The newest legal manga service, Azuki, announced themselves to every manga fan globally June 17, but didn’t officially launch until June 28. We are now into September, so it makes sense to check in and see where it stands two months later.
So in today’s interview, conducted over email, we do get into a bit of Azuki’s future, but also we look back with the Azuki team. From why it got started, to how long it’s been in development, and to the challenges and surprises encountered before and after launch, I talked to the following four people about building the service to where it currently is today:
- CEO Abbas Jaffery
- Marketing Director Evan Minto
- Mobile developers Adela Chang and Krystyn Neisess
TheOASG: Tell us a little about yourselves and how you each got into manga.
Abbas Jaffrey: I got into anime when my older brother introduced me to some on VHS and the Sci-Fi Channel when I was about six years old. My introduction to manga came after finishing the 1997 Berserk anime, which destroyed me. I found out the manga continued the story and I was blown away by the level of detail in each panel. Shortly after that, I got into Blame! and kept exploring from there.
Evan Minto: Like a lot of people, anime was my gateway to manga. I started with Pokémon and Toonami, then dipped my toe into manga during the mid-2000s boom while hanging out at bookstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders. The first few manga volumes I owned were .hack//Legend of the Twilight and One Piece, I think.
Adela Chang: When I was young, my older siblings were really into Dragon Ball. Chinese copies were lying around the house and they’d have pseudo-Dragon Ball fights by whacking each other with newspaper rolls and stuff. I would read them and my sister’s copies of Rurouni Kenshin that she borrowed from her friend. In seventh grade, we went on a school trip and the girls in my cabin had copies of Inuyasha with them. I was hooked and would borrow Inuyasha from the library every week, which eventually expanded into reading other manga as well.
Krystyn Neisess: I first encountered manga at 10 years old, when I stumbled across a copy of Pita Ten in my school’s library. My best friend and I were so enamored with the art style — it was so cute, and unlike anything else, we’d seen before! We spent the next few years seeking out more manga to read, and used them to learn the drawing style.
Can you share as much as you can about how you each got to know each other at Crunchyroll?
Evan: I joined in 2013 when Abbas had already been there for years. We worked together pretty closely on feature development for the Crunchyroll website, including on the HTML5 update to the manga reader!
Abbas: We were a very social bunch so we’d hang out at lunch and watch the latest anime together on the office TV. We quickly became friends outside work too.
Adela: I joined Crunchyroll in 2016 on the mobile team, and the big push at the time was to launch VRV. My work didn’t overlap too much with Evan and Abbas, but the company was small and all the engineers were quite social!
Krystyn: I’m the exception! Rather than meeting the team at Crunchyroll, I met Adela at Yelp in 2017, where we worked together as mobile developers on the same team. After knowing Adela for a couple of years, she introduced me to Abbas and Evan and we started Azuki together.
How did you get involved with the creation of Azuki?
Abbas: After I left Crunchyroll, I took a break from the anime industry but I was still watching anime and reading manga as a fan. One day when I was searching for more manga to read, I noticed that most of the available apps didn’t fit what I was looking for, which got me thinking about what I would want in a manga app and eventually led to Azuki.
Evan: Abbas pitched the idea to me and I thought it had a lot of potential, so I started helping out on the side to get things going. At that point I was a freelancer working with a few anime/manga clients so it fit in with my other work pretty well.
Adela: Abbas approached me one day and asked if I was interested in this project after I had already left Crunchyroll. I’m a huge manga fan and had made that known while I was working there, so of course, I said yes!
Krystyn: When Adela invited me to join the team, I was thrilled by the prospect of building something from the ground up and tapping into my love for manga.
What ultimately made you feel that it was time to start a service like Azuki?
Abbas: As a big manga fan myself, I was looking for a way to read a wide variety of manga for a single price, but that streaming model was still uncharted territory, with a few exceptions. Looking at what fans were saying in online manga communities and on pirate sites, there was clearly a big appetite for it, especially now that there’s so much manga available in English! I envisioned Azuki as a way for fans to unlock a whole library so they could freely explore all the amazing stories manga has to offer.
As you’ve worked on Azuki, what turned out to be the biggest challenge from building the service to launch day?
Evan: From a design and coding perspective, the manga reader is pretty complex! I had some experience working on the manga readers at Crunchyroll and Kodansha and the book reader at the Internet Archive, but even so, the Azuki reader was challenging. We went through at least two other versions of it before landing on the current design. What helped us hone in on it was user research. We showed it to real manga fans and figured out what worked and what didn’t, then refined from there.
Abbas: Juggling a day job while also working on a new business was tough but it just kept on getting tougher as time went on. By the end of my previous day job, I was struggling to keep up and balance it all with my personal life since Azuki demanded a lot of attention. When I finally decided to quit my day job, it lifted a huge weight and I was finally able to devote more time to Azuki.
Adela: I think the biggest challenge was communication and knowledge sharing. We used to meet up regularly in person, but that stopped when COVID hit. With such a small team, each person wears a lot of hats and it can be easy for things to fall through the cracks. I think it’s always better to over-communicate because we all have our blind spots and getting more team members in on your thoughts can help with that.
Krystyn: Before launch, time management and balancing commitments was personally the most difficult task. Especially in the earlier stages of Azuki, I found it difficult to prioritize setting aside enough time to make consistent progress. As we moved closer to launch, the rising sense of urgency was helpful — but by that point, there was a lot of ground to make up, which made the pre-launch hustle that much more demanding.
What’s surprised you the most after the service went public and users gave their thoughts on Azuki?
Evan: The fan enthusiasm, both positive and negative! We’re a small team and just starting, but we were blown away by the attention we received and the high expectations fans had for us. It was a lot of pressure, but also good confirmation that we were on the right track! I also have to give credit to our marketing consultant, Patrick Sutton, who helped plan and strategize how we were going to get the word out.
Abbas: I was surprised by how positive people were about Azuki. We worked hard on it but you always expect there to be a lot of negatives about what you are missing even if you are already working on it.
Adela: I was also surprised by just how hyped up people were for us to launch. I don’t know what I was expecting but I certainly wasn’t expecting so many people to take an interest in us before our product went live, and wait so anxiously for us on launch day! It’s nerve-wracking but super exciting at the same time.
Krystyn: The amount of at-launch excitement and social media traction was way beyond my expectations, and uplifting to witness. Regarding constructive feedback, it was surprising (but incredibly helpful!) to see many users ask for features we hadn’t thought would be in such high demand, such as offline reading or alternative payment options.
How long did it take to work on the apps and when did you feel that they were ready to launch?
Adela: I started off helping Krystyn with Android, but back then no one knew if this was going anywhere, and we worked on it very sporadically. Everyone had full-time jobs at the time, and we would get together to work on Azuki a little bit every week or two. Eventually, as the project came together and publishers began taking an interest, the pace picked up. I started working on the iOS app in August of last year, and when both apps had the core browsing and reading functionality down we started feeling like maybe this was something we could put out into the public eye. Of course, you always wish there were more features — you want more time to squeeze this in, and squeeze that in, but at some point, you do have to put your foot down and say hey, it’s time to let the world know we exist!
Krystyn: The first line of Azuki Android code was written almost exactly two years ago, but the rate of work certainly hasn’t been constant since then! Especially in that first year, it was treated much more like a casual side project. But nowadays, it’s easily rivaling that of a full-time job. As for feeling launch-ready, admittedly we launched without a few features that I would’ve liked to see (like search, which went live shortly afterward). I do feel solid about the feature set that we were able to launch with though.
While developing the iOS and Android apps, what were some of the functions you had to make sure was refined before launch?
Adela: Making sure the reader was polished, especially the different reading modes (single page vs. vertical scroll), was something that took a lot of the time before launch. In addition, showing and saving the user’s reading progress and optimizing loading times were also quite important!
What can you say is the immediate challenge you’ll be focusing on as Azuki continues to develop and grow?
Abbas: The most immediate challenge is working to get more manga available on Azuki. Those business relationships take time to build and deals take time to finalize, so there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Evan: I agree with Abbas: content is the big looming challenge. I’m excited to say we’re in talks for some really great new manga and will have announcements to share very soon.
Adela: I also think crafting a good experience for the fans and fostering a healthy community is important as well.
Krystyn: With the initial attention of the launch now behind us, finding ways to continue getting our name out to a broader audience is certainly a challenge!
Can you comment on future simulpub plans — in this case, I mostly mean will it expand beyond just Kodansha titles?
Abbas: We want to make as much manga as we can readily available regardless of the publisher but that’s easier said than done! We’re looking at more series in general, which includes both catalog and simulpub series, but I can’t say what we’ll be getting yet as nothing is final until it’s publicly available on the service.
It feels like there’s a lot more official digital manga available than ever before — how would you assess where the market’s been at over the past few years?
Abbas: Manga sales have been doing really well since last year, to the point that it’s hard for print production to keep up. This has spurred publishers to make more available digitally to capture that fan interest. As anime is becoming more mainstream outside of Japan, more of these fans are now searching the source material for many of their favorite shows. We’re pushing for Azuki to help make it easier for people to discover manga.
Evan: The manga market has absolutely grown, even before COVID. It’s kind of mind-boggling to me the amount of manga that’s available right now, including things like The Rose of Versailles that we thought would never make it over here. Digital manga readership in the US has been huge for a long time, but a lot of it is captured by pirate sites. It seems like there’s an increasing understanding from both the US and Japan side that digital needs to catch up to those pirate sites. The subscription, “all-you-can-eat” model of Azuki is one way to do that.