Communiqué 64: Selar’s success is a masterclass in old-fashioned customer obsession

In an industry often obsessed with vanity metrics, Selar’s quiet, creator-led growth offers a blueprint for success in Africa’s creator economy.

Presented by Moniepoint

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1. Not all heroes wear capes; some process payouts

While most people have rightfully celebrated the rise of Africa’s digital creators, they’ve paid less attention to the platforms powering this revolution. Among them, Selar has emerged as a quiet force, enabling the continent’s creator class to turn passion into sustainable income.

The numbers speak for themselves: In 2024 alone, Selar paid out 9.8 billion naira ($6.4 million) to African creators, more than double its 2023 disbursements. This marks four consecutive years of doubling both users and creator payouts—a growth trajectory that began during the COVID-19 lockdown but has continued through disciplined execution.

Unlike flashy startups chasing unicorn valuations, Selar’s approach has been decidedly different: scaling sustainably by obsessively solving creators’ most pressing needs.

As Africa’s creator economy matures, platforms like Selar are becoming the invisible infrastructure, making this cultural shift possible. Selar is proving that not everyone has to own a train; some can build the rails instead.

2. A mountain and a molehill

Fresh out of university in 2016, Douglas Kendyson’s first job was as a tech and customer support personnel for a new fintech startup called Paystack—you might have heard of them. Kendyson was at the receiving end of requests from people who wanted to sell digital products. But Paystack only supported registered businesses, not individual customers.

After getting approval from his bosses at work, he and a couple of friends built and launched the first version of Selar in 2016. It was essentially a Gumroad replica—allowing creators to set up an online store in minutes. Initially, five of Kendyson’s friends joined him to build Selar. But as time went on, work and other commitments pulled them away, leaving Kendyson as the sole developer. For the next four years, Selar existed as his passion project.

One of Selar’s first users was a musician named Muyiwa, Kendyson’s former schoolmate, who used the platform to sell his EP, Dear Music, as a zip file. However, its most important early user was the Nigerian Christian movie production company, Mount Zion Films.

In 2017, Kendyson signed a deal to help the production company distribute its films. On paper, the deal made little financial sense: Selar earned just 39 naira (3 cents) per sale, a fraction of its usual take rate. But what the deal lacked in revenue potential, it had in something more valuable—social proof. If a household name like Mount Zion trusted Selar to sell its product, then smaller independent creators could depend on it.

Things with Mount Zion improved a bit when Selar added a custom-built subscription-based streaming feature at 1,000 naira (65 cents) per month, meaning Selar could earn 300 naira (20 cents) per subscription. But the partnership was short-lived. By 2019, Mount Zion had stopped uploading new content to Selar, moving to YouTube as its main online distributor. By this time, Selar had grown to 1,300 merchants. Not bad, but not great, considering that it had been around for four years.

3. Little by little, then all at once

At the start of 2020, Douglas Kendyson gave Selar an ultimatum: The platform needed to transform into something “really, really good”—or he would walk away. Then, a few weeks later, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world.

The pandemic arrived at a pivotal moment for Selar, transforming what might have remained a modest side project into an essential platform for Africa’s digital creators. As lockdowns swept across the continent in early 2020, traditional income streams evaporated overnight. Suddenly, teachers could no longer hold physical classes, musicians saw their live performances canceled, and entrepreneurs found their usual sales channels disrupted. This economic upheaval created an unprecedented surge in demand for digital solutions—exactly the problem Selar had been built to solve.

With physical commerce restricted, Africans who had previously hesitated to buy digital products found themselves with little choice but to embrace online transactions. The psychological barrier that had long hindered digital commerce in Africa collapsed almost overnight. Selar’s platform, which enabled creators to sell everything from online courses to music files, became not just convenient but necessary.

But the pandemic merely set the stage—it was a business strategist named TriciaBiz who became the catalyst for Selar’s breakout success. As thousands of newly unemployed professionals scrambled to monetize their skills online, TriciaBiz recognized Selar as the ideal solution. Her endorsement to her substantial audience of aspiring digital entrepreneurs carried immense weight, driving an astonishing 60% of Selar's 2020 revenue. By the end of the year, Selar had processed 100 million naira ($253,000) in transactions—a massive leap from the 6 million naira ($16,700) it processed in 2019.

The focus on creators’ needs has been the real driver of Selar’s success. For example, the streaming functionality, initially developed in 2017 for Mount Zion Films, became the foundation for Selar’s premium course-hosting feature. By enabling streaming (rather than downloadable content), Selar addressed creators’ rampant piracy concerns. A similar pattern of innovation follows Selar’s product development timeline. Its tipping feature—colloquially called “Show Love”—was born from the creators’ need for extra revenue. Likewise, integrations with global payment platforms like WeChat Pay, Alipay, and Apple Pay directly responded to African creators selling to the diaspora.

4. Selar’s aggregator advantage

Another factor that explains Selar’s growth is Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory. The theory argues that in the digital age, value is captured by aggregators—platforms that sit between consumers and suppliers, reducing transaction costs and improving user experience. Unlike traditional businesses that compete on supply-side advantages (e.g., manufacturing, distribution), aggregators win by dominating demand-side economies of scale. Two pillars of the aggregation theory explain Selar’s success:

• Direct user relationships: Selar owns the buyer-creator connection, bypassing intermediaries. Its storefronts and payment tools let customers transact seamlessly, making the platform indispensable to both sides.

• Near-zero marginal costs: Digital products—ebooks, courses, films—require little to no additional inventory cost. Each new creator who uses Selar to sell their product brings new customers to the platform, helping drive exponential growth at minimal cost.

The result? A self-reinforcing loop: More creators on the Selar platform attract more buyers, and the more buyers view Selar as a reliable means to buy digital products, the more creators it draws in.

In 2025, Selar has set an ambitious goal of paying out 20 billion naira ($13 million) to creators—more than double the 2024 figure. This ambitious goal will be powered by enhancements to its product suite, including a new booking system for service-based creators and an event check-in app to complement its existing ticketing features.

These additions, developed in response to creator feedback, underscore Selar’s unique advantage: a deep understanding of African creators’ unique needs. A focus that has fueled four consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. In an industry often obsessed with vanity metrics, Selar’s quiet, creator-led growth offers a blueprint for success in Africa’s creator economy.