In 2018, Tayo Aina boarded a plane headed to Russia for the FIFA World Cup without a visa. He did not watch football, but his friends planned to watch the tournament live, so he took the opportunity to leave Africa for the first time.
With about *₦300,000 ($$831.06) gathered from his filmmaking side gigs, he bought a return flight ticket and landed in Moscow in the middle of June. The Russian parliament had just approved a bill make the country visa-free throughout the World Cup. To qualify, all visitors needed to do was buy a flight ticket, which granted them a FAN ID that served as a permit to fly into Russia.
That trip was the beginning of a new kind of hunger for Aina.
“It was a lot of exposure,” he said, realising life was different from what he had known. “Life doesn’t have to be the way it was in Lagos—people can live differently.”
In the month he had toured Moscow, watched football matches, and taken midnight walks without fear, Aina decided, he would see the rest of Africa.
“[I realised,] if I could go back to Africa, then I could travel more,” he said. “Let me go across Africa, too, [and see] what Africa is like.”
This is the story of Tayo Aina, YouTube creator, filmmaker, and tech founder.
Aina had spent time working within the tech space before ever transitioning into the media. Before he ventured into travel and film production, he was building Spacebook, an app to book a space for events, meetings, and vacations, which he intended to be the ‘Airbnb of Africa.’
He soon realised that Spacebook was not viable, and coming off a tech career pathway, later worked as an Uber driver in Lagos in 2017, which allowed him to see places he ordinarily would not.
In between rides, he would watch YouTube videos that exposed him to international creators documenting other cities.
As an Uber rider, driving customers to restaurants and diverse locations, he began documenting places to visit with the phone he had at the time, then uploading them to YouTube. Eventually, Aina rented equipment to film weddings, events, and construction sites privately for clients.
It was not until April 2018, when an international music star, J Cole, visited Nigeria, and Aina offered his team free video coverage in exchange for a ticket to his concert, that he realised the impact he could make with the videos he created.
In under 48 hours, Aina edited the video of the performance surrounded by a crowd pulsing with energy, and uploaded it to his YouTube channel, garnering him a million views at the time.
As Aina created videos, he began to recognise the power of the stories he told, revealing Lagos and Nigeria in ways his audience and the curious public did not seem to have experienced.
“I started to see comments of people saying, ‘I’ve never seen Nigeria like this, or Lagos like this before, or now I have something to show my friends in the US or UK,” he recalled.
It became obvious that he wasn’t just making videos but telling powerful stories that were changing perceptions. From his observation, the people commonly documenting the stories of African were non-Africans, and while it was ‘cool to watch,’ nuances and context were different, and sometimes missing.
Aina is clear about why the African perspective matters, whether home or abroad: “A white person who lives in New York, their lifestyle and their perception are different from someone who grew up in Nigeria, moved to New York and is now living there. And I felt like nobody was capturing that.”
How a global lockdown birthed the ‘Made in Africa’ series
After Aina’s trip to watch the World Cup in Moscow, he returned more resolute to document the rest of Africa beyond Nigeria’s borders.
“That’s how it started,” he admitted. “It became a bigger vision of ‘let me showcase Africa’.”
Aina did not make his next international trip till a year after when he visited Kenya; all the while, he continued to upload videos on YouTube and create content for private clients.
In February 2020, he planned a one-month visit to South Africa. While in the country, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the country, rolling with vineyards and wine tasting cellars, came to a standstill.
The lockdown extended Tayo’s one-month visit to an eight-month stay. It was here that his lens started to take a different subject.
“I felt that as I’m promoting culture[s], and tourism,” he said. “ I also want to promote the people because I know how hard it is to build a business, and black people, Africans need as much support as they can get.”
With the lockdown, Aina had ample time. When his friend mentioned his mechanic, a Yoruba man from Nigeria with a story worth telling, Aina grabbed his camera and went off to the workshop.
In the midst of metal drilling, soapy bonnets and polished car trunks, the ‘Made in Africa’ series was born.
“Those are conversations that I would normally have without the camera,” Aina said. “It was me sharing that interest, bringing it onto a camera and making it, in a way, a lot of people can learn from how others build their businesses.”
Aina returned to Nigeria in October, but not before gaining his first 100,000 subscribers while in South Africa. that year, YouTube monetised his channel.
It took a while to access his funds because of the logistics around receiving his AdSense PIN, but eventually, he did and received his first payout in 2021.
As he continued to travel, telling stories of cultures and the people behind them, Aina started to get enquiries about creating videos and growing a successful YouTube channel.
“I always wished there was somebody who could take me through the process of how to grow a YouTube channel… but I never found that,” he said.
Driven by a desire to distil years of trial, error and growth into a scalable system, he began building the YouTube Creator Academy in 2022.
“Yes, the process was gruelling. I would go record, delete, record, then I’ll watch it again,” he recalled.
When the first version launched in 2022, it saw immediate traction with 100 signups in the first two weeks, but Aina soon hit a bottleneck common to solo creators.
He realised that a digital product was a ‘whole business on its own,’ requiring marketing funnels and a team that could operate while he was off-grid or in transit.
This realisation sparked a massive structural overhaul in 2024. Aina said he re-recorded 90% of the program, added live weekly coaching calls, and built a global remote team spanning Nigeria, Ghana, and the US to handle everything from community management to technical support.
Building the machines that build the digital future
Now with thousands of African creators the academy has empowered, Aina hopes to diversify the solutions and infrastructure he is building for the creator economy, both on the continent and at large.
“We’ve been able to build something that gives value to creators,” he said. “Now we have a lot of creators in our pipeline, and we want to start creating infrastructure [to solve] other problems that creators are facing, either physical infrastructure, advisory infrastructure or digital software infrastructure.”
One such infrastructure is the Leenkies brand, a link-in-bio product he built for creators to manage their payments and information all in one place, with zero commission fee to help solve financial bottlenecks creators face.
“Now we’re at the stage, like the way Mr Beast built his [media business], that’s literally what we’re trying to do, and build different arms,” he said.
For Aina, he’s also seen his career come full circle, where he is returning to his tech roots from when he built Spacebook before he moved into media.
“Now, I’m going back into tech and building solutions for creators across the globe,” he said.
When I asked how he’s been able to build while being highly mobile, Aina credits his systems and teams. Over time, he has built these structures into the engine of running his YouTube channel.
From editing videos to thumbnail designs, he outsources to his team and focuses on ideas and their approach to video creation, and even then, there’s a team that handles that.
“The same way I was able to build a structure for YouTube, is the way I now build a structure for the academy, where we have the web developers to the marketing—that’s the only way you can build anything that will scale,” he said.
For Tayo, this is not just a personal philosophy, but one he believes African creators should have a strong command of: to be able build and distribute.
“Anybody can build—but how can you distribute? That hasn’t been solved yet, but creators already have that pipeline [their audience],” he said.
For creators who cannot build the products, infrastructures or solutions they want to see, Aina asks that they find somebody who is building and partner with them.
The command of both building and effectively distributing is one way he sees the creator economy unlocking economic prosperity for Africa as a continent, and Africans at large.
*Exchange rate: ₦360.9830 to $1 as of June 1, 2018
