Five years of Communiqué. What next?

What started as a newsletter in May 2020 has become a full-blown intelligence business and knowledge ecosystem.

Exactly five years ago today, I hit send on Communiqué edition zero. I just wanted to share a monthly newsletter about my thoughts on Nigeria’s media industry. The first newsletter covered Stears’ $600,000 fundraise and the four waves of digital publishing in Nigeria. I could sense that the industry was on the cusp of something special, something different. But I wasn’t sure exactly what it was.

Eight months later, in January 2021, I published another newsletter sharing my lessons from inception. It was a manifesto detailing how Communiqué would evolve. I wrote, “The intersection of media and technology deserves more analysis than it currently gets, particularly its impact on culture and business.” So, I proceeded to do just that, writing about Spotify’s entry into Nigeria, asking questions about the state of podcasting in Africa, and analyzing Paystack’s foray into media building. I didn’t know this at the time, but I was gradually building the foundation for what Communiqué would eventually become—the publication of record for Africa’s creator and creative economy. Later in 2021, I wrote an essay examining the state and future of Africa’s creator economy.

In 2022, I dived deeper into stories exploring the relationship between the media, technology, and culture. I talked about journalism’s place in the creator economy, how satchetization impacts media product pricing in emerging markets, and how we can build $500-million African media companies. 2022 was the year Communiqué came into its own. My child was becoming a teenager, and I couldn’t be prouder.

Then I took a job in December 2022, and it all went quiet. I couldn’t publish the newsletter as often as I wanted. I told myself that taking on the role would help grow my career and open doors that could benefit me and other people like me. I also wanted experience in a place where I could grow and acquire important organizational management skills. Some of the things I hoped for happened. But most of them did not. So, in late 2024, I returned to the thing I knew best and loved the deepest. And here we are.

I knew that Communiqué had the potential to be something more, something truly special. But I also knew that there was no way it would be a viable business in the state it was. At least not the type of impactful business I wanted to build. So, I began asking questions:

1. What will it take to build a global media business out of Africa?

2. How does a newsletter about the media, a seriously economically limited industry, become commercially viable?

I concluded that it wasn’t enough to cover one industry. I needed to look at the ecosystems attached to it. The more time I spent thinking and looking at my old work, the more obvious the answer became. I’d concluded a few years prior that the media industry and the creator economy were two sides of the same coin. The next thing was to figure out what the space the creator economy existed in looked like. It was fairly obvious that in Africa, one couldn’t speak authoritatively about the creator economy without thinking more deeply about the creative industries that supported it.

Thus, the new era of Communiqué was born: to talk about the media, we had to talk about the creator economy, and to talk about the creator economy, we had to talk about the creative industry.

The next step was figuring out what that business would look like, which didn’t take too long. I’d studied media businesses for the last decade, and read almost every major book and article about the industry’s formation and viability that I could lay my hands on. So, the Communiqué Knowledge Ecosystem was born. And that is why we are who we are today.

A few things have changed since we went all in with this vision of the future. Nothing beats getting into the ring to throw and take a few punches. There is no better teacher than Mr. Experience himself.

So, what started as a newsletter five years ago in May 2020 has become a full-blown intelligence business. We tell stories, structure data, uncover insights, and build communities that help people like you make better business and professional decisions. And we are bloody good at it. In less than a year, we have worked on the most comprehensive African creator economy report and the biggest database of African creative economy players you will find. The great thing is that there’s so much more we have to do, so many more exciting things on our roadmap. We haven’t even told you about our AI data products yet.

We will be to Africa’s creative economy what Bloomberg and Dow Jones have become to the U.S. financial market. Just stick with us and you’ll see it all unfold.

So, here’s to the next five years, and the many more five years that will follow. May we live to see them.