FOUNDERS
CONNECT
building a content engine for Africa's tech storytelling media brand
01 — the problem
Great stories weren't travelling as far as they could.
Founders Connect is a media company putting the African tech ecosystem and the people building it on the global map. When I joined in February 2022, the core product was already strong: long-form conversations with African founders, operators and investors, hosted by Peace Itimi. The problem was distribution.
Instagram had around 1,600 followers and consisted largely of episodic teasers. There was no systematic way of extracting the strongest moments from long-form interviews, no TikTok or LinkedIn presence, and limited third-party distribution. A 45–60 minute founder conversation contained dozens of potentially valuable stories, insights and ideas but was being treated as one piece of content.
I saw an opportunity to change that and asked myself: How do we turn a long-form conversation into a content system that travels across platforms?
02 — the strategy
My central idea was simple: an episode wasn't one piece of content, but rather a source. Before an episode went live, we created teaser content designed to build anticipation. After publication, I watched the full episode and identified the moments most likely to resonate with different audiences.
I evaluated potential clips against three questions:
- Was it emotive? Did it reveal something true about what it actually feels like to build a business?
- Was it instructive? Did it give a founder, operator or aspiring builder something useful?
- Did it spark curiosity? Would someone who hadn't watched the full conversation want to?
Those clips became the foundation of our social distribution. But because I didn't want the social channels to become a feed of episode advertisements, I built a broader content mix:
- Carousels — insights and quotes extracted from conversations
- Games — crosswords, quizzes and other lightweight formats
- Quote graphics — memorable ideas from founders
- Event coverage — editorial content from live events
- Press roundups — third-party coverage of Founders Connect and its guests
The objective was to make the brand worth following even when there wasn't a new episode to promote.
Founders Connect Live, Lagos — ← scroll →
03 — the distribution system
I gave the different platforms different roles to play.
- Instagram: the primary home for the brand's editorial identity and community.
- YouTube: the home for full conversations, with SEO-optimised descriptions, strong covers, timestamps, related-content cards and, where appropriate, managed ad spend.
- X / TikTok: the discovery layer. I built the TikTok presence from zero, using short-form video and stronger hooks to reach people who had never encountered Founders Connect before. X was mostly for quotes.
- LinkedIn: a more professional distribution surface for video, events and founder-focused content.
- Podcast platforms: audio versions gave users another way to interact with the brand.
- Substack: for the most engaged audience, primarily for announcements and updates.
- Third-party distribution: syndicated written content to Hackernoon, a tech-tailored publishing site, extending the stories into adjacent audiences.
The principle was consistent: don't put the same piece everywhere in the same way. Give every platform a job.
04 — the brand
Content strategy and visual identity should not be separated. The existing visual language was functional, but I felt it didn't yet communicate the energy or distinctiveness of the stories we were trying to tell. Although design wasn't part of my original role, I began iterating on the visual system: introducing accent colours like pink and yellow, developing more engaging post formats, and thinking about what the feed should look, feel and move like as a whole.
A stronger visual identity made the content more recognisable, but also more fun, gave the brand a more coherent presence and helped individual pieces feel like part of a larger editorial product. Those colours remain part of the Founders Connect visual language today.
05 — knowing what will travel
A good content strategist makes editorial judgments before performance data arrives. One of the clips I selected became Founders Connect's most-watched Instagram Reel for three years, reaching 308K views. The clip featured Tomilola Majekodunmi, founder of Bankly, discussing the experience of female founders within the African tech ecosystem. I chose it deliberately because it had three things I was looking for:
- Emotional resonance. It dealt with an experience that many women in the ecosystem could recognise.
- Specificity. This wasn't generic commentary about entrepreneurship. She was speaking from lived experience.
- Tension. The clip confronted the gap between how female founders wanted to be perceived and how they were sometimes treated.
06 — the results
what I learned
Founders Connect was where I stopped thinking of content as individual pieces and started thinking of it as a system. A long-form interview isn't just a video, it's a collection of stories. A social channel isn't just a place to publish, it's a home. And a content strategist isn't simply responsible for making things. They're responsible for deciding what deserves to be made, where it should live, who it should reach and why people should care.
I joined Founders Connect knowing how to write and left knowing how to build a functional content engine.