Building anything new takes patience
I’ve been been working on this project for the past few years, the vision is to build an app that only allows you 6 words or less to share your ideas or stories.
Why even go through this suffering?
The main reason for this is to remove the complexity from creating, consuming and sharing content, especially, in a time when there’s so much competition for people’s attention and time. Therefore creating a much simpler, easy to use and accessible social media/micro-blogging experience.
However, due to team struggles, the pandemic and other personal factors outside of my control over the past 2–3 years (read more about that here), I’ve had to put the project to a halt and abandon it.
After experiencing so many setbacks and personal growth along the way, I do still believe this vision has the potential to be very transformative in how the next generation of content creators and everyone shares content and expresses themselves.
Why now?
Firstly, because the creator economy is on the rapid rise.
The creator economy is the ecosystem of influencers, freelancers and boutique brands who work with larger companies to create bespoke content. The Information reports that venture capital firms invested more than $3.7 billion in the creative economy in 2021. Analysts predict the creator economy market size could be worth up to $5 billion in 2022.
I feel inspired to revive this project again now as I feel like the timing is perfect. Considering how much covid-19 has accelerated the growth of digital content creation over the past 3 years. People are creating and sharing content so much short-form content. Evidenced by the rapid growth and dominance of TikTok over the last few years.
The rise the the African content creator
What’s even more fascinating is the emergence of the digital content creators in the African content, there’s been so much creativity and authentic self expression coming from content creators in African countries.
A quick Google trends search shows 3 African countries on the top 5 with the highest search interest in Social media and content creation over the past 5 years.
However, even with such rapid growth happening in the social media and creator economy. There’s still a big fundamental problem:
Social media is still so complex for many people, figuring out how they work takes many years and there’s still a lot of underserved people in the world, especially in emerging markets. Some of these micro-blogging platforms are overwhelming, intimidating, and feel very cliquey such that, as in a secret society, only insiders know the rituals that unlock its power.
The good news is, we’ve been building an app to fundamentally solve these challenges and make social media/micro-blogging cool again. Digital and social media can still be reinvented. We truly believe we are pioneering the next-frontier of content publishing on the internet.
This is the experience we had built so far:
I’m currently looking to raise an angel round to fund the product development. Anyone or investors interested getting involved please get in touch. Or you can check out our prelaunch website. www.spoink.co.za
