THE AFROCENTRIC MILLENNIAL COMPANY INVENTING THE FUTURE
September 1 2016, I woke up with a decision to quit my baby startup: Jangilova — a TV share platform, it was meant to be the uberification of TVs but life happened.
Fast forward down to September 1 2017, my team and I are officially launching Morebranches, a media company that was birthed in Twitter DMs, turned whatsapp conversations and then, a home studio in Yaba, Lagos where we currently run operations.
Adedayo Laketu (Founder of Baroque Age) had to be the guy to walk the journey with. First; we weren’t sure about what to build but if there was something we were certain about, it was the fact that any thing we were investing our time, money and resources in had to be Afrocentric and long term-futuristic for Africa.
June 2017, we dared audacity and started the work, a lot of people didn’t understand, was it another blog or just a social media board for everything nice and black?
Some got the drift and some supported the vision with backlashes and hate mails.
Three months down the line, we’ve built a team of 20 young Africans spread across Ghana, South Africa and Nigeria, all exploring our seven branches: Music, Visual+, Technology, Business, Fashion, AroundAfrica and News.
The ‘News’ is a big bet and we’re still building what we deem as the next big thing for millennials around it.
Morebranches Media is the biggest bet, we’re capitalizing on Africa’s new age of young, creative and eclectic youths disrupting the norms in all spheres to tell the real stories, a culture majority of people are still unaware of, or what white media companies have cloned and given specimen names, like ‘Hello Africa', ‘Continent on the rise’ and a host of many untruthful truths.
For us at Morebranches, we’re dreamers and architects of a future where Africans are connected to a conscious stream of information, integrated with culture and technology, to properly document the growth of a new age refined by the youths, for the growth and sustainability of future generations.
It’s a big dream, in fact it’s the biggest dream I’ve had. It came from a place of realization that we can’t keep letting people tell our stories, it’s our identity, our substance and our consciousness.
So we designed a company that values the need for self-aware contents by Africans, stories spearheaded by a generation with open ears and the capacity to look inwards rather than outwards for inspiration.
Just as we’ve stated, we operate on the radical pledge and commitment to original reporting and championing of essential fact-finding, representing a generational voice for reliable contents from modern and diverse perspectives. Our stories are grounded in journalistic ethics but distributed in new and experimental channels. We tell stories that intelligently cover serious issues important to young, diverse Africans.
There have been four fundamental stages on the web: First, there was directories with Yahoo. Then there was search with Google. After that came social, with Facebook and Twitter. We are now amidst a fourth phase: Curated discovery, we’re building Morebranches for creators, curators, and consumers.
The figures as at today are promising, in less than a quarter, we’ve gained 1500 subscribers in Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda and Kenya. Plus over 6 million interactions with our contents and all of these things keep us afrofuturistic about the chances.
Whatever you see today is our first dice tossed on the table, the future is worth being excited about.
At the end of the day, we just want to build a conscious media network for diverse Africans, the largest at that.
We’d love to hear your feedback on Morebranches, any comments, suggestions or ideas. We are also creating a distributed organization looking to work with creatives and companies from anywhere.
If you’d like to join our team, shoot a mail now at hello@morebranches.com or feel free to tell me anything — richard@morebranches.com.
Till then, keep dreaming with us and click on morebranches.
