SELAR
CREATOR
SUMMIT

01 — the brief

Selar is an e-commerce platform serving the African creator economy. In 2023, the team was preparing the second edition of its Digital Creator Summit: a two-day virtual event bringing together creators, entrepreneurs and industry experts across Africa and beyond. The ambition was substantial: 21 speakers, multiple brand partners, two full days of programming, thousands of attendees.

I was brought on as Project Lead, working under the supervision of Selar's CMO, Milton Tutu. My responsibility was to take the summit from planning document to execution — coordinating timelines, speakers, content, communications and the live event itself.

The result was the summit's biggest edition yet: 18,000+ registrations.

02 — project leadership

A large event is ultimately a coordination problem. There are dozens of dependencies that have to resolve at the right time: speakers need to confirm, assets need to be created, sessions need to be scheduled, communications need to go out, technical details need to be tested.

I owned the project timeline and tracked these moving parts using Trello and Google Docs, while StreamYard powered the live event. My job wasn't necessarily to do every piece of the work myself. It was to make sure that every piece had an owner, a deadline and a path to completion. That meant constantly moving between planning and problem-solving as new information came in. The project required a small team to execute something significantly larger than the team itself. And it worked.

03 — getting 21 speakers across the line

One of the biggest pieces of the project was speaker management. We needed 21 speakers across media, entertainment, branding and technology, including names such as MI Abaga, Josh2Funny and Steve Harris.

My role covered:

• Speaker outreach
• Follow-ups and confirmations
• Scheduling
• Information and briefing
• Managing expectations
• Coordinating speaker requirements
• Ensuring speakers had what they needed before going live

The challenge wasn't simply getting people to say yes. It was keeping 21 busy people aligned to one programme and one timeline. That required persistence, organisation and a lot of careful communication.

By event day, all 21 speakers were confirmed and accounted for.

04 — making a virtual event feel like an event

A virtual summit has an obvious problem: the audience is sitting alone in front of a screen. So the content experience mattered.

I supported the content and social operation by:

• Designing promotional assets
• Publishing across Twitter and LinkedIn
• Live-tweeting throughout both days
• Capturing and sharing key insights in real time
• Filming session intros and outros

The goal was to make the summit feel like an experience, rather than eight hours of people appearing in Zoom-like boxes. The intros, transitions and live editorial coverage gave the audience something to follow between sessions and helped create the feeling that something was happening with them, rather than simply being broadcast at them.

05 — hosting the conversation

I also hosted a panel on The Impact of Technology on the Creative Process and the Future of Creativity, with Fisayo Fosudo, Aisha Owolabi, Mitchelle Chibundu and Adora Nwodo.

This was another useful part of the project because it required me to move from behind-the-scenes execution to on-stage communication. Good moderation requires more than preparing questions. You have to understand enough about the subject to know which questions are worth asking, listen closely enough to identify useful threads, and be flexible enough to change direction when the conversation calls for it.

It was a different kind of project-management skill: managing the room rather than the spreadsheet.

06 — results

feedback

Some of what the team and the wider ecosystem said afterwards:

what I learned

The Selar Creator Summit was a crash course in the difference between planning and execution. Plans are neat. Projects aren't. People change their minds. Speakers respond late. Things break. Priorities move. The job is to keep the machine moving without allowing the audience to experience the chaos behind it.

It also taught me that scale is often a coordination problem before it is a resource problem. A small team can execute something ambitious when everyone understands the goal, knows what they own and keeps moving.

And I learned something about audacity — specifically, that it is a skill you develop by doing things that feel slightly too big for you and discovering, on the other side, that you were big enough after all. The summit felt slightly too big when we started. We did it anyway. And 18,000 people registered. It trended.