FoundersConnectContent

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 approximately 1.6K followers and was primarily used for episodic teasers. There was no TikTok presence, no systematic process for repurposing long-form interviews, and limited distribution beyond the company's owned channels.

The problem wasn't a lack of stories.

It was that each 45–60 minute conversation was being treated as one piece of content when it could become dozens.

I saw an opportunity to turn the interview archive into a repeatable, multi-platform content engine — one that could increase reach without requiring the company to constantly create entirely new source material.

My central idea was simple:

An episode wasn't one piece of content. It was a source.

A single founder conversation could produce multiple editorial assets, each designed for a different audience behaviour.

Before publication, we created teasers to build anticipation. After publication, I watched the full interview and identified moments with the potential to teach, provoke, entertain or create curiosity. Those moments became short-form videos, quotes, carousels and other social formats.

The goal wasn't simply to post more. It was to get more value out of every original conversation while creating more opportunities for new audiences to discover Founders Connect.

A couple of examples from the feed: one ↗ and two ↗.

I gave each platform a distinct role based on how we wanted people to discover, engage with, and stay connected to Founders Connect.

• Instagram: our primary editorial and community channel, where we built a consistent brand identity around founder stories.
• YouTube: the home for full conversations and long-form discovery, supported by SEO, strong covers, timestamps and paid distribution where relevant.
• X / TikTok: our discovery layer. I grew TikTok from 0 to 12K followers in one year through short-form content, while X turned interview moments into shareable quotes, live sessions and community activities.
• LinkedIn: professional distribution for interviews, events and company updates.
• Podcast platforms: extended the interviews to audiences who preferred audio.
• Substack: retained our most engaged audience through direct updates and announcements.
• Third-party distribution: extended our stories to adjacent audiences through syndication, including Hackernoon.

The principle was simple: one story, multiple distribution jobs.

Instead of reposting the same content everywhere, I adapted each conversation to the platform where it had the greatest opportunity to travel.

Over time, 40+ founder conversations became a multi-platform content engine, contributing to 1,650% Instagram growth. The system was subsequently adopted as part of how Founders Connect distributed its content.

Content strategy and visual identity shouldn't 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 telling. 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.

The result was a feed that felt more recognisable, more coherent, and frankly, more fun.

The colours and visual language became part of the Founders Connect identity and remain part of the brand today.

A good content strategist doesn't only rely on data when making editorial judgements. Instinct matters too.

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.

Watch the reel ↗

This was the kind of editorial judgement I wanted to develop: not just knowing what had performed, but being able to recognise why a moment might travel before the numbers existed.

Over 20 months, I grew Instagram from 1.6K to 28K followers and built TikTok from zero to 12K followers.

But beyond follower growth, Founders Connect went from having a strong long-form interview product with limited distribution to having a system capable of turning each conversation into a museum of discoverable content across multiple platforms.

That meant more ways for people to encounter the brand, more ways to consume its stories, and more value extracted from every interview.

Founders Connect was where I stopped thinking about content as individual pieces and started thinking about how content travels. In this role, I learned that a 60-minute interview wasn't just a video, it was a source (like a potato). I learned social channels weren't just places to publish content, rather they were distribution assets. And finally, that content strategy wasn't simply about deciding what to post. It was about deciding what deserved to be made, where it should live, who it should reach and why people should care.

I joined Founders Connect knowing how to create content and left knowing how to build the system that makes content travel.

Founders Connect Live, Lagos — scroll →