Alankar Khanna, Ty Keough and Oliver Breitbart want to run the Internet.

The three sophomores, all majoring in business administration, lead the product incubation division of Khanna’s eight-month-old startup, JAA Media. Named after its three founders, the company has captured a niche within the world of social media marketing and delivers unique storytelling content to spur product promotion for both their own brands and clients.

JAA Media, initially founded by Khanna and two other friends, directly owns a faceless social media network that has more than 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Those followers and their surrounding network generate around 1.5 billion TikTok views per month on JAA Media’s English content. (JAA Media also produces content in French, Spanish and Italian, which Khanna said is “less monetized,” but still averages several hundred million views a month.) 

“We basically built this portfolio of brands and we have so many accounts and so many videos going up every day,” Khanna said. “Then we just promote [products].” 

Khanna, Breitbart and Keough head JAA Media’s product division. Keough oversees operations, which include communicating with suppliers and auditing products. Breitbart leads marketing efforts for the company’s brands through advertising placements outside of JAA-owned pages, including with influencers and Instagram’s biggest meme pages. JAA Media’s content development side, which focuses on generating viral content, is run by Khanna’s two co-founders.

JAA Media eschews artificial intelligence content generators; instead, all of its content, which now averages around 600 videos a day, is generated by a team of human copywriters and content creators. It’s a logistical nightmare, but the process is necessary to JAA Media’s success because it sets them apart from other media companies, Khanna said.

“We talked to a lot of people [who work] in the space,” Khanna said. “They’re always like, ‘How are you guys posting this many unique videos?’ Because it’s one thing to post 300 videos and it’s another to create 300 unique pieces of content.”

Content creators can post a million videos using bots, but each of them typically only gets around 10 views, rendering the content meaningless, Khanna said. Still, creating meaningful content isn’t easy. 

“The challenge is [it has to be] subtle enough, [so] it doesn’t feel like an ad, and it feels like a story,” said Kyle Mayer, chair of the management and organization department in the Marshall School of Business.

The strategy has worked well for JAA Media so far. A few hours after the Daily Trojan initially interviewed Khanna, Keough and Breitbart, they launched a new wellness supplement brand. Based on its first few hours of sales data, the product is on track to sell out in two weeks, Khanna said.

“This kind of speed is pretty standard,” Khanna said. “The last one we launched…we did it super similarly for two to four days, and then it just sold out. This [product] had [more] stock, so we were able to just pump it now.”

When partnering with brands, JAA Media asks potential clients to fill out a survey about their advertising needs to inform the kind of content they produce. Challenges arise when each client has different media needs and wants. 

“Sometimes it can just be hard. It’s like you’re running different strategies within one overarching strategy … so our scripts are constantly needing to be shifting and variable and changeable,” Keough said. “And that is something we always deal with.”

JAA Media has other challenges on the horizon. For it to make the leap from a startup to a full-grown company, it needs to build a stable business infrastructure, Mayer said.

“With any startup, how do you move past the value of the company simply being the value of the people?” Mayer said. “Is there anything sustainable that the company has? It’s not just the connections or the talent of the founders. They’re in the process of figuring out how to systematize… formalize the processes of what they do into a sustainable business.”

These are transition points that all startups have to deal with, Mayer said. But he’s confident in the JAA Media team.

“They’ll keep things moving in the right direction,” Mayer said, citing the team’s “talent, energy and impact.”

Ultimately, JAA Media has many future growth directions and opportunities to choose from. It could continue to manage its own brands and leverage its ability to convert social media impressions into sales to partner with clients’ brands, Mayer said.

The company also has offers from potential investors, though Khanna said an offer has yet to earn serious consideration.

“We don’t need it. With most startups, they raise money for marketing spend or to acquire customers,” Khanna said. “We just kind of went for the experience and to see the big boardroom.”

At the moment, Khanna said the founders of JAA would rather maintain ownership of their own growth.

“Attention is currency,” Khanna said. “If you own the attention, you own the power.”

Hiring is also a priority for the company. Expanding the product development team is crucial if Khanna, Keough and Breitbart hope to sustain the kind of growth and potential JAA Media has experienced in its first eight months of existence.

“Our second biggest struggle is this whole thing of finding talent,” Keough said. “What we do need right now is just people who want to work.”