1. Do or do not. There is no try

It’s World Savings Day on October 31, 2023. PiggyVest, a Nigerian wealth management fintech, has just released its inaugural Savings Report. Its findings were grim: nearly 30% of Nigerians were in debt, battered by inflation, currency devaluation, and soaring fuel and electricity costs.

PiggyVest had spent the last two years building a content engine that chronicled the financial lives of Nigerians. Tales of hustles, windfalls, and survival found expression across different content formats. But that was not enough. Real influence required stories that were contextualized correctly, with up-to-date data. So, the PiggyVest content team set out to get that data with the savings report. In 2023, they surveyed a little over 1,000 of their users.

The following year saw the team ramp up its effort, polling over 10,000 people, a more representative sample of Nigeria. The results were even more staggering: only 1% of Nigerians could afford to spend more than $609 monthly.

Each report didn’t just make headlines—it reinforced PiggyVest’s position as an authority in Nigeria’s financial industry. The media cited the report, policymakers referenced it, and everyday Nigerians shared it on social media.

The day after the 2024 report launched, PiggyVest received the single largest savings deposit for the year.

Several organizations pay lip service to content as a marketing tool. But, PiggyVest has shown that it could be a worthwhile investment if done right—its content marketing engine has propelled it to over 5 million users and cemented its status as Nigeria’s most influential wealth management platform.

2. Building a blog that converts

When Daniel Orubo resigned from his second stint at Nigerian pop culture publication Zikoko, he had no idea what he would do next. He knew his next job would be in tech, but he was unsure how that would materialize. As he mulled over his future, his close friend, Odunayo Eweniyi—who also happens to be Piggyvest’s co-founder and COO—approached him with an offer to lead the company’s content department.

Orubo and Eweniyi had been friends for years, and he was wary of taking up any job that could muddy those waters. But Eweniyi was persistent and convincing enough, promising creative freedom. She managed to win him over.

From inception, PiggyVest had cultivated a strong social media presence, but there remained an untapped opportunity to drive growth using content. Its blog was the most obvious vehicle.

Orubo’s first instinct was to flood it with articles—a holdover from his time running a busy newsroom. In his first month running the PiggyVest blog, Orubo’s team published three times more than their initial target, driving significant traffic. But traffic by itself was meaningless. "If 100,000 people read an article without bringing in new users, that’s a failure," Orubo told Communiqué.

PiggyVest wasn’t a media company; its content had to fuel growth directly. The team slashed output, focusing instead on fewer, higher-impact pieces designed to guide readers toward a single conclusion: “PiggyVest is the solution to your financial problems.”

The formula was deliberate to get people to tell their full money story and show where PiggyVest fit in. These stories were then broken down into categories: My Money Mistake explained the mistake Nigerians made with their money; Women and Money showed the gender dynamics of money; and the Life column spotlighted people who had attained some level of financial prosperity. Interviews with high-profile users lent credibility to the site and helped increase views, while everyday narratives made the blog relatable.

The content team also implemented an SEO approach focused on answering real financial questions Nigerians searched for. Each SEO piece began with careful research into local search trends and combined insights from PiggyVest's in-house financial experts with practical wisdom from successful savers. For instance, when writing an SEO piece about saving money, they avoided generic advice like the 50-30-20 rule. Instead, they interviewed Nigerians who had built substantial savings to understand what worked in the local economic context. The results were transformative. The company began dominating search rankings for financial queries, and its domain authority surged, helping more people discover the app.

3. The PiggyVest creative collective

The most significant driver of PiggyVest’s success with content has been the people behind it.

When Orubo put out the first vacancy for content writers and editors, he was inundated with responses from over 1,000 people applying to fill three slots. In selecting the early content team from this multitude, he had to prioritize people with more than one creative skill. “I needed people who could do more than one thing," he said. A writer had a higher chance of getting into the PiggyVest content team if they could also design or produce video. This philosophy resulted in a small but agile team whose cross-functional skills birthed some of Piggyvest’s most engaging content formats.

The early members of the content team included Agnes Ekanem, who wrote the My Money Mistake column, and Tobechukwu Nwosu, who helped develop the Women and Money series. Ifeoluwa Adekoya later joined to lead Piggyvest’s SEO efforts.

Extreme resourcefulness was also important. When Boluwatife Akindele cold emailed Daniel Orubo to highlight some of the issues he felt were wrong with the website and how he felt it could be better, Orubo immediately hired him. Akindele would later rise through the ranks from an intern to lead the content team after Orubo resigned in 2024.

Ekanem, a brilliant writer who also created comics, best exemplified the full stack creative model. She started repurposing blog stories into social media-friendly comic strips, which would become the foundation of the PiggyVest Grown Ups comic series. The comics, which had characters that humanized some of PiggyVest’s key user personas, distilled complex financial topics—like resisting Ponzi schemes or the dread of automatic savings withdrawals—into relatable, humorous vignettes. The comics’ popularity revealed an appetite for visual storytelling, prompting the team to conclude that adding video to the mix could elevate their level of results.

So, Orubo recruited Israel Obasola, an animator who has attained online fame for his distinct humor, to turn the comics into animated shorts. These videos became instant hits, racking up millions of views and outperforming other marketing assets in conversion rates. The comics also enabled PiggyVest to reach a subset of the audience who would not read their articles.

But beyond digital content, PiggyVest deepened engagement through physical events. After the first season of Grown Ups, the team organized a meet-and-greet for fans. Furthermore, each Savings Report launch was complemented by industry roundtables with financial experts and stakeholders. These forums served a dual purpose: strengthening community ties while providing crucial feedback that directly informed content strategy and product development. Insights from the first Savings Report and roundtable discussions revealed a critical need for housing solutions, leading PiggyVest to launch its popular 'House Money' feature - a dedicated savings product for rent payments, becoming one of the platform's most important features.

When PiggyVest launched its content team in 2021, it wasn’t alone in recognizing the power of storytelling to drive growth. Across Nigeria’s tech landscape, venture capital-fueled startups invested heavily in content, poaching top media talent to build out blogs, social campaigns, and video series. Yet, while many of these initiatives have fizzled out, drowned out by unrealistic ROI expectations and shifting priorities occasioned by the current economic climate, PiggyVest’s content engine has thrived and contributed to the company’s growth.

The key difference? Unwavering support from the top. Unlike competitors, where content teams often battled for resources or struggled to prove their worth, PiggyVest’s leadership gave the content team the freedom and resources to experiment. For instance, when Akindele pitched Orubo about joining PiggyVest, there was no vacancy on the team or budget for the role. But the company's leadership trusted his instincts and made resources available for the hire.

Whether it was comics or animated shorts, the C-suite understood that driving growth with content required patience and creative risk-taking, and it was willing to bet on the team it had assembled. That bet is paying off massively.

1. Chasing unicorns

In October, Nigerian fintech Moniepoint became the latest African tech company to cross the billion-dollar valuation mark, a feat that only eight others have ever accomplished.

Venture capital funding into Africa’s tech ecosystem has slowed down over the last two years, with several startups shutting up shop, laying off staff, or pivoting into nearly unrelated industries. News around Moniepoint’s “unicorn” status was welcome, and even more remarkable was that that company nearly tripled its valuation during a period when the Naira had lost half of its value.

But for several ecosystem stakeholders, this was unsurprising. The fintech sector of the industry had become so prominent that by 2022, it was already competing with larger traditional financial institutions for advertising spend. Fintech startups were pouring millions of dollars into the biggest TV shows, signing the most prominent musicians as brand ambassadors, and splashing the cash on massive billboards around town.

Between 2020 and 2024, for instance, fintech companies were the biggest sponsors of reality TV shows, and reality TV shows have historically attracted the most eyeballs. In 2023, The Black Book, Netflix’s most successful African original film to date, was backed by a roster of fintech founders and investors from companies like Paystack, Flutterwave, and PiggyVest.

Fintech has become the poster child for tech in Africa, an MVP pointing many to what is possible. But its recent rise to the fore dates a few years back, before the boom of 2019.

2. A switch in time

For students of contemporary history, 2002 was an interesting year; the global financial system was reeling from the collapse of Enron the previous year, the International Criminal Court was established to prosecute crimes against humanity, and Brazil won the World Cup. Amidst these exciting developments, something of heroic proportions was happening in Nigeria. Mitchell Elegbe, a young engineer, founded a company that would turn the financial services industry right side up. Within a decade, the company — Interswitch — grew to become a mainstay of the ecosystem, and developed a playbook for what was possible for young people in an otherwise difficult market.

On the other side of the continent, in 2003, Nick Hughes, Vodafone’s head of social enterprise at the time, proposed an idea backed by the U.K.’s Department for International Development to develop technology that allowed mobile phones to execute financial transactions. After four years of iteration and building partnerships, including from Safaricom, the now-famous M-PESA launched in Kenya in 2007. From about 20,000 users one month after launch, the product grew to over 1 million users within seven months. M-PESA has now become the subject of several case studies at the best universities in the world.

Over the next 15 years after M-PESA’s launch, fintech would grow into the cornerstone of Africa’s technology ecosystem, with 205 fintechs attracting 43% of the total funding raised in 2022. But how did this industry become so important and prominent?

3. Hit tracks and payment rails 

The mid-1800s marked a new era for the American economy. The need to efficiently transport goods between the east and west coasts had become evident as the acquisition of California and the resolution of the Oregon Dispute between America and Great Britain almost doubled the former’s geographical size. But work did not start on the Pacific Railroad until 1862, during the American Civil War. The railroad was supposed to help maintain communication between the east and the west and, more importantly, facilitate troop and equipment movement for Abraham Lincoln’s union army.

The railroad was completed in 1869, four years after the war ended, and it became the backbone on which the war torn country rebuilt its economy. It drastically reduced travel times for goods across the U.S., eliminating the months-long voyage around South America or across dangerous trails by wagon. It enabled companies across different industries from agriculture to mining to access new markets; raw materials from the less developed West Coast could be sent to the industrialized East Coast, while manufactured goods could be sent back westward. With the help of the railroad, America grew to become an economic world power.

Fintech has done the same in Africa, albeit to much smaller effect.

In Nigeria, for instance, fintech was the railroad on which the tech ecosystem was built. Legacy payment companies like Interswitch and newer players like Paystack and Flutterwave built critical payment infrastructure for thousands of businesses to collect money from their customers. They created a platform for many other startups to expand their product offerings and seek out venture capital. With reliable payment solutions in place, these businesses could focus on growth rather than pesky transaction-related challenges. Other tech sectors like logistics, edtech, healthtech, and e-commerce have also flourished because fintech had already done the thankless job. For instance, PiggyVest, a wealth management platform, was enabled by Paystack’s payment solution; Uber found it easier to deploy its ride hailing services in Nigeria because of Flutterwave’s payments rails; and Netflix and Amazon Prime could spread their tentacles and bill users in Nigeria because of payment infrastructure from local startups.

Fintech companies have also contributed to talent development across the continent. By investing in internships and training programs like the Moniepoint Women In Tech internship, and partnerships with educational institutions like Altschool, these companies have helped create a skilled tech workforce that is good enough to export globally.

But fintech’s most important contribution to the ecosystem has been in exits and liquidity events. In October 2020, when news of Stripe’s acquisition of Paystack broke amidst the EndSARS protest, the immediate effect was that it helped reinforce what the protesters had been saying all along: tech workers were not criminals, and tech was a viable career path. But the long term implications were more profound. The success of these fintechs stoked an entrepreneurial spirit in their employees. “The impression that Paystack has always left on me is that there’s an opportunity for many more things to work. And like you know, the best way to predict the future is to (attempt to) invent it,” Yinka Adewuyi, Paystack-alum and CEO of Golemon, a grocery delivery startup, told Condia.

Many of these employees gained experience in scaling startups, managing investments, and interacting with global investors. They have taken these learnings along to build their own companies, sometimes bootstrapping from the profits they made from the exits of their former employers. Some have even been backed with angel investment from their former bosses.

4. A creative goldrush

The beauty of fintech is that it touches almost everything. In 2022, Flutterwave acquired Disha, a platform that allowed digital creators to create portfolios and receive payments from their audience globally.

Gbenga Agboola, Flutterwave’s CEO, told TechCrunch at the time that the company “saw Disha as an opportunity to capture a new market of indie creators that need innovative tools to showcase their craft and get paid.”

That acquisition hasn’t worked out so far, with Flutterwave temporarily shutting Disha down earlier this year, citing a need to “realign its mission to better serve the creative community.” Unfortunately no specific reopening date has been announced. In its place, however, platforms like Selar, whose founder is a Paystack and Flutterwave alumnus, are integrating fintech solutions to allow creators monetize their work. In 2023, the company paid out over 4 billion naira ($2.4 million) to creators.

Aside from helping creators monetize their work, fintechs have become an important source of funding for the creative economy. In 2020 Flutterwave, crypto exchange Patricia, and neobank Kuda became the first fintech sponsors of reality TV show, Big Brother Naija (BBN), the beginning of a symbiotic relationship that has seen these companies significantly increase their user base as the show airs.

Communiqué 11 explained why Big Brother and other reality TV shows had become important advertising real estate:

“Talking about the shows online generates a ripple effect, attracting more attention and eventually converting interest into viewership. The same holds true for advertising. People see great ads during major TV events, they talk about them online, resulting in more publicity and exposure for the advertised product.”

Flutterwave almost doubled its total transaction value during the period of its first Big Brother Naija sponsorship, leading to a unicorn valuation months after. Other fintechs like Moniepoint and Pocket (formerly known as Abeg) have also sponsored the show.

Fintechs are also becoming prominent in the film industry. In 2023, for instance, The Black Book premiered on Netflix to global critical acclaim and rave reviews. A few days before release, the film’s director Editi Effiong shared a list of investors who backed him, half of the names were prominent fintech founders and investors. That symbolized a moment for fintech’s foray into the creative economy. According to Odunayo Eweniyi, PiggyVest co-founder and one of The Black Book’s investors, “The tech industry in Nigeria is burgeoning, and collaborations between tech and the entertainment industry, particularly Nollywood, will open up new levels of content creation, distribution, consumption, and most importantly, quality.”

The past has so far been encouraging, and the future looks even more promising.

Steve Dede is Fincra’s editor-in-chief. Fincra is not a newspaper or magazine. It’s not a media company. It’s a payment infrastructure provider. Before joining the company, Dede had spent the last eleven years of his career as a journalist. What then is the rationale behind his hire? Why does a fintech company need an editor-in-chief? And what makes it possible to switch from journalism to content marketing?

To answer these questions, we need to take some steps back in time, first by a year, then by a few centuries.

In July 2021, I published ‘Paystack’s media threat’, in which I talked about how the company was building its media strategy and analysed its potential impact on tech and business publishing on the continent. Admittedly, I wrote that essay from an outsider’s perspective and with a few assumptions about what Paystack’s plan was. The company’s media efforts haven’t, in fact, grown to rival TechCabal, Bloomberg, or any of the business publications we frequently engage with. But the quality of its thought leadership has deepened. It also launched two more shows: Tabs vs Spaces and Artwork. A few more startups have also picked up on this strategy and integrated it into their marketing efforts.

Communiqué

Communiqué 13: Paystack’s media threat

In April 2021, Paystack – a payment processing company – announced it was hiring a Managing Editor to help build “Africa’s largest digital business media network”. This was nothing new. Paystack has been producing the kind of content you’d expect from an actual media company fo…

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5 years ago · 49 likes · 19 comments · David I. Adeleke

For example, since publishing the Paystack essay, three senior members of the Zikoko editorial team moved to tech startups, with two going on to head the content teams at Paystack and PiggyVest, and another occupying a senior editorial position at a crypto company. TechCabal’s former editor-in-chief left to start a company that, among other things, aggregates and develops writing and content marketing talent the way Andela does for engineering. Then Fincra, the subject of today’s newsletter, hired Dede from Pulse, one of Africa’s largest digital media companies.

What makes these career moves, where people migrate from traditional media, sometimes journalistic, roles into content marketing positions at tech startups, possible? In other words, what are the shifts that had to happen and the conditions that had to align for Dede to leave Pulse for Fincra?

Centuries in the making

Fifteen years before the turn of the twentieth century, in 1885, a plough-making company came up with an idea for a publication that educates farmers about their products and provides them with information about specific tools that could help them do better, more efficient work.

The publication, named “The Furrow”, dubbed itself “a journal for the American farmer”. By 1912, it peaked at roughly 4 million readers and has been in production for 137 years. The plough-making company, John Deere, has a market cap of over $110 billion.

A few years later, in 1900, a tire company founded by two French brothers created a publication to help travellers enjoy their trips better. It included maps, tips on how to take care of their vehicles, and recommended places to eat and rest. In 1923, the publication introduced a section featuring independent restaurant recommendations, and when that gained traction, it hired a group of people to find and review the best restaurants. This gave birth to what we now know as “Michelin Stars”, which has become a defining feature of the culinary industry. Michelin Guide is still published until this day.

Both “The Furrow” and “Michelin Guide” are fixtures in the history of content marketing, a strategy through which companies create content that establishes their authority, helps their customers make better decisions, and builds long-term relationships with their industry. John Deere helped farmers understand their equipment better without directly selling themselves and ensured theirs would be the brand they trusted the most. Michelin helped influence where people visited when they travelled and etched its name in the minds of vehicle owners.

The idea that companies can build channels that mirror the traditional media and use these platforms to better connect with an audience of potential customers has, as we can see, been around for centuries. Today, it has become much easier to pull off as the Internet has lowered the barriers to publishing and distributing content.

Here’s how Dede assesses this centuries-old evolution:

“In the past, as a journalist, there wasn’t much to worry about other than getting your story out. In those days, people had to buy newspapers, listen to the radio, or watch TV to get the news. Journalists didn’t have to struggle to get an audience -- that was a given. They just had to deliver stories.

“But digital media changed everything. Because now, your stories aren’t enough. Being a journalist today means you have to understand the digital content ecosystem. Pulse, Big Cabal Media, and any digital media company you can think of are competing with streaming platforms, social media, and different brands on the Internet trying to market. If I write a story as a journalist for the New York Times, someone has to decide not to spend time on Twitter and read my story. Someone has to decide not to watch Netflix, or go on Instagram, just to read my story. We are all marketing on the internet, and that’s how the media has evolved.”

For people like Dede who’ve worked in digital media companies, it’s the skills developed while seeking to understand not just how to write stories but also to find an audience that will engage with them, the ability that comes with treating every story like a product that must be packaged and marketed properly, that provides a pathway from journalism into content marketing, which, in reality, pays better. Particularly in Africa.

Still, content marketing is a means to an end. It has to feed into the organisation’s business objectives.

Fincra’s media strategy

As a payment infrastructure company, Fincra plays in the B2B arena, which requires a different marketing approach. With the more prevalent B2C, you’re talking directly to customers whose decision-making you hope to influence. With B2B, the dynamics are different, and communication channels are complex.

Jemima Adegoke, Fincra’s head of marketing, explains it this way in “The Growth Handbook: Scaling Fintech in Nigeria”:

“For B2C, the marketing focus is on quick solutions and enjoyable content because you speak to individuals. In contrast, B2B is more concerned with building relationships and providing a return on product investment for a business customer. [The decision-making process is also] much longer. It involves communication channels like the accounting department, procurement department, or the CEO. So, the sales cycle can be lengthy because of the time and levels of [approval] for the business customer to agree to use the product.”

Fincra employs a two-pronged media strategy to build the long-term relationships she mentioned. First, it embraces niche media advertising. If you’ve read Communiqué long enough, you’d have seen the Fincra sponsorship placement. The company also sponsors industry-specific newsletters and publications like BenjaminDada.com, Notadeepdive, TechCabal’s daily newsletter, Not The Boring Tech Stuff, Techpoint, and Technext, all of which speak directly to people within its target audience.

To consolidate, Fincra is also building an intent media strategy that addresses user pain points and anticipates the audience’s needs. It relies on search engine optimisation (SEO) to anticipate and answer customers’ questions about specific products or services. This is the same strategy that fuels $100-million companies like the Money Group, publishers of Money.com, ConsumersAdvocate.org, and Navchain. Taken to the extreme, it’s responsible for the barrage of mediocre content we must endure on the Internet. When done correctly, it’s a great way for brands to build lasting relationships with an audience.

The companies that employ this strategy seldom talk about themselves. Their focus is on creating content that is primarily helpful to the audience and almost indistinguishable from what you’d find in business media. They seek to build subject matter expertise and use that to gain affinity with an audience that appreciates the information and, by extension, the source. The view is that if the company does this well, they will retain sizable real estate in your mind, making you more likely to consider them when or if you need their product or service.

Wole Ayodele, Fincra’s CEO, thinks about it this way:

“It’s never easy to produce content that people are interested in. It will require some compromise. If you look at Fincra’s blog today, you’ll see us doing some industry analysis and even articles talking about people that could be considered competitors. If you look around our tech space in Nigeria, that’s not something you see very often, where on a company’s blog they’re referencing other companies and talking about things that might not have to do with the core business.”

He explains further:

“For example, a potential customer can say they read an article on Fincra’s blog on Tayo Oviosu’s masterclass on scaling a business out of your home country. That’s relevant content for any business owner or startup, whether in Africa or outside. So, when we create those kinds of content and people engage with them, we make a more lasting impression than when we just run an ad talking about a product because that’s what everybody is doing.”

Final words

My conversation with Dede ends with an allusion to Netflix’s hit docu-series, “Formula 1: Drive to Survive”. He says:

“All my friends now watch Formula 1 because we hung out at someone’s house and we were watching “Drive to Survive”. We’d never watched an F1 race in our lives, but we now keep up with it. I know a couple of friends who got interested in basketball after watching “The Last Dance”. That’s the power of storytelling, and I’m a huge believer in it.”

I agree with him. If I weren’t already a football fan, watching the “All or Nothing” docu-series on Amazon Prime would whet my appetite for the sport and give me a different perspective. I can see how this plays out in content marketing.

Building top-of-mind awareness requires going the extra mile to embrace strategies and tactics that many other companies won’t. Startups like Fincra play in a market with already-established dominant players, a market where people already have default options and getting them to choose otherwise can be extremely difficult.

What the company is doing with its media strategy isn’t yet popular on the continent, just like Michelin and John Deere’s strategies weren’t popular then. However, history has proven that this almost always bears long-lasting results if done well.

Editor’s note: This is a Sponsored Deep Dive on Fincra. For full disclosure, here’s how we decide on and approach writing sponsored essays like this.

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The scandal shaking Africa's tech ecosystem

Two articles have opened a can of worms and shaken Africa’s tech ecosystem to its core in the last two weeks. Both put Flutterwave, the continent’s highest-valued startup, under the spotlight.

The first article, published by Clara Wanjiku Odero, a former Flutterwave employee, on April 4, accused the company’s CEO, Gbenga Agboola, of bullying, intimidation, and coercion while accusing the company itself of negligence leading to endangerment. The second article, published by journalist David Hundeyin on April 12, investigated fraud, perjury, and insider trading allegations.

All of this followed an interview published on the night of April 3, which chronicled Flutterwave’s journey from inception to a $3 billion valuation. In it, Agboola referenced lawsuits from some former employees, including Odero:

“An ex-employee who led one of our country expansions sued us for negligence and emotional trauma for not removing their name as the contact person in the country. So anytime there was a merchant enquiry, they were called. They said this was emotional harassment.

“We tried to resolve this amicably, but it was impossible. They asked for $900,000 to quash the lawsuit. We refused because we didn’t believe $900,000 in damages represented the cost of the alleged negligence. They proceeded with the lawsuit, and the judge awarded them an equivalent of $2,500 for damages. When it was time to cut the check, they declined it and said they’d appeal.”

This statement in the interview supposedly triggered Odero’s article, followed by questions and conversations about Flutterwave’s culture and Agboola’s leadership. The investigative report landed a few days later, and conversations became even more heated.

A lot has been said in the last two weeks, but there are still some angles to explore.

I. How not to respond to serious allegations

Flutterwave’s public statements and crisis communications have been classic examples of how not to respond to serious allegations.

Its statement to TechCrunch regarding Odero’s claims was lukewarm at best. Perhaps because there are still ongoing legal proceedings, and this kind of issue is better handled in court than publicly. Still, when presented with the opportunity to address the matter pointedly, the company chose to say a lot without really saying anything.

Its response to the investigative report was no different, but it should’ve been. Flutterwave said it was “based on recycled and previously addressed claims and several others that are false” while asserting that it takes “all claims of this nature seriously, and [is] conducting a thorough review.” However, in the same article containing Flutterwave’s response, one of the allegations (of impersonation) made in the investigative report was practically corroborated by the company’s former CEO and co-founder, Iyin Aboyeji.

Here’s an excerpt:

“One of the many actions Agboola was accused of was creating a ghost ‘co-founder’ identity, who went by the name Greg, to give himself more shares, in the company’s early days. To this, Aboyeji told TechCabal that the agreement between the co-founders was that Agboola would hold some shares in trust for the fictitious Greg.

“‘When I joined the company, I was told there’s a chief technology officer named Greg, who’s from MIT, whom I’d meet someday. It never happened,” Aboyeji said. “After a while, it became clear what had happened. By that time it didn’t matter. We [Aboyeji and third co-founder Adeleke Adekoya] had already signed agreements, and I decided to just move on.”

None of the statements Flutterwave put out has been satisfactory, especially when the accusations are so grave. Whether deliberate or not, communication has been opaque, and trust has significantly eroded. But in some ways, the company’s decision to be opaque is understandable, particularly if the goal is to say as little as possible and ride this out.

Still, there are significant implications to consider.

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II. The implications

While I don’t think these allegations will sink the company, they’ve done massive damage to its reputation. They will also affect investor confidence in the company while inviting additional regulatory scrutiny and increased legal liabilities.

It’s also difficult to shake off the feeling that this might impact the ecosystem’s relationship with foreign investors, even though it shouldn’t. I don’t believe any investor should look at this situation and draw conclusions based on it. Will it come up in conversations? Yes. I can imagine this case becoming a reference point for investors who aren’t fully embedded into the ecosystem and rely on signals to make decisions.

This episode is reminiscent of Wells Fargo’s account fraud scandal, for which the US government fined it $3 billion in 2020. The bank admitted to pressuring employees between 2002 and 2016 by giving them unrealistic sales targets, which led thousands of them to open millions of accounts for customers without their consent and under false pretences. This incident undoubtedly impacted the company’s reputation, which it had spent more than a century building.

In 2017, it began an apology campaign to rebuild its image and win back its customers’ trust. However, the campaign was built on the bank’s admittance of wrongdoing and a visible commitment to changing things internally and externally. In this case, silence and opaqueness weren’t options. The situation was too grave for that.

For Flutterwave to repair the damage this has caused, there has to be a similar level of incision and openness. Silence, in this situation, is not golden.

III. Flutterwave’s communications debt

Startups optimise for different things at various stages of existence. They pursue a set of ideas and outcomes at the expense of others—a classic case of opportunity cost. However, in some instances, the opportunity cost is higher than they imagined.

For example, startups sometimes incur technical debt when the team focuses on functionality and speed of delivery over perfection. Their product will function (to a large extent) and move them from zero to one, but not without underlying issues that will still need fixing in the future. Sometimes, fixing those issues comes at an additional cost.

There’s also culture debt, where a startup hires too many people too quickly at the expense of building a sustainable positive culture. Because it’s grown so fast, it becomes more challenging to align employees with the company’s vision and direction. It also becomes nearly impossible to give everyone clarity on what they’re doing and how it fits into the bigger picture. In the end, the startup will grow but at the expense of employee satisfaction. You can expect a high churn rate to follow.

Similarly, we can say that Flutterwave has accrued a communications debt. Like many startups, it has prioritised growth and marketing at the expense of core communications. For a company this large and consequential, not having a communications engine that goes beyond publicising its fundraising and expansion plans is risky. This series of events shows precisely why.

First, a proactive and robust in-house communications engine would have caught this story early (which Flutterwave did) and prepared a multi-step plan for resolution (which Flutterwave didn’t). The company’s handling of this crisis indicates that it wasn’t ready for this kind of outcome, and it didn’t think too far ahead with its resolution plan. The timing of the interview suggests that it was an attempt to get in front of the story, but the responses that followed pale in comparison with the gravity of the situation.

Proactivity is always the best course of action. Preparation is the next best option. To understand better, let’s look at Monzo, a European fintech startup similar to Flutterwave and with roughly the same valuation range. Both are building for a global market and operate in tight regulatory environments.

Monzo was founded a year before Flutterwave, but it runs a significantly more robust communications team. This includes a communications director who’s a former journalist, a PR and communications manager, an internal communications lead, product and marketing communications personnel, etc. It also employs agency services to amplify its in-house efforts.

Monzo has had its scandals in the past. In 2019, a BBC Watchdog investigation revealed that the company had been freezing and closing down some of its users’ bank accounts, causing them financial difficulties. Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield released a statement to set the record straight, explaining that the company blocked the accounts for suspicious activities. He also explained the regulatory framework behind the decision.

In 2021, it got involved with the UK’s Financial Control Authority. The FCA sent letters to a few retail banks, including Monzo, informing them that it was investigating their anti-money laundering controls. As it did in the previous instance, the startup chose the path of transparency by acknowledging the investigation and explaining in clear terms to its customers what the implications were.

That’s how to get in front of a crisis.

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IV. Conclusion: What’s there to learn?

We’ve published three essays in this newsletter (here, here, and here) about why the startup ecosystem needs to move beyond fundraising PR and why the ecosystem has to realise communications is much deeper and more integral to operations than getting a few press releases published.

One of the core functions of communications is threat and weakness detection. Sometimes, businesses miss things because they’re not incentivised to notice them and because there’s no one within the company whose sole responsibility is to pay attention to things others don’t. An efficient communications engine solves that. It picks up signals that could potentially damage an organisation’s reputation and lays out plans for resolution, including making hard and uncomfortable decisions involving personnel.

As tech ecosystems across the continent continue to develop, as more investment dollars come in and startups grow, more scrutiny and more stories like these will follow. There’s far more attention today than there was three years ago, and far more at stake.

Still, founders don’t need scandals and crises to realise the importance of setting up solid communications engines. Internal communications, corporate social responsibility, good customer service, conflict resolution, and threat and weakness assessments are as crucial as media relations and brand storytelling.

As the ecosystem grows and attracts more attention, all the engines within it also have to grow. This includes investing in communications efforts to match.

We’re hosting our first event this Friday!

If you’re in Lagos, join us on Friday, April 22, as we host our first edition of Creators’ Circle in partnership with the Creative Economy Practice at CcHub. For more details and registration, click here.

Register for Creators' Circle

Some essays don’t require creative openers. Present your argument, examine the data, state your conclusions, and move on. Maybe sprinkle some love and light at the end to show that you’ve published what you just did in good faith. But ultimately, you don’t need a fancy opener.

Before the end of this newsletter, we’ll talk about the importance of data-backed conversations, and most importantly, how startups should think about PR and storytelling.

Stay with me.

When we talk about tech media across Africa, perhaps the most significant criticism is that they aren’t critical enough. They either don’t critique founders, startups, and the broader ecosystem enough, or they publish too many rosy, friendly stories. In two previous newsletters, I have alluded to this challenge.

In “Paystack’s media threat”, I wrote:

“For so long, African tech and business publications have served as informal publicists of their ecosystems, with some exceptions. That strategy is no longer sustainable. Society will always need journalism, but journalism that cannot be differentiated from content marketing and Public Relations is impotent and puts its purveyors in danger.”

In another essay, I wrote about my early days covering startups with TechCabal and Techpoint:

“Most of our stories revolved around startup and founder profiles (we wrote about any and every startup we could find)... Anyone aware enough at the time would’ve criticised us for writing about every Tom, Dick, and Harriet who had a startup idea. But we did what we did because that was all we had to work with.”

There’s no version of the universe in which anyone should criticise African tech journalists and writers for not doing enough to cover the stories of local startups and founders. The criticism is often that they do too much of this and not enough of other stories. There’s no version of the universe in which African tech media aren’t supportive of founders and startups. At least, there shouldn’t be.

The unlikely universe

This tweet sparked a conversation over the weekend, and the responses have been interesting, especially those that agree with its premise. They argue that it’s true – that the media often ignores a startup until it is too big to ignore anymore. Some say the media is a “cabal”. Others say that the onus is on the journalists to “find the next best story”. Are they all correct?

The other side refutes this claim. They say that the tech media has supported startups in the ecosystem. Some say that startups need to understand the media better. Others say that the onus is on the startups to get their storytelling right. Are they all correct?

Let’s look at the data

We took a sample of 20 African startups featured on TechCrunch between 2019 and 2022 to see where each of them got their first press coverage. We excluded some startups with founders who have been in the news multiple times, won major awards in the past, or received some level of international recognition. We also excluded startups that have raised multiple or high-volume rounds ($10 million and above).

Of the 13 Nigerian startups on the list, 92.3% first appeared on local media, and none were first featured on TechCrunch. Of all the 20 African startups on the list, 85% were first featured in the local media and 25% in the international media. None of them was first featured on TechCrunch, and none of the 25% is a Nigerian startup. All of the Nigerian startups from our sample size first appeared in local media stories before their eventual international coverage.

Despite what this limited sample size shows us, you can’t shake off the feeling that the data is incomplete and doesn’t tell the whole story.

If a significant enough number of people feel a certain way about something, if they think that thing is true, even if you can argue to the contrary with data, their beliefs are still worth examining. Perhaps there is some truth in there that we can learn from?

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PR 101 for startups

There are two facts to consider: tech journalists are constantly looking for stories (because their jobs depend on it), and there will always be startups or companies in the news. I explain this in a previous essay using Stephan Russ-Mohl’s three markets of journalism model.

So, when it comes to media coverage, there are several factors in play, the chief of which is newsworthiness. The classic analogy from journalism school is that if a dog bites a man, that isn’t news. It happens all the time. But if a man bites a dog, that’s news.

One of my main arguments in this conversation is this: the mere fact that a startup exists and the founder thinks that what they’re building is special isn’t enough reason for it to get press coverage.

There’s no founder in this world who doesn’t think what they’re working on is special. There’s no founder in this world who doesn’t believe that more people should know about their product. But none of these is enough reason why a journalist should write about them, just as they aren’t enough reasons why an investor should give them money.

So, as a founder looking to get good press for your company or product, especially if you’re a first-time founder who can’t hire a communications person or agency, what do you need to know about how the media works?

1. Know what counts as news. I’ve reviewed a lot of startup press releases and pitches over the years, and my initial impression is often that the writers (who usually aren’t communications professionals) don’t understand what counts as newsworthy.

   Newsworthiness is social. It’s hardly about your company or product and more about what it means in the grand scheme of things. A good rule of thumb is “social benefit”. Ask yourself how your company or product benefits people and who it has benefited. That's often where the story is.

   (PS: Fundraising stories fall into this category because they have obvious social benefits.)

2. Understand the news cycle. Much of this point boils down to knowing what the journalists you’re pitching your company to are interested in. Think of your startup as one out of a pool of several suitors vying for the same person's attention.

   You can’t stand out of the crowd if you have no idea what the person you’re trying to woo is interested in. That’s how it works in journalism.

   Every journalist has topics or areas they’re most interested in. If you respect their work enough, you’ll do your research and find out where your startup’s story falls.

3. Employ social proof. The reason local media will start to pay attention to a startup that has raised a lot of money and announced it on TechCrunch is that the startup has established some form of social proof. No one will pay attention to a product or company with no testimonials or enough social proof. It’s even better if the proof comes from well-known sources.

   People are more likely to accept things from those they know or are familiar with.

4. Build your owned media channels. There are three categories of media in marketing: Paid media, earned media, and owned media. Owned media refers to the content you produce in-house and publish for free on your digital channels.

   If telling your startup’s story is that important to you, it’ll show. If you can’t hire in-house storytellers yet, you might have to do it yourself. The better you are at telling your stories, the more likely you are to attract media attention. (Ask Elon Musk.)

   Remember that no one understands and cares about your narrative more than you.

Conclusion

It’s interesting to see how strongly people feel about the relationship between tech media and startups. I’ve read enough comments to know that this is a touchy subject. As with most conversations on Twitter, there’s very little care for nuance. But there is nuance to this conversation. It’s less about who’s right and wrong and more about how constructive we can be with each other.

To end today’s essay, I’d like to help four new startups (two female-led, two male-led) craft their stories and communications strategies for free. Reach out and pitch yourself. I look forward to hearing from you!

In September 2019, MoviePass, an American subscription-based movie ticketing platform, shut down its services, with its parent company filing for bankruptcy months later in January 2020. The service offered users access to one movie per day at the cinema for less than $10 a month. It eventually failed because its model was too good to be true and couldn’t keep up with unit economics. Still, MoviePass’ eight-year run showed cinema operators what was possible.

Now, the three largest cinema chains in the US – AMC, Cinemark, and Regal – have similar subscription services, with two other smaller chains – Alamo Drafthouse and Showcase – doing the same. In Nigeria, there’s Filmhouse, which offers access to unlimited cinema tickets, free movies online (from a limited catalogue), and discounts on some concessions at the cinema for ₦5,999 ($11) or ₦8,999 ($16.5) a month.

Filmhouse is Nigeria’s largest cinema chain, and in 2021, it introduced a two-tiered subscription service. The first is FH+ Silver (₦5,999 per month) which allows users to purchase unlimited tickets to movies showing in standard and premium formats from Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays. The second is the FH+ Platinum (₦8,999) which gives users access to an unlimited number of tickets to movies showing in all formats, including IMAX and MX4D (my favourite).

I’ve subscribed to FH+ Platinum for two months running, and I appreciate the potential of the service. I go to the movies at least three times a month, depending on what’s showing, and this usually sets me back ₦15,000 to ₦20,000, including tickets and concessions. An ₦8,999 plan is a no-brainer for me.

In theory, Filmhouse’s subscription plans are great. In reality, execution is the devil. And it is this devil that punches holes in Filmhouse’s plot.

The plothole

After signing up in September, I wanted to purchase tickets to see Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, The Protégé, and Free Guy. Ordinarily, it should have been straightforward: I log on to the Filmhouse platform, select the movies I want to see and the cinema where I want to see them, and then checkout. But that was not my experience.

Instead, when I logged on to the app, my subscription wasn’t reflecting. I reached out to a member of the Filmhouse team to understand what was going on. He told me the app had a bug that they’d been trying to fix and offered to help out manually. He did, and I received a notification that my subscription was now active.

Next, I needed to buy the tickets but got an error message, “Unable to find recognition”. This, I found out, was part of what they were trying to fix. I had to refresh the page repeatedly before I was able to buy the tickets I wanted. Since then, I have dealt with many more issues. On some days, I have to purchase tickets in person using my subscription details.

This month, when I renewed my subscription, I faced another problem – I couldn’t log in to my account and got an error message saying I couldn’t be logged into more than two devices at a time. That was strange because I wasn’t even logged in anywhere.

Anyway, I reached out to customer service and was asked to “select ‘forgot password’ to sign in”. I did, and it worked, until recently when I wanted to purchase another movie ticket. This time, repeated attempts to change my password proved futile, and I had to get my ticket in person again. What’s more is that, as things stand, I cannot log into the mobile app. This is a frustrating symptom of a larger problem.

Denouement

In Communique 14, I wrote about the challenges of building a subscription service in this market:

“There are technical problems with subscription management that are, in some ways, unique to African publishers, mainly because it is a nascent concept on the continent and the talent and resources needed to solve them are not readily available. Subscription management requires an incredible amount of engineering investment that most media companies can either not afford or be bothered to make.”

What Filmhouse seeks to do with its subscription service is relatively new and, as far as I know, the first of its kind by a cinema company in this part of the world. (Nairabox is not a cinema company.) So, I’ll make a discount for growing pains and the drawbacks of experimentation. Nevertheless, the dissonance between my expectations and experience with the service lends credence to my point in that essay and this statement from Preston Ideh, Stears’ CEO (emphasis mine):

“This infrastructure hurdle [to providing subscription products] can make or break publishers [or media companies]. It might seem negligible when you have only a few subscribers. But at scale, it can become a nightmare. It gets even more complex when African publishers want to be creative with their reader [or user] experiences… Behind the scenes (and you can ask my team if you do not believe me), it requires engineering power that most media businesses do not have.”

The emphasis here is on the engineering requirements for building a subscription service with a seamless experience. Filmhouse outsources the engineering for this service, and my experience hasn’t been great so far. The alternative might be to bring this in-house, but that only works if the service’s uptake is big enough to justify this decision. I doubt it is.

Still, much like Filmhouse, more media companies in Africa will attempt to build subscription products, and they will hit the same engineering snags. But perhaps there is a point in the future where companies that have built great subscription management services exist here. Maybe we don’t have to look too far ahead.

I pointed out in Communique 14 that there is an entire market outside of publishing for a subscription management service, something that Stears has received a grant from the Google News Initiative to build. But Stears is likely not the only company looking to solve this problem, and a lot will depend on how quickly the market expands.

If you listen to the podcast often enough, you will notice that most of his guests have been working in the media and technology industries for several years. Peter himself has been in the business since 1997, which means he has cultivated an army of sources, harnessed a plethora of story perspectives, and, most importantly, gained high-level credibility that gives him access to the most prominent industry figures.

I’ve chosen to begin today’s newsletter with this illustration because it’s crucial for anyone criticising or commenting on tech media or journalism in Africa to do so with a proper appreciation for context. The ecosystem is only just coming of age, and so is the journalism that dissects it.

I started my journalism career in 2015 as a reporter with TechCabal. At the time, there weren’t many of us. The ecosystem we covered was fringe, and not many people took it seriously. Outside our small tech communities in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, etc., we got minimal traction.

Most of our stories revolved around startup and founder profiles (we wrote about any and every startup we could find), explainers (we were ecosystem evangelists, explaining the industry to whoever cared to listen), and growth resources (we tried to translate business lessons from more mature industries into startup lingo). Anyone aware enough at the time would’ve criticised us for writing about every Tom, Dick, and Harriet who had a startup idea. But we did what we did because that was all we had to work with.

Fast forward to many years later. The ecosystem is growing fast and attracting far more attention than it used to. Now, there is more money from investors, and with that comes big publicity pushes from startups. Every time a startup raises money, no matter the size, they make a PR play (because it sends strong signals that they have arrived). Even minor partnerships or feature updates are fodder for press release campaigns. Everyone wants to be noticed.

Due to the size of the funding rounds and the signal they send to the ecosystem, these are the stories that often generate the most buzz. First, because they make the startups look good, and then because they validate the ecosystem. (It feels good to talk about how much African startups have raised in the past 12 months, doesn’t it?) But even with that, this doesn’t mean that fundraising is all there is to tech journalism in Africa. Those are just the stories that get the most attention.

What we see with the nature of tech’s most prominent stories reflects the industry’s evolution and what people pay the most attention to (whether they admit it or not, data doesn’t lie). But this is just one side of the story.

The other side has to do with talent and human resources. It is as tech analyst (and former journalist) Osarumen Osamuyi explains on this podcast:

• There aren’t enough reporters who have been around long enough to become peers with the people they are covering.

• The ecosystem is still relatively small, and so is the size of the media covering it. This makes it all the more difficult for media companies to retain their best talent.

• Because of the ecosystem’s allure coupled with the media’s limited financial capacity, the journalists who stick around long enough eventually become knowledgeable to the point where they can migrate to the industry. (Osarumen is himself an example.)

• Essentially, tech media companies don’t have the financial muscle to hire ready-made subject matter experts who can churn out high-level analysis from day one. They also might not be able to afford trained journalists who will consistently provide high-quality investigative stories.

• All these factors affect the quality of editorial work.

With all this said, it’s still paramount to point out that there are so many good examples of tech journalism and media extending beyond fundraising.

Here are a few good examples

• Alex Onukwue’s Quartz Africa coverage

• African Tech Roundup’s series of podcasts

• Abubakar Idris’ Rest of World coverage

• TechCabal’s daily newsletter and general tech coverage

• Justin Norman’s podcast and newsletter on The Flip

• TechCentral’s robust coverage of tech and business

• Techweez’s consistent reviews and socially pertinent news

I’m sure several other examples exist that I haven’t mentioned, all of which constitute solid options for anyone genuinely curious about tech coverage outside fundraising. If you’d like to point out some others, please do so in the comment section. Thank you!

In April 2021, Paystack – a payment processing company – announced it was hiring a Managing Editor to help build “Africa’s largest digital business media network”. This was nothing new.

Paystack has been producing the kind of content you’d expect from an actual media company for nearly two years but on a minor scale. It publishes Decode Fintech, a newsletter and podcast that curates news and provides commentary on the fintech ecosystem in Africa.

Now, it wants to do more. Much more. It wants to build a media operation in the mould of Morning Brew, Bloomberg, First Round Review, etc.

In his announcement of the vacancy for the Managing Editor role, Emmanuel Quartey, Paystack’s Head of Growth, said: 

“We genuinely believe that content - like software products - can solve real problems for merchants. As Managing Editor, you’ll lead our entire content effort supported by a team of writers, video producers, designers, and developers… But just as importantly, you’ll help fundamentally shape the story of entrepreneurship in Africa.”

On the surface, this seems like a noble cause. First, Paystack will use its platform to provide practical business insights for its customers and, in the process, help them solve problems they encounter while running their businesses. (The textbook definition of content marketing.) Then it will gradually develop its capabilities to the point where it can go toe-to-toe with any digital business publication on the continent. And herein lies both the genius and the threat.

First, the genius

The first time I listened to the Decode Fintech podcast, I immediately understood what Paystack was trying to achieve. I saw the brand-building potential and opportunity for the podcast to become a great customer acquisition channel.

For example, the pilot episode features Guaranty Trust Bank’s Group Head of ePayments speaking about the strategy and technology behind their hugely successful USSD service, 737. Midway through that episode, the host takes a “quick second to tell you about what we do at Paystack”. The chances are that if you’d listened to the podcast until the 17th minute because of the quality and relevance of the insights, you likely would be interested in the services Paystack offers.

Paystack could provide you with great value in the form of practical business insights while drawing you into its sales funnel. So, if 100 people finished listening to that podcast, that’s 100 people Paystack advertised to at zero marginal cost.

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Then, the threat

The capabilities and skill set required to build a successful financial technology company are wildly different from those needed to build successful media operations. And Paystack knows this. Its current Managing Editor is the former Editor-in-Chief of TechCabal. Its next Managing Editor will likely have a similar resume and skill set. So, which industry will it attract talent from? Your guess is as good as mine.

By positioning itself as a media company, Paystack will (knowingly or unknowingly) become a competitor with the same media platforms that have told its story until now. If it executes this strategy well, it will become a headache for these traditional media companies. (By traditional in this context, I am bundling both traditional and digital media.)

If a company with little to no pressure to monetise its media properties begins to tread deeper into the territory that was erstwhile occupied by traditional media companies whose livelihoods depend on reporting news and creating content, what happens then?

Let’s juxtapose Paystack and TechCabal for the sake of illustration. Suppose both of them start competing for talent, content, and audience attention. Paystack already has a robust business that can conveniently finance its media operations, while TechCabal still has to wade through the muddy waters of the media business. Also consider that both of them occupy different industries with lopsided market sizes. One plays in an industry that, despite its relative nascence, can attract $200-million exits and birth multiple unicorns. The other plays in an industry that is struggling globally and even more so on the continent. Given all of these factors, who do you think will win in the end?

Where really is the threat?

I must clarify at this point that this topic is only a problem depending on what side of the aisle you’re sitting on.

For the audience, this is a non-issue. We’ve seen over time how fewer people are concerned with the name of the outlets through which they get their news or information. As long as they perceive the outlet to be credible, everything else pales in comparison. Most people consume content on Facebook, Twitter, or via Google, and it matters less to them the name of the publisher that put it there.

For companies like Paystack, this is one more upside to the Internet. It allows them to bypass traditional middlemen and go straight to customers. The advent of the Internet means they can now achieve the same scale of engagement previously attainable only by the media. Now, individual organisations can, in theory, wield just as much influence as the media has on how people think and behave.

However, for the media – especially business and tech media – this development poses a threat. It further weakens their already loosening grasp on people’s attention and dilutes their ability to influence the audience and make money off their eyeballs. It also poses ethical issues.

In journalism, one of the first things we learn is that the press is the watchdog of society. To play this role, it must criticise and hold people in power (and key figures in society) accountable. To do this, it requires sources, and those sources are members of the same society it must keep in check. So, there is a delicate ethical balance to uphold here.

However, what happens when those members of society decide that they can do the job of the press as well as the press can, something we’re starting to see more of with the evolution of social media and user behaviour online? Who holds society accountable then? Of course, this is a rather general example, but it sheds some light on the ethical dilemmas that will arise.

The point is that there are certain terrains that the media is motivated to drive into and certain dark spots that it is obliged to probe that no company’s content marketing vehicle is neither motivated nor obliged to drive into, considering that the aim of content marketing is ultimately to sell. There are hard questions that the media is (ideally) obliged to ask that no company’s content marketing strategy is even motivated to consider. Yet, attention is zero-sum, a scarce resource that people only hand out to whoever has the most resources to attract it.

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A global problem

In the early 2000s, former Financial Times journalist and founder of Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski, introduced the idea of corporate brands taking up the mantle of media operations. To him is attributed the famous “Every company is a media company” quote. A nascent concept at the time, it has since grown to become the norm with the advent of the Internet, although predominantly in the West.

In 2018, Stripe (Paystack’s parent company) began publishing books while it also owns a collection of digital publications. In the same year, Goldman Sachs started to push its podcast, Exchanges at Goldman Sachs, out to a broader audience, but it had already been publishing it since 2015.

In 2019, Airbnb began publishing a print magazine you can subscribe to at $18/year for six issues. Bumble, the dating app, launched its magazine. And Netflix launched its entertainment journal, Queue.

Most recently, in 2021, venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz (also known as ‘a16z’) officially launched Future, a platform for opinion pieces and content that will shape how people think about the future of technology and society.

What all these publications and media properties have in common is that they are all industry-specific and make no attempt to be mass-market products. Still, there’s no doubt they will compete for attention and talent. And there is no doubt that they are content marketing tools. Furthermore, most of their top hires are from, you guessed it, traditional media companies. (Again, I’m bundling traditional and digital media here.)

Airbnb’s Editor-in-Chief, Janine Kahn, was once the Editor-in-Chief at Say Media. Clare O’Connor, Head of Editorial Content at Bumble, was a staff writer at Forbes. Netflix’s new VP of Editorial and Publishing, Michelle Lee, was Allure’s Editor-in-Chief for over half a decade. Sonal Chokshi, a16z’s Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Partner, used to be a Senior Editor at Wired. LinkedIn’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Roth, was the Managing Editor at Fortune and a Senior Writer at Wired.

And then you have Paystack. Its current Managing Editor is the former Editor-in-Chief of one of Africa's most prominent tech publications. Furthermore, its incoming Managing Editor will have to expand the team and make some hires. You don't have to think too far to know where that talent will come from.

These are just some examples, and there are many more. But I know you get where I'm going with this.

Globally, more companies are waking up to the potency of content marketing. Attention is a zero-sum game, and you have to capture it to sell your products and services. In the past, companies went through the media to get to their customers within an audience because they didn’t have options. Now, they do. Now, they can go directly via the Internet and build their own vehicles of influence driven by editorially savvy hands and minds.

Paystack’s foray into this terrain will be one of the most significant attempts by a company to play at scale with this strategy on the continent. And while it might be the one of the first, it certainly won’t be the last.

Denouement

In the past few months since I started writing this essay, I have spoken with editors and journalists who are worried about the implications of what Paystack is trying to do. I have also talked to several other people who are simply curious. It’s easy to miss the undertone if you aren’t paying attention or aren’t rooted in the ecosystem.

Tech and business publications, for sure, will be most affected, given that much of what they do heavily leans towards content marketing.

The silver lining is that this is ultimately a question of incentives. Paystack (and other companies that will take up this mantle) are incentivised to produce content that their customers find valuable. In some cases, they will wade into the waters of opinion moulding. That’s as much competition with the media as there will be. As Margit Wennmachers of a16z iterates, Future has no intentions of being a news operation. Instead, it will focus on overarching subject matters and only touch on news stories as they impact those matters. So also, these companies will focus on producing content that helps build their brands and attract customers.

For so long, African tech and business publications have served as informal publicists of their ecosystems, with some exceptions. That strategy is no longer sustainable. Society will always need journalism, but journalism that cannot be differentiated from content marketing and Public Relations is impotent and puts its purveyors in danger. Society will always need institutions to keep it in check, and no one is better equipped to do this than the media – we’ve seen Facebook, Twitter, and other big tech platforms fail woefully at it.

Now more than ever, tech and business publishers need to find answers to the hard questions that I know they have been asking for so long: “How do we move beyond advertising as a primary revenue source?” Because without answering this question, they will forever be stuck in their role as ecosystem mouthpieces while the ecosystem itself continues to develop beyond needing them and into becoming competitors.

One more thing… 

I’ve been writing Communiqué for over a year now, and each edition requires hours (sometimes days and weeks) of research, thinking, writing, editing, and design. So, if you find the insight that I provide valuable, please do me a favour: like the post and share it directly with at least two people you think will love it.

Also, if you like the quality of work that goes into the newsletter, I offer the same quality of writing, research, and consulting services to corporate clients. Reach out to me and let's talk.

Contact me

PS: Thank you to Jane Efagwu, Olaoluwa Oyedele, and Hassan Yahaya for helping me edit and refine the points in this essay.

If you enjoyed reading this, please like the post and tell other people about Communiqué.

On February 23, 2021, I finally downloaded Spotify onto my phone. For four years, I’d been confined to using the service on my laptop with a VPN. Anyone who’s had to do this knows how annoying it can be. Sometimes the app logs you out, and signing back in can be a hassle. Not anymore.

Spotify’s expansion into 85 new countries means it is now readily available in Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya. It enters an already crowded Nigerian market with Apple Music, Boomplay, Deezer, Gbedu, UduX, and music blogs where users can stream/download music for free. It also has to contend with Beat FM, Cool FM, and other radio stations that regularly play music (radio remains the biggest medium in Nigeria). So, the economics aren’t attractive enough for it in Nigeria, but only as an isolated market. Globally, however, the expansion makes absolute sense.

If you think about Spotify purely as a music streaming service, I can excuse you for failing to see why its entry into the market is a big deal. Beyond user experience (which is a technicality), there’s not much else to it. It operates a freemium model, and its cheapest subscription plan is N900. It costs the same as an Apple Music subscription and N400 more than Boomplay. But this goes past just another music streaming platform entering into the market.

Spotify’s real gameplan is owning your passive media experience via audio. It is gunning for the whole nine yards—music, podcasts, audio advertising, audiobooks, and whatever else technology can conjure.

Here’s what Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek, realised in 2019:

“More than 10 years ago, we founded Spotify to give consumers something they couldn’t get — music any time, anywhere, and at the right price… I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, but what I didn’t know when we launched to consumers in 2008 was that audio — not just music — would be the future of Spotify… With the world focused on trying to reduce screen time, it opens up a massive audio opportunity. This opportunity starts with the next phase of growth in audio — podcasting.”

Music streaming is a cruel business. The bigger a platform grows, with more subscribers and streams, the more money it has to lose by paying artists, distributors, and record companies. For Spotify, this comes out of its net revenue from adverts and subscription fees.

Rolling Stone reports that Spotify pays record companies 52% of all profits from their artists’ streams, and a further 10-15% of its revenue goes to songwriters and music publishers. For Spotify to continue growing, it needs to add content to its platform that it doesn’t have to pay for perpetually. This is where podcasts and other audio forms come in.

Since 2013, it has acquired 19 companies that provide services ranging from podcasting to music discovery, music intelligence, and cloud computing. It spent $600 million on acquisitions related to podcasting between February 2019 and 2020 alone. It is exploring audiobooks as well.

Why is Spotify only just expanding to these markets?

According to Morning Brew, “Spotify has been slower to expand outside the US and Europe because securing music rights is a huge headache... [Its recent] expansion [now opens] its service up to 1 billion more people, which will help power discoverability for new artists, styles, and genres.”

Its expansion also taps into the growing success of international content. The South Korean movie, Parasite, won Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars. It was the first-ever foreign-language film to do so, but its win was not “the beginning of something new”. It was indicative of what has since been brewing. Hollywood seems to be out of ideas, reflected both in its obsession with remakes and sequels and the audience’s hunger for more international content on streaming platforms. Toby Howell of Morning Brew writes, “[T]he US has historically dominated the music and entertainment industries. But the growing success of international content shows the centre of gravity is shifting.”

With increased competition in the streaming landscape, small margins could contribute to massive gains. Netflix saw this with the international expansion that brought it into Nigeria. Now, Spotify is going down that route, using the same playbook.

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What are the opportunities?

Two interesting pieces of Spotify’s expansion puzzle are:

1. Its commitment to work “closely with local creators and partners in each market”. I imagine that it will initially do this in Nigeria with musicians and record labels; they are the lowest-hanging fruit.

2. Its long-term plan to help creators monetise their content. This is something Ek expects to play out over the next decade as radio fades and audio content moves from linear to on-demand.

As we already established, Spotify’s gameplan transcends music streaming. While music is great for attracting users and subscribers, music streaming is a cruel business, and audio will play a larger role in the future of media. So, podcasts, audio advertising, audiobooks, audio branding, voice, etc., all constitute vital parts of its strategy. This is where the long-term opportunities lie for the Nigerian (and African) creative industry.

While Spotify isn’t precisely focusing on African markets, its expansion still opens up some exciting opportunities. For example, there could also be room for audio technology services that help Spotify (and other services like it) figure out how to better engage its content with African audiences. Perhaps there is room for audio podcast networks that help Spotify aggregate content, the way FilmOne does for Netflix in Nigeria. Or maybe there is room for audiobooks and audio dramatisations of African literary classics.

In another case, suppose the Loose Talk podcast was still running with the level of conversations each episode generated and its impact on Nigerian pop culture. In that case, there could have been a potential licensing deal on the horizon, not unlike Joe Rogan’s. That said, Loose Talk’s success proves a gap in the market, but any takers must look beyond the boundaries of Nigeria and appeal to international audiences. Because although Nigeria is populous, its economy does not have the stamina to match the value of its creative industry. This large audience does not have the spending power to push content to its full potential. And it is the possibility of tapping into vast but buoyant audiences that will make any service like Spotify pay greater attention to an ecosystem.

The snags

There is a caveat, though. Unlike Netflix, which came into the market to leverage local content with a global appeal and tap into an already mature ecosystem, Spotify can’t yet do the same. Where Netflix could work with an established pool of actors, directors, scriptwriters, and production companies moving towards a centralised goal, Spotify can’t yet do the same.

Away from music, the audio content ecosystem has not reached the point where it can attract comparable investments, except in radio. Podcasting remains relatively small, audio advertising is largely limited to radio, audio ad-tech is almost nonexistent, and audiobooks are still not widely adopted. Then there is the content direction snag. Because the ecosystem is far from maturity, there isn’t much local audio content with global appeal, and so there are no windfalls in sight.

However, there is already talent and infrastructure to create audio content that could interest platforms like Spotify. But most of them are either devoted to radio or scattered across several industries—presenters, voice-over artists, sound engineers, scriptwriters, audio producers, data analysts, etc. What we need is convergence, and only the right incentives can drive this.

Business ecosystems thrive on incentives. For example, the technology ecosystem is driven by the promise of wealth and the many ways innovation can lead to it. The entertainment industry promises fame and fortune, and harvesting people’s attention through music and film creates a pathway. These ecosystems are bigger now than they were many years ago because of investments fuelled by compelling incentives.

Audio will play a much bigger role in the future of media as people continue to experience screen fatigue. The journey to the point where Spotify’s expansion brings tangible opportunities to African creatives is long and arduous. But there is a journey still, and there are incentives. I don’t see a better signal than when “the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service” begins a venture into your market.

(PS: A big thank you to my friend, Hassan Yahaya, for helping me refine the arguments in this essay.)

Additional reading

1. Spotify CEO explains how the company plans to help artists (and itself) make money - The Verge

2. Spotify debuts new tools for creators to make interactive podcasts - Axios

3. Spotify has tripled number of podcasts in past year to 2.2 million - Axios

4. How much does Spotify pay per stream? - Business Insider

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