Hello! Welcome to my Channel.

My name is Adaora Oramah, and I'm the founder of AMAKA. I'm a Nigerian Igbo woman who grew up in Cairo, New York CIty and London. While I’m currently a full-time CEO, I occasionally moonlight as a part-time introverted jester with a penchant for very spicy foods and an inability to stay in one place (I travel and move around a lot).

I’ve decided to launch my weekly newsletter ‘Fail-Smart’ to share my experiences of running, building, and pivoting my company, AMAKA. For those who don’t know, we started our journey as a media platform spotlighting Pan-African women’s stories. Since we launched in 2021, we’ve grown our community to over 50,000 readers and creators. Last year, we decided to pivot the business to a social publishing platform that empowers Pan-African creators to share and monetize their stories through subscriptions and paid gigs. Today is a momentous occasion as we've launched an extension of the platform for businesses and creators to connect: AMAKA Gigs. The aim? To develop the gig  economy for Pan-Africans worldwide.

I launched AMAKA at 24-years old and was learning everything as I went along. My goal is to provide a more open understanding of running a creative tech business, particularly for those who identify as Black and African. I also want to share knowledge that is typically elusive and highly inaccessible unless you attended certain universities or worked at specific high-growth companies. Over the past four years, I’ve devoted a significant amount of time to AMAKA, accumulating a wealth of knowledge and experience that would have taken me a decade to learn if I had taken the traditional route of going for a job straight after my master's degree.  Through my AMAKA Channel, I’m delighted to be able to share myCEO/Founder journey so far, my advice, my massive wins, epic failings and valuable learnings

Before we dive in, don't forget to hit subscribe and share my channel with others. 

Sidenote: I use some concepts and terms that may not be 100% familiar to those who are new to the start-up ecosystem, so I provide an * against words to offer definitions and clarity in the spirit of accessibility.

Why Did We Pivot?

Last year, like many startups, we fell on hard times.  The economic downturn spurred a further decline in advertising spend in media, which has resulted in cherished media companies either shuttering or filing for bankruptcy. That, combined with the fact that only 0.34% of Venture-Capital Funding*  goes into Black-woman owned businesses, We had to make a change.  We were already in the process of moving away from a solely editorial business  in 2022, but the extreme economic challenges forced me to make the pivot much sooner.

Declining Investor Interest and Advertising Shifts

Investors really don't like the traditional media model anymore. The initial success of investments in platforms like Vice and Buzzfeed have proved fruitless. Media is incredibly difficult to monetize and not scalable. Good quality storytelling needs time, investment, and resources. However, it requires a steady stream of funding to do so at an increased rate. Investors, especially venture capitalists, want extreme viral and product-led growth* that require minimal overhead cost while achieving high levels of revenue all in a short span of time. 

Also, the decline in advertising spend in media has redirected to paid social media, coupled with content creators, as it is more cost-effective and easily optimized. 63% of marketers in the U.S. say influencer-generated content performs better than other brand-directed content, and they are investing significantly in more low-fi creator content instead of highly stylized product and branded content shoots.

The Future of Storytelling: Social Media and A.I.

The future of social media is becoming less about social interaction and more like personalized TV, where it is preferable to curate your viewing experience, making readers/viewers steer away from going directly to media sites. Generative AI is also changing the future of storytelling and creativity, allowing creators to generate content at an unprecedented rate while leveraging historical data to create better-performing stories.

Adapting to the New Reality

You’ll probably notice that I’m thinking from a highly commercial lens. My points are not to denounce the traditional media industry — as we need impactful, fact-checked African-led storytelling platforms now more than ever — but to convey the current challenges making it incredibly difficult for independent media to thrive.  It was tough. There were many tears, but we soldiered on. 

With this current media mayhem, we took the hard, but actually landmark decision to focus on

AMAKA becoming an innovative social publishing platform. I saw a greater opportunity to provide growth and access for more than 800 million young Africans on the continent and worldwide to leverage the digital economy and capitalize on the surge of remote work that primarily began from the global pandemic lockdown. We developed our platform for creators to make money directly from brands, clients, and their community. This aims to offer a solution to the lack of structural support in the creative industry for Black and African creators.

Paying  writers and creators for their work is an issue due to Africa's challenging and country-specific payment solutions. It’s currently hard to remit USD to countries like Nigeria right now. While there’s been significant strides in Africa’s fintech infrastructure, there’s still a lot of work to do. For example, many African and Black content creators need a foreign bank account to be able to utilize platforms like Substack, Upwork, Medium, and Patreon, which excludes billions of potential creators from monetizing their creativity. 

We wanted to consolidate the experience where it was possible for creators to share, monetize and get paid on the same digital platform, whilst also empowering businesses with a streamlined solution for discovering, commissioning, and managing creators—all in one place!

How to Thrive in the Media Mayhem

Based on my experiences, I've compiled some of my personal thoughts on how  creative businesses can adapt and thrive in today's media landscape, but most importantly how to prioritise revenue growth. I’ll be sharing that in the next newsletter,  so please be sure to subscribe to my channel, and forward this article to others who might find it useful. 

And That’s a Wrap! 

If you made it this far, firstly, thank you so much for taking the time to read it! I hope the above was helpful for those in the media business. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments; I would love to hear your feedback!

Until next time,

Adaora 

Definitions 

Venture-Capital Funding: A form of private equity and a type of financing for startup companies and small businesses with long-term growth potential

Product Led-Growth: A business strategy in which a company uses its product as the main tool to acquire customers. For example, Slack users can invite their friends or colleagues to chat on the platform.  They must have an account to do so.