as a human and that could have totally happened to them. And if it did, I’m very empathetic. You don’t really see enough of that. And so to me, it’s perfect bringing it back to the kids. So then hopefully it bubbles up to the adults too and the parents. It could have impact a lot more people than just kids.
Jelani:
I think so and look, kids, it’s very easy to change their minds and their ideas and their values, because they’re just now forming them in their childhood. Very hard for adults. But for us, it’s about creating those bridges. I think when an adult can go, “Oh, that topic, wasn’t that scary now to introduce and talk about. And oh wow, my kid is like, totally ready to talk about this. They’ve already thought about it.” Then starts to move that grown up in the direction where they go, “Aha, that wasn’t exactly what I thought that was. Or maybe some of my ideas are changing about this thing or at least I just understand it now.” Because I think the job of being an adult is sort of to pretend like you know everything.
Jelani:
And then definitely when it comes to sort of adult to kid is basically to enforce like, “Oh, I do know everything. And you have to listen to all the things that I say.” And the reality is we know we barely know anything. In fact, the older we get, the more we go, “I don’t really know much at all. I just kind of I’m politely pretending that I understand geopolitical and inflation and cryptocurrency.” You know what I mean?
Stephanie:
I know it all.
Jelani:
Yeah. It’s like, it’s just not possible. Our books come in a really stealth way as well as our podcast to sort of say, this is for the “Kids,” but adults will walk away and go, “Wow. I never knew that.” Which I find every time we make a new book or podcast or video, I go, “Huh, I never knew that.” And it’s led me to be a lot more open-minded about ideas.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I also feel like parents of this generation are a little bit more open-minded though to parenting in a different way. That’s what I say, I mean, a mom of three boys under four, like just in those past four years, what I’ve been exposed to and thoughts I’ve had to have and like, “Okay, how do I parent well?” You should apologize to your kid and you should listen to them and change your mind if they have a better opinion. And it’s such different parenting styles that are now kind of coming out than what I grew up with and generations before us. And it’s interesting seeing just a lot of things shift, I would say for the better. I mean, I guess it depends how you’re seeing things, but things like this could also even amplify these new ways of parenting and thought processes and like how to raise kids. And it’s all really exciting to watch just new generation raising kids in a very different way.
Jelani:
Yeah. I totally agree with you. And I would say that this is the best generation of parents that’s ever existed. And I say that without any sense of irony or sarcasm. I really mean that. Show me a generation previously that apologize to their kids ever. It just never happened. Now look, we get stuff wrong. We’re really afraid of screwing up our kids, probably a little too much.
Stephanie:
Too much. Yeah.
Jelani:
[inaudible] sort of the helicopter parenting and stuff like that. But it’s not like the boomer generation, it’s not like the silent generation, just sort of send our kids into the woods and sort of say, “I hope you survive.” We were there and they know us as emotionally complex beings that are there in life with them and that’s massively healing and growing and beneficial for kids to feel loved and known, seen and be happy and healthy.Stephanie:
Yeah. I completely agree. I was just looking up, there’s this Instagram account of this woman, I feel like you would love. It’s like the Mama Village or something like this. She’s this Canadian mom. And she has all these posts that are basically like going through just exactly what you and I are saying of like, “Hey, if you do something wrong, you can apologize. Like here’s what it actually looks like behind the scene for the kids. And if they’re doing this, here’s how to talk to them. And here’s how to let them express their emotions and be mad.” It’s really good. And it reminds me a lot of the conversation we’re having right now, just like little tidbits.
Stephanie:
So we’ll link it up in the show notes for anyone who’s like, what account is that? Because I think it’s the Mama Village or something like that. But things like that though, I’m like who had those kind of tips back in the day, when they were raising kids of like little quick moments to be like, “Oh, that’s a good point. I probably did something a little, [inaudible] maybe I could have chosen to do something differently if I had this one little piece of advice here.”
Jelani:
Yeah. The number one bit of feedback I get on our books from adults and specifically usually a millennial parent is I wish I had this when I was a kid universally, because the reality is we didn’t, nothing even close to it.
Stephanie:
Yeah. So when thinking about branching out and expanding your channels, you had books and then you are doing podcasts now. Tell me a bit about what that thought process looked like to get on other platforms and other outlets.
Jelani:
Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, it was a massive risk. We had reached scale with books and had also reached breakeven, which is like, great. And we had more money in the bank than we had raised. I was like, “This is kind of cool.” So we ended 2020 in that spot where I was like, I guess we’ve built a really great business. So I was like, why am I to change it? The thought process was there’s more stories to tell and there’s more storytellers to tell them. And there’s more ways to tell those stories. And because of my background, I knew more about telling stories through audio and more through telling stories through visual mediums, like film and video. And then I had a massive tech background, deploying a consumer electronic device as well as subscription apps and whatnot.
Jelani:
So being able to bring some of those pieces to the business felt right and would allow us to scale our ability to tell story to kids and all the mediums that we thought made sense. So went out raised a series A, $7 million led by the wonderful folks at pendulum and a handful of other funds and angel investors to support the growth into podcasts and to apps and to video. And then grew the requisite team to support that. And it’s been a wild year. We started the year, I think at 10 people, we’re 25 now and have built so much stuff. It’s been really cool to watch. And Apple recognized our flagship podcast, a kid’s book about the podcast as one of their top shows of 2021.
Stephanie:
Cool. Amazing. Congratulations. [inaudible] exciting.
Jelani:
Yeah. Like not [inaudible] that. I think one of the badges of honor there is that it was the only kid show for that honor and just a credit to Apple and also credit to [inaudible] storytelling that we’re doing for kids really elevating what a podcast can be for kids. So it was really about taking the process that we make our books and going, “What can we keep from this? And what do we need to jettison when it comes to making these other media formats?” And it turns out there was a lot that we had gained and learned and could adapt from our workshop process for podcasts and for our video content specifically kids’ class about, which is sort of like our version of masterclass for kids. And so we workshop all that content. It happens in a different way where it’s not like the whole podcast gets written in a day, like that doesn’t even make any sense. But the conceit, the concept, the episode count, the approach, the tone, like all that gets workshopped in a day.
Jelani:
And then what’s great is then we go to execute. And by the way, like this is usually done with folks who’ve never podcasted before, all that authentic experience. Can they show up there and tell a story in an authentic way? Whether that’s through interviews or through monologue or through something scripted or unscripted. So we’ve spent the year figuring out how to do that, doing that, and then trying to scale that. And so excited about 2022 and what that represents for us to really sort of go after it now having really refined the process to make all the different types of media.
Stephanie:
Yeah. Wow. So when thinking about taking on investment, how did that… I mean, what would you maybe do differently and how did it help you guys, of course, around hiring you had extra cash, but like were there other things you were looking for when taking on an investment partner?
Jelani:
First, I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. I think we executed really well. And this is like, for any of the entrepreneurs listening, it’s like, you get to choose who you take your money from, not the other way around. And that’s so important. They’re joining your cap table, you’re not joining their cap table. So I was choosy, whether that was around the conviction of the brand and how much they bought into what we were doing, or what other businesses they’re funded, invested in to what the value add could be. So really proud of the group of investors we brought on. We did something really unusual. Something like 93% of the capital came from black and brown investors for our series A. I don’t know of another business that’s done that. We wanted to reflect the diversity in our talent pool and in our team also in our cap table. And that’s usually the one place that ends up being really white and really male and almost in unavoidable fashion. And we were just like, “Nah, that’s not us. That’s not who we are.”
Jelani:
And then like more money, more problems, right? Like having more cash in the bank is not always an awesome thing. And so it was really important for us to go, like we’re going to spend a bunch of money. We’re going to lose a bunch of money initially, because we’re going to be investing into the business pretty heavily. And we’re going to need to emotionally deal with that and cope with that reality, going from like a breakeven business, into a money losing business because of that investment. But really proud of one, the approach we took in taking on investment, the investors that we brought on and then the investment of the capital across 2021.
Stephanie:
Amazing. All right. My last question is around the future, when it comes to the future of media and kids content, like what are you planning on? I would say within the next like five to 10 years because I can tell already you’re a long term thinker. You’re planning for the future. What do you right now? And what are you kind of preparing for?
Jelani:
Yeah. The things that we’re thinking about and seeing and planning for are all about authentically speaking to kids where they’re at. So I’ll give you a good example. Our book series, A Kids Book About is ranged from five to nine. You go under that and kids lose interest because they don’t have pictures and you go over that and kids really lose interest because they go, “I don’t read kids books. I’m not a kid anymore.” So for us like making products specific to kids experience and also their age demographic is really important. We’re exploring things for kids in that sort of early adolescence, between teenage and then older teenagers and then parents, because turns out parents have a lot of impact on kids.
Jelani:
And so speaking directly to them becomes quite important. We want to tell stories everywhere that kids are and not in a fake or put upon or cheesy way in a real way. And so you can think of all of the social media platforms that kids spend time on. We have been sort of giving a really concerted effort to go, how do we show up in those spaces in an authentic way? And not in like a, “Here’s a cheesy video you have to watch that your parents want you to watch.”
Stephanie:
Sure. Yeah.
Jelani:
For real, and that’s really exciting for me because that’s a hard problem to solve. I watch my kids and how they spend their time on TikTok. And it’s like, they’re not trying to watch like an ad from the Walt Disney company, they’re just not. And then, all the formats we want to do long form, short form. We want to be in the documentary space. We want to be in the animation space, theatrical film, TV, and then educational tooling. We think of ourselves as a bit of a education company, a bit of an entertainment company and a bit of something I don’t… Empowerment company, because of all the things that we’re up to. So five, 10 years from now, my hope is that every classroom, every household where a kid from zero to 18 is present, they have one of our stories there that’s being used to hopefully shape empower, encourage or inform that kid there.
Stephanie:
Yeah. I love that. Very powerful. Jelani, thank you so much for coming on today. I could really sit here and chat with you for at least another hour on all things media and kids. So we’ll have to have you back in the future, but until then, where can people learn more about you and A Kids Company About?
Jelani:
Really wonderful to be on and to find more about us and all of our products just go to akidsco.com.
Stephanie:
Amazing. Thanks so much.
Jelani:
Thank you.
