A Leader's Perspective: How To Grow Your Company With Synergy And AI

Forbes

01-07-2025

Anatolii Kasianov🇺🇦 , Co-Founder & CTO at HOLYWATER / My Drama & My Passion apps. getty
In March 2024, along with my fellow co-founder, Bogdan Nesvit, I launched My Drama , where we produce AI-driven short series. How did we know My Drama would become a viral product? Analyzing trends and adapting quickly.
The short series market gained extensive attention in 2024. We found that there was greater demand for concise, accessible and engaging storytelling. The market is currently expected to grow by 10.50% CAGR, reaching approximately $11.91 billion by 2030.
At My Drama, my main areas of focus are team synergy and leveraging AI to boost our growth. Based on my experience, I've outlined a few lessons that can help you transform your own business, regardless of your industry.
Without full synergy between your team and your company's goals, you will struggle to move forward.
Alignment sessions are key in ensuring my company is working in collaboration. Organizations like NASA and Toyota are already using this technique. It offers a comprehensive approach to coordinating vision, strategy and execution across all organizational levels.
First, your leadership must come together to synchronize business goals. Then team leaders can join, and each department can have an internal alignment session. You must ensure that everyone knows what your company is working toward and builds their own action plan to get there. In practice at my company, it looks like this: If a creative producer has a task to shoot a top-performing series, the business development team has a task to find a director for it.
The main purpose of alignment sessions is to facilitate open feedback and criticism. The team should feel comfortable addressing and critiquing leadership, too. Make it clear that it's far more important to define what is right, rather than who is right.
Alignment sessions and an open feedback culture can make a startup more agile. When our team is under pressure during peak periods, we move as one unified force. During one particularly intense growth period, our head of product and head of engineering even switched to marketing for a month to help acquire enough users—that's the kind of flexibility that alignment creates. Automate as much as you can.
Category-defining companies don't just innovate—they automate to make innovation possible.
At My Drama, we take this approach seriously. Each month, we generate over 15,000 content concepts, localized into 12-15 languages, resulting in more than 200,000 creatives launched. And we do this with a lean team, powered by AI. One of our in-house tools identifies viral moments in our series, cuts them out and assembles them into ad-ready concepts with titles. Another launches campaigns across platforms, enabling us to test over 100,000 creatives per month, something no manual workflow could manage.
It's not just marketing. We recently tackled a major productivity drag in product analytics. Our analysts were constantly interrupted with basic data requests: metrics, simple charts, repeat questions, etc. So, we built a custom LLM that now handles those requests in real time, freeing the team to focus on conducting deep research and driving strategic experiments.
The takeaway? Automate anything that interrupts your team's focus. Dashboards, campaign setup, internal data lookups—every repetitive task you eliminate gives back compounding creative energy. Don't wait until you scale to start automating. Automate so you can scale. Rely only on data, not your feelings.
Once you've tackled the obvious bottlenecks, the real work begins: figuring out what to automate next. Growth doesn't come from instinct—it comes from insight. And that insight lives in your data.
If you're a founder building in the content space, there are three core pillars you need to control:
1. Product: Is it fast and stable? Are pages loading in 2 seconds—or dragging at 15? Is the paywall smooth or buggy? Product performance is your foundation, and it's one of the easiest places to lose or retain users. Track the essentials: load times, drop-off points, funnel completion and bug frequency. Then zoom in: Where does your dev team burn the most time? What decisions are they making over and over again? That's where automation can drive the biggest wins.
2. Marketing: Are you shipping enough creatives? Are they performing? What's your CAC and LTV across channels? At my company, most of our revenue is marketing-driven—so our data ops are laser-focused there. We've built an internal tool that tracks everything from ad pass rates to creative fatigue curves, helping us optimize at scale.
3. Content: Script quality, production speed, localization timelines, storyline retention—these all add up fast. Every word costs money. And bad content? It costs even more. In the world of vertical streaming, it's common to cut corners—but that often leads to series that are impossible to market or scale. You can apply this same lesson to any industry. What do you consider your "content" in this context?
Within each of these pillars are workflows you can (and should) automate. Use tools to help developers ship faster. Leverage AI to expand creative capacity, automate storyboarding and streamline task management. Deepen your understanding of all processes.
None of this came from a textbook. As a co-founder, I've been hands-on with every part of the business—from app development and analytics to screenwriting, marketing and content licensing. This is not because I'm a control freak, but because everything is interconnected. If one part breaks, the whole system slows down.
To keep that system running, I've made it a habit to study my own company and its industry.
This means regular deep dives with team leads, studying bottlenecks, driving hackathons and brainstorm sessions and bridging gaps between departments. When something isn't working, don't wait—look for patterns, find industry examples and dig into what other founders have done. Be sure to dedicate time to this learning, just as you should do for your regular meetings.
You don't always need a traditional education to run a company, but you do need curiosity and the willingness to fix everything that's not working at its best.
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