Day 1-1000: Storipod wants to make reading as addictive as scrolling

For African writers, sharing your work to get paid on global platforms has always been a herculean task. African startups are building to solve this problem, but Storipod has a different approach, serialising the stories in the format of social media stories. 

It’s a bold approach that seeks to take advantage of  increasingly short attention spans. This is the Day 1-1000 of Storipod. 

Day 1: When blog posts die

James Nelson has always written. In 2019, while working at Interswitch, he’d publish blog posts one week and spend the next week spamming the link everywhere. “Come read my blog. Come click. Come to my blog.” After a while, he felt like he was just annoying people.

Then he started writing on his WhatsApp Status instead. Same content, different format. By slide five, people were already responding. “Oh, I don’t think that should have happened.” “I actually think this makes sense.” The engagement was instant.

“People consume things in tiny bits,” Nelson explains. “That’s how we read now, WhatsApp Status, IG Stories, tweets. So why not use the same approach for actual storytelling?”

The insight was simple but powerful—music has Spotify and Apple Music. You can record a song in your living room and make streaming money. Movies have YouTube and Netflix. Put up a great film, people watch it, you get paid.

But what happened to writing? Nothing. Medium doesn’t pay. Substack doesn’t pay Africans. Twitter’s monetisation requires subscriptions. “There’s no platform that enables people who write incredible stories to actually make influencer money,” Nelson says. Writers deserved better.

In 2022, while still head of product at Shuttlers, a startup digitising shared commutes, Nelson registered the Storipod.com domain. The name came from ‘peas in a pod’, writers sharing stories together. ‘Storypod’ with a y was already taken, so Nelson went with ‘Storipod’. “We’ll out-market them,” he figured.

By December 2022, he’d left Shuttlers, bought a Mac and an iPhone. “If I have these two, I will not be jobless,” he told himself.

“I realised the difference between most Nigerian founders and me is that they’ve raised money and I haven’t. That’s it.” After a brief stint at Edukoya in 2023, he made the call: “We’re going to do Storipod, or we’ll die trying.”

Day 500: 15 developers and a prayer

Building a social media app is one of the hardest things you can do as a startup. The bar is brutally high. Users expect Instagram’s polish from 2-3 people. They don’t want lag. They don’t want it to ‘feel like a Nigerian app.’ They want the international version.

Nigerian developers “know how to fix things and work in a company,” Nelson says. “They don’t know how to build from scratch to scale.”

Storipod burned through 15 mobile developers. Nelson used his last savings to hire an Indian developer who left bugs everywhere, but in December 2023, they got into the Android store.

Then came the iOS dance. Twenty-two builds rejected. Nelson kept pushing. On February 6, 2024, the email arrived: “Welcome to the App Store.”

“I read it twice,” Nelson says. “That’s the most powerful email I’ve ever received.”

But money was gone. The Indian developer left. The team was down to Nelson and his co-founders, Caleb Chinga and Prince Ita. No mobile engineer. No way forward.

“At some point, I thought this was the end,” Nelson admits.

Then he went on LinkedIn and began cold-messaging Flutter developers. “We have bugs. Can you help us? We don’t have money, but this thing can blow.”

Most blocked him. One developer, Daniel, asked to see the documentation.

“This is what I do for a living,” Nelson replied, sending over everything.

Daniel looked at the code, fixed a few bugs, then said he’d keep helping when he was free. He was between jobs. That’s how Storipod survived the first crash. But in those early months, he kept the app alive for free.

Then Nelson found Taiwo Farinu. Autistic, brilliant, coding from a beer parlour with a broken laptop. When Farinu needed ₦20,000 ($13) for an emergency, Nelson sent it immediately, even when he was broke himself. Farinu solved the most complex problems, like making stories remember where you stopped reading, just like WhatsApp Status. “Working with Taiwo can be really hard,” Nelson says. “But once he gets it, he can solve anything.”

Getting free Microsoft Azure 150,000 credits from Microsoft saved them. So did relationships. Nelson called in favours everywhere; former interns built the web app, a pharmacy encounter led to a designer who sketched the entire web interface during her NHS night shifts at 3 a.m.

“She finished it in two days,” Nelson says, still amazed. “If there’s a will, there’s a way.”

But the team still wasn’t getting paid. Nelson was burning out. His co-founders were juggling day jobs and night shifts on Storipod. “I see what they’re going through,” Nelson says. “I’m like, ‘Guys, how far? We need to fix this one. Let’s push.'”

Every night he’d pray the same thing: “God, let this succeed, not for me, for these guys.”

Day 1,000: 150,000 users, zero payroll

In January 2024, a Canadian connect on LinkedIn saw what Storipod was doing. He reached out and asked how much Nelson needed. He signed Storipod’s first angel cheque: $5,000. Nelson shared part of the funds with the team. People cried. “I never knew ₦200K ($138) meant more to them than millions,” Nelson says. That’s when Nelson knew they had something real; not just a product but a mission people believed in.

In 2024, they launched monetisation. Creators could lock their stories and readers would pay to access them. Readers could also tip their favourite writers. Storipod planned to take 30% commissions on what writers earned. And unlike other platforms, payouts were real.

Then a user named Grace made an organic TikTok video. “Let me introduce you to an app where you can make money from day one.” She had 3,000 followers. The video went viral. Nelson sent her ₦30,000 ($20) and ran ads on it. It became their killer marketing.

Another user, Winnie Baby, started writing on Storipod, then joined the team to write newsletters. Nelson made her the face of the brand. ‘Winnie Baby from Storipod’ became their voice. 

By mid-2024, they had 50,000 users. Then 150,000. They moved payouts on-chain through Busha stablecoins, USDC, so anyone in Africa could withdraw; no more country-by-country payment integrations.

The team has since grown to 20 people. They run on Zoho’s free tier (five email aliases shared between everyone), built their own email campaign manager, and use Microsoft Azure credits. No one on the team gets paid. “When I tell people we run at zero cost, they don’t believe me,” Nelson says.

And somehow, it’s working.

The exit nobody’s pricing in

Nelson doesn’t think like a typical founder. He’s not chasing the VC unicorn path. He’s watching what’s happening in the creator economy globally.

Farcaster, a decentralised Twitter for creators, is gaining traction. “Every platform makes its own creators,” Nelson notes. “People big on YouTube aren’t big on Instagram. Storipod will make its own – Winnie Baby is already one of them.”

Amazon Books might be the real target. “A writer puts their book on Amazon, makes nothing until someone buys the whole thing. On Storipod, they’re making money from chapter one, chapter two, and chapter three. After a while, Africans will default to Storipod.”

Right now, Storipod is at 150,000 creators. Ads haven’t even launched yet. When they hit 1 million users, ads will go live. The business becomes real.

Nelson is tired; sleeping at 4 a.m., waking at noon, and squeezing work from his team during their lunch breaks. Farinu is still coding from the beer parlour. The UX designer is still sketching at 3 a.m. between NHS shifts. New people keep showing up.

“People don’t resign at Storipod,” Nelson says. “Everyone’s a founding member. Even the cleaners. They believe this is theirs.”

The math is impossible. Twenty people, zero payroll, building Instagram-level UX. But somehow, they’re at 150,000 users. And somehow, they’re still running.

Nelson leans back. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”