A. Sotomiwa Notes   Work with me

Raised $5,000 funding from Tony Elumelu Entreprenuership Program to fuel RadioHub's growth

While running Snackspot , I wanted to run radio ads to build awareness about the venture and that was the first time I had to experience some of the inefficiencies in the Nigerian Radio Industry. I observed two things:

  • Most people running businesses don't understand the extent of the reach of Radio.I didn't know too till I saw some marketing data from Diageo's advertising in Nigeria
  • There's little or no information about how to do radio advertising in Nigeria. Its too offline and there's no transparency about how it works

Freshoff failing to make Snackspot work, I decided to dig deeper into the hypothesis I had created around the problems I had observed. I spoke with countless Brand Sales managers, jingle operators, Radio managers and created the solution statement and started building wireframes to solve the problem.

I then started thinking about the perfect name for this business. I think its one of the best names I have ever named a venture, I even had the perfect tagline haha

abdulquadri sotomiwa

I felt I had a great reserarch and validaed the problem to an extent. To further stretch my research, I then started writing a business plan to put all my thoughts together and challenge myself to figure every single part of the business out. Here's what I came up with:


I proceeded to register the business

I also created a pitch deck. I did use some good ideas from Airbnb to create mine.



I decided on a couple of features for the first MVP based on my conversation with these people:

  • a simple easy to use app for people to see radio stations, see their prices, their reach and decide on who they want to advertise with
  • make radio fun and endearing to people by making it easy for people to send shoutouts to their favorite radio programme. My research showed that OAP's with far reaching programs (for instance, radio shows that allow people shout out to their loved ones) struggle with managing multiple channels of accpeting requests on their tv shows

I started working on the prototype on Adobe Photoshop; I remembered how frustrating power supply was, I was at Mummy Dammy's place in Alagbole and had to work 2am to 5am to pull this together.

I hope you can design better now Abdul whenever you are re-reading this

Everything was ready minus the actual product, I knew I needed to raise funds to hire engineers to build. I started talking to people and was advised to apply to the Tony Elumelu Entreprenuership Programme

I applied and was lucky to be one of the winners of the grant. My name is number 4 on the list of winners

Now I had funding and could chase my dreams. i could build my business and bring transparency to the Radio Industry. I have everything I need to disrupt the industry.

I immediately hired 2 engineers; one frontend and one backend and I was the product design person on the team. We toiled hard and eventually built the MVP. I knew I had to start selling so I started calling everyone I had initially spoken with and took demo calls with them and they were all impressed. They promised to start listing on my platform.

I knew I needed to start talking to people about what I'm doing so i started attending events to meets brands who would love to advertise. I also applied to pitch at an event that changed things for the business significantly. This event by the Lagos Chamber of Commerce & Industry (LCCI);

I applied and was one of the few people selected to pitch at the event.

Here's why pitching at the event changed things for the business:

  • I got so much interests and exhausted sharing my business card
  • I got investment interest too and it made me happy that RadioHub was going to be very great

Here are some pictures from the event day, I posted on Facebook as well

Business was going alright, we closed our first radio station; OSBC radio in Osun state. I later hired one sales person to join me in closing more radio station as we start to grow our marketplace.

I'm really grateful for Tony Elumelu Foundation for the grant and the ability to chase my dreams of building RadioHub. Thank you