We have good news for you. You can have a cool career and make a good living. No need to choose between loving your job and paying your mortgage. The following profile, part of the BlackEnterprise.com Cool Jobs series, offers a peek into the nuts and bolts, perks and salaries behind enjoyable careers.
With offices in London, Lagos and New York, iROKO Partners has five Web brands including online film distributor iROKOtv and the music streaming platform iROKING. After accumulating 152 million views in 2011—and set to hit 250 million this year— iROKO is Africa’s largest content provider on the YouTube and Dailymotion platforms. Add to that success the $8 million investment the company received earlier this year over two rounds, led by U.S.-based hedge fund Tiger Global, and you have the makings of success.
For this special edition of Cool Jobs, BlackEnterprise.com caught up with Njoku to talk his career awakening, his return to Nigeria, and his determination to expand his business across the globe.
BlackEnterprise.com: What was the impetus for launching iROKO Partners?
Njoku: Moving home penniless at the age of 29 was a pretty humbling experience. After a number of failed businesses, I had nowhere else to go but home. It wasn’t cool. But once I was back at home and spending more time with my mother, I noticed how her TV viewing habits had changed. She was more interested in Nollywood films than Eastenders (a long-running popular UK soap opera).
In an effort to try and source more films for her, I instinctively went online as I’m an internet geek. It’s where everything begins and ends for me. I couldn’t find a reliable source of Nollywood movies online and so the idea for iROKOtv was born.
Why did you choose to launch the company in Lagos, Nigeria?
In the early days of iROKO Partners, I attempted to launch and run the business from my bedroom at my mom’s house. After a couple of months, I realized that this wasn’t possible. Yes, I could watch a bunch of Nollywood movies on DVDs at home, no problem. But to actually purchase the movies and have knowledge of the industry, which is quite fragmented, I had to totally immerse myself in the arena.
Nollywood moves at lightning speed and business is conducted fairly informally, so being thousands of miles away at the end of a phone line was never going to work. I had to be in Alaba Market, where the business of Nollywood is conducted. I had to be on movie sets, I had to be building relationships—so I got on a plane and moved to Lagos.
Our company sells Nigerian entertainment to the rest of the world; We couldn’t be anywhere else but Nigeria. We have people on the ground, with local knowledge and industry contacts.
How did you start to build relationships in the Nollywood community?
Entertainment is a relationship business — so as soon as I touched down in Lagos, I put myself in the middle of everything to start on building these relationships.
It’s a close-knit community, so once you meet one person, they introduce to someone else, who links you with a couple more people — your network grows in super-fast time. I got to know people, they got to know me. They liked the company’s mission, to spread the love of Nollywood to a global audience online. They wanted to do business and it went from there.
We’re incredibly proud of our iROKOtv Ambassadors — a who’s who of awesome Nollywood talent. For our iROKOtv+ subscription launch, we had [popular Nollywood actresses] Tonto Dikeh and Funke Akindele record promotional videos for us that were super-popular with our fans. We also work with heavyweights such as Jim Iyke and Artus Frank — big, established Nollywood stalwarts who love what we’re doing.
How does your business model translate into revenue and milestones?
As a private company we can’t really disclose revenue at the moment, but I
can share some impressive data: We reached 560,000 registered users in less than seven months. We have viewers in 178 different countries. Eighty-one percent of our registered users return weekly. We have streamed more than 10 million hours worth of film. Forty-five percent of our traffic comes from the UK and U.S. We have had more than 13 million visits from over 2.5 million unique visitors.This is all before Africa comes online. At the moment, we are very much focused on the West. We are aggregating the African diaspora.
Our funding story is unlike most others. We were approached by Tiger Global, a US-based Hedge Fund, after they had read about us in a TechCrunch article. They liked what we were doing, saw the huge potential, came over to Lagos and it went from there. We closed on a two-round funding of $8 million in total earlier this year.
What’s your position on Nollywood’s issues with piracy and bootlegging?
We have spent tens of thousands of dollars on fighting pirate sites. Piracy is killing the industry: There is direct economic loss to producers and artists and in turn, producers have no real incentive to re-invest in their product and improve the quality of their output.
IROKO Partners works in partnership with Nollywood film production houses and Nigerian music producers and artists for iROKING, our music platform, to ensure they are remunerated fairly for their creative output. We want them to keep creating awesome, exciting and popular content. By expanding distribution and revenue channels for them they are now, finally, being compensated accordingly for their hard work and personal investment.
What can we expect to see from iROKO Partners in the near future?
We have just launched a subscription model, iROKOtv+, which is massive for us as it’s the next step in how we’re revolutionising Nollywood. The company will be putting time and energy into building up the music side of the business, [with iROKING] including growing our artist base, refining our iROKING apps and spreading the love for West African music.
We’re also expanding our team in the U.S.: We recently opened an office in New York, where we have a team of awesome iROKO Partners gurus looking into business development opportunities in North America and the Caribbean. The potential is there, we have the team in place, and we are very much ready for action. It’s such an exciting time for us.
Octavia Goredema is founder of relocation resource Crash Course City and the Twenty Ten Club, an award-winning networking organization and online resource designed to connect, inspire and support black female entrepreneurs. Goredema is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an international network of accomplished individuals in the arts, manufactures and commerce patroned by the Queen Elizabeth II.