Communiqué 81: Beyond brand deals, African creators are building scalable product businesses
47% of African creators earn more from digital products than brand deals, now they're building platforms to scale that income.
Key points
Creators make great business founders: Many African creators use their popularity to launch real businesses, not just promote others. For investors, this shift represents a new type of early-stage venture opportunity—creator-led businesses that already have built-in demand and low CAC (customer acquisition cost).
Subscriptions are the future: Selling one-time products like eBooks or courses is hard to sustain. Creative entrepreneurs should adopt SaaS-like recurring revenue models or membership platforms over single-sale products. These models are more complex to pirate, easier to scale, and build stronger lifetime value.
Creator holding companies are the next best asset class: The most ambitious creators will build multi-brand companies using their content engine as the marketing infrastructure. Creative entrepreneurs who have found product-market fit in one niche can explore adjacent verticals where their audience’s trust gives them an unfair advantage.
1. Going beyond brand deals.
In his final year as a medical student, Dr. Chinonso Egemba witnessed a young patient die not because of a wrong diagnosis, but because the patient had failed to follow medical advice. It was a stark reminder that access to healthcare isn’t just about doctors and hospitals, but also about information and understanding. That moment marked a turning point. Egemba began creating content to close the gap between medical knowledge and everyday Nigerians.
Nearly a decade later, Egemba is better known as Aproko Doctor, the health-conscious content creator with over six million followers across social media. But he’s gone far beyond videos about blood pressure, carbonated drinks, and hydration. In early 2025, he launched Awadoc, a telehealth platform designed to connect everyday Nigerians with medical advice and licensed doctors at an affordable rate.
Since launching in April, Awadoc says it has served more than 50,000 patients across 13 African countries and is now raising a $500,000 pre-seed round to expand its operations.
Similarly, Ifedayo Agoro, known to her audience as Diary of a Naija Girl, entered the skincare market in 2020 with her brand, Dang Lifestyle, after gathering over a million followers across social media. What began as a simple experiment has now sold over 400,000 product units across Nigeria, the U.S., and Europe. In 2024, the brand opened its first physical location, an experience centre in the upscale neighbourhood of Victoria Island, Lagos.
Also, popular skitmaker Justin UG, a staple of Nigeria’s Instagram comedy scene, is turning his viral humour into a software play. In May, he announced Memora, a platform to help people discover, save, and share memes worldwide.
These creators represent a growing trend of African creators moving beyond simply monetising their influence by endorsing other people’s products to leveraging their reach, trust, and cultural capital to build products, launch businesses, and raise capital to scale these businesses.
2. The MrBeast playbook
To truly understand the growing wave of African creators launching digital products and building businesses around them, it helps to look at the global north star of this model: Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast.
Donaldson, the 26-year-old YouTuber famed for his elaborate stunts and philanthropic giveaways, was already one of the most-watched creators in the world when he made his first major leap into product entrepreneurship. In 2020, he launched MrBeast Burger, a virtual restaurant brand that piggybacked on a network of ghost kitchens across the U.S. Initially, it was a viral success—millions of orders flooded in, driven by MrBeast’s massive online following. But behind the scenes, operational cracks quickly emerged: poor quality control, inconsistent customer experience, and tension with the company he’d partnered with, Virtual Dining Concepts. By 2023, he was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit over the burger chain, calling the food “inedible” and alleging damage to his reputation. But Donaldson didn’t let that deter him.
In 2022, he launched Feastables, a chocolate brand using the full power of his YouTube platform as a marketing engine. The business exploded: in 2024 alone, Feastables generated $250 million in sales and $20 million in profit, surpassing even the content creation arm of the MrBeast business, which reportedly lost $80 million in the same period.
Feastables’ success has since become the blueprint. MrBeast has quietly expanded into other categories: Lunchables-style snacks under a new brand called Lunchly, and Viewstat, a software company selling analytics and automation tools to other creators. All these entities sit under a holding company called Beast Industries, which has now raised $450 million in funding and was valued at $5 billion as of 2024.
The business model is clear: the content is no longer the business but the marketing engine.
“We have an unprecedented platform in terms of reach and fandom,” Jeffrey Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, told Bloomberg. “We have the opportunity to launch multiple businesses on the back of that centre of reach and distribution.” By 2026, revenue from the content creation arm of the business will account for only 20% of the company’s total revenue.
Other creators have used this playbook with stunning success. Huda Kattan, a former beauty blogger and makeup artist, leveraged her online influence into Huda Beauty, a cosmetics empire valued at $1.2 billion at its peak. Her deep understanding of her audience’s beauty preferences, honed through years of direct engagement on YouTube and Instagram, became the foundation for product development, marketing, and global expansion. Similarly, Australian fitness influencer Kayla Itsines transformed her online workout guides into Sweat, a full-fledged fitness tech platform. In 2021, she sold Sweat to fitness giant iFIT for $400 million.
3. The creator product journey
African creators have always sold products as part of their business. The 2024 African Creator Economy Report found that for 47% of creators, selling digital products such as courses, eBooks, templates, or presets was their most significant source of income. The first wave of this productisation boom was enabled by tools like Selar and Flutterwave Store, making it incredibly easy for creators to package knowledge in areas like beauty, fitness, finance, tech, and freelancing into high-margin, one-off offerings. And to a large extent, this model has worked.
However, cracks in this productisation strategy soon became clear. Digital products like courses or eBooks are one-time purchases and rely heavily on the creator’s ability to market them continuously. That process is exhausting. Worse still, once a course is live, it’s often vulnerable to piracy, with thousands of leaked copies shared freely across Telegram and WhatsApp.
This new wave of creator-led product businesses, particularly for those building digital products, will lean towards the SaaS model.
Instead of selling one-off products, creators will build membership ecosystems that combine content, community, access, and tools that address a specific pain point into a single offering. Awadoc uses this model in healthcare. This approach is more complicated to pirate, easier to scale, and deeply embedded in daily user behaviour.
4. What does the future look like?
In Communiqué 35: The creator lifecycle, David outlined the various phases of a creator’s growth and the final stage; legacy is the hardest to reach:
“This is the final stage for creators. Here, they’ve entered wholly into celebrity status. They’ve gotten rich by leveraging their audience, but they know they won’t be hot forever, so they need to think beyond themselves. Here, the focus is longevity. How can they invest in projects outside the scope of what made them successful? How can they channel their fame into long-lasting wealth? How can they build considerable passive income? This is when we start seeing creators launch venture capital firms, restaurants and hospitality brands, clothing and fashion lines, makeup brands, production companies, creative agencies, etc.”
However, thanks to open-source tools and AI co-pilots, we will see more creators reach the legacy phase as the cost of building software continues to fall. In the coming years, expect more creators to ship tailored apps, such as education, wellness, investing, and design, wrapped in the language of community and powered by creator-led brand affinity.
In this future, expect a wave of creator-founded software platforms that bundle the niche expertise of creators with the interactivity of an AI chatbot in various fields, from parenting to productivity to wellness. These will often be paywalled or use a freemium model.
Also, just as the last generation of influencers moved into brand ambassadorship and endorsements, the next generation will launch actual brands with content as the launchpad, not the product. We’ll soon see creator-backed holding companies that resemble startups launch multiple consumer-facing brands backed by one powerful personality and a shared content, operations, and marketing engine. Think “Aproko Group” launching Awadoc (health), AwaWell (wellness), and AwaStore (e-commerce for health-related products), for instance.
For investors, this is a new asset class. Creator-led companies offer distinct advantages: pre-built demand, low customer acquisition costs, and intensely loyal communities. However, they also require a new investment framework that prioritises attention metrics, audience conversion history, and platform performance over traditional features investors require.
Yet, these models come with unique risks. A business built entirely around a single personality is vulnerable. If a creator falls out of favour with their audience, the brand can suffer collateral damage. The challenge will be decoupling the founder’s face from the company’s future, without losing the emotional trust that made the business possible in the first place.
The continent’s most trusted voices are no longer just building audiences; they’re building businesses. And in doing so, they’re reshaping what entrepreneurship, branding, and product–market fit can look like in Africa. As the lines blur between creator and founder, the most valuable commodity won’t just be attention, but the products creators build with it and the businesses they build around those products.
I completely agree