On paper, Ife Omai is AllAccess’s Co-Founder and Chief Communications Officer. In person, she’ll tell you she’s the mother of the brand, and like most mothers, she ends up doing everything: HR, operations, social media, staff welfare, and making sure everyone from creators to investors understands what they’re trying to become.
She and her co-founders, Oladapo “Dapo” Giwa, set out to build something alien in Nigeria, and dare we say, after over ₦1 billion in payouts and creators spanning West Africa, they’re pulling it off.
Ask Ife to explain her brainchild, and she’ll tell you to imagine GoFundMe, Instagram and Patreon had an affair. What they’d produce is AllAccess: a platform where African creators get paid directly by the people who love their content, in naira from home and in dollars or crypto from everywhere else. No middleman at all.
In two years, AllAccess has grown from working at the tense intersection of content creation, digital money, and Nigerian morality. Somebody had to build the infrastructure everyone else ignored, and she says her team “volunteered as tributes”.
Getting here was lonely. Creators didn’t trust them, because exploitation was all they’d known. Vendors didn’t trust them because of who they were housing. Even potential staff kept their distance. Still, more than 50,000 creators signed up, and one of them made $100,000 in the first year. Ife says AllAccess was “birthed by force”, and after this conversation, you’ll believe her.
We talked about building in a corner of the internet most people only whisper about, why she refuses to ask creators why they do what they do, how the money actually moves, and what “f* you money” means for a young Nigerian woman. It’s frank, sharp, funny in places, and a reminder that some of the most important infrastructure in Nigeria’s creator economy is being built exactly where nobody wanted to look.
Adedayo Laketu: To begin, could you define your role at All Access? You’ve mentioned that your responsibilities often go beyond a typical corporate title.
Ife Omai: Basically, I am the mother of this brand. You can call me that. Essentially, but on paper, I am the Chief Communications Officer. That means everything All Access is communicating in its essence, I am orchestrating. I’m making sure the public understands what we’re trying to do, that the creators themselves understand how we’re trying to serve them, and that the users understand how we are trying to equip them with their fan relationships. I also ensure the investors understand our goals and our maturity as a company. I basically communicate holistically what it is that we are about.
That’s one layer, but I’m also building a startup. The truth about startups is that they’re not necessarily a straight line; we usually intersect. At the end of the day, I’m spread across a lot of things using all my skills. I basically do everything. I get into staff welfare, HR, social media, and operations. This is my firstborn, and I do everything that needs to be done for the brand. Holistically, I manage operations, curate the narrative, and manage relationships with whoever is interacting with us shareholders, stakeholders, and that kind of stuff.
Adedayo: In the early stages, what was it like trying to build a platform in a “gray area” niche within a conservative environment like Nigeria?
Ife Omai: It’s a very good question. I think the way to explain it without taking the whole day would just be to say that it was very isolating. It was a very isolating experience. People who are pioneers in certain niches or spaces will probably be the only ones who can relate to how isolating it is. I felt isolated within the industry I found myself working in, and I felt isolated outside of the industry as well.
To break that down: within the business, every single person you need to make the business work- the creators, the payment processors, the staff, the community, the human resources every one of them was an isolating experience. The creators didn’t trust us because why would they? All they’ve experienced so far is exploitation. The vendors didn’t trust us because we were housing said creators, and even the staff didn’t want to work with us. But as I mentioned, this was a personal journey for me, which contributed to how I’ve navigated sitting comfortably in such an isolating, thankless job. Whether or not people know it, everyone started the same way. It’s not hard for me because I don’t take these things too seriously; I had been there. I was one of those people who found out about that industry and had my nose up, but then, for whatever reason and all the other things that have happened in my personal life just as a woman existing in the same world, I knew that it was important work. It is important work.
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Adedayo: You’ve spoken about the “stubbornness” required to keep building despite the isolation. How do you manage that?
Ife Omai: It is a slap in the face of the whole continent that there isn’t any infrastructure that is safe for women to do whatever they want with their own agency in terms of digital infrastructure and financial empowerment. We’re talking about basic amenities here; these are basic needs. It started to feel like a very “NGO-coded” vibe, but obviously, we are deep in capitalism as well. My team and I are very stubborn about our goals. I always say All Access wanted to be birthed by force because we are so fortified. There’s nothing we can’t do. I get a million “nos” all the time, but somehow I’ve been able to get the best “yeses”.
That’s how I’ve been able to maneuver this isolation, because the good thing about isolation is that it makes it very clear who your people are. My role is to keep building, signaling, and improving the product enough for the people who need it. The people will find us. It’s been two years. Why am I getting 50,000 creators signing up when I don’t even have a social media presence because Meta keeps taking down our accounts? There’s a need for this. It’s bigger than me and bigger than our team. I think the African market deserved intentional building, and it’s paying off. It’s not an easy front; I’m definitely paying heavy “school fees” and learning on the job to figure out what creators actually need in our emerging market.
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Adedayo: How exactly does the business model work? How do you create that bridge between creators and their paying customers?
Ife Omai: I like to describe All Access as a company where you imagine that GoFundMe, Instagram, and Patreon had an affair. Essentially, it is a social media platform concentrated on monetization for its content creators. The idea is that you have people you like and you want to build a connection with them that is outside of the regular, senseless, endless scrolling that is social media. There’s a way to personally connect with your community. That is at the core of All Access: helping creators and their audience connect really well.
A content creator is a full-time business person, and they need certain tools to work for them. They need to be able to earn. We wanted to build a globally relevant company. I want our creators to have the same conversations the Americans, the UK girls, and the Brazilians are having. On All Access, you earn money; that’s the gist of it. You don’t just come to get more followers and likes to use elsewhere; this is actually where you do the business. This is where you create that pipeline between fans and paying customers.
One of the first things we did was break the earnings down separately for creators in Africa into their local currency side and their dollar side. We want every African content creator to earn money in their local accounts from their local community, but also allow everyone abroad, from neighbors to people in Japan, Asia, and North America, to support them intentionally. We receive money through crypto, dollars, and Naira. We take a flat rate of 30%, but if you do well meaning you’re committed and your social media is converting nicely we take 10% off that, so it becomes a 20% rate. We also have streaming coming, (at the point of releasing this article, the Live streaming feature has been launched), which will be a major way to make money through live streaming and gifting. Africa is in a good place for this; people abroad are impressed that, with so little, Africans are doing so well. We just need the infrastructure to collect that money nicely.
Adedayo: What are the specific ways a creator can monetize their content on the platform right now?
Ife Omai: There are two main ways to focus on as a creator. First, there are recurring payments. That’s just like following someone on Instagram, but you pay a certain amount monthly so the creator knows their audience is committed to their growth and connection. Then you have Pay-Per-View (PPV). That’s content you drop that fans can “shop”. We put limits on the amounts to ensure we don’t encourage fraud or money laundering, but you can price your paid content really nicely.
You can also make custom content for fans in private messaging. You can send money in any way to get the attention of your creators. This will be fantastic as other categories get popular on the platform, where people can give tips for more of a creator’s brain, product, or access. And, of course, the champion of that connection is going “Live”. You can basically FaceTime your creator. Those are the major ways for a creator to make money.
Adedayo: Can you speak to the financial milestones you’ve seen? What does the earning potential look like for an average creator?
Ife Omai: Nigerian creators have proven time and time again that we are worth the attention and worth buying into. We had one of our highest-earning creators rack up $100,000 in the first year of the business, combining her local and dollar earnings. We’ve had all sorts of creators with different milestones, including those who made money fast because of a viral video.
Before All Access, when I saw something go viral, I would wonder, “How does this person make money?” People abroad can answer that, but for an African, it was tough. Now we can change that. When creators go viral, it bumps up their All Access account constantly. I’ve never seen a “Live” that doesn’t contribute to their earnings. I have so much pride that these are the content creators I’m helping, because nobody else wanted to. Others felt too “holier-than-thou” and were willing to watch this infrastructure be demolished and filled with exploitation because these are women. We have to do better for all our women.
Adedayo: You mentioned that society often views All Access with stigma. How do you address critics who say you are “corrupting” or “degrading” society?
Ife Omai: I’ve seen reporters ask if this company is good for Africans or if it’s degrading our girls and corrupting society. This is where I differ from the world, and I’m very happy to sit comfortably right here. I don’t think it is our job to ask every creator why they are doing what they are doing.
What is most important is that there is corruption and disenfranchisement happening, and that is a problem for anybody. What should be more worrying is that, for whatever reason, these creators were previously forced to give a middleman a percentage of their money. Platforms like OnlyFans take 20%, but if you don’t have an American account, you need an uncle or some weird man to help you sign up, and they take a cut of the remaining money. There is so much abuse there.
The idea for me is that All Access is empowering girls. Most of the creators on my platform are girls just like you. When they start touching money, they stay in their houses, have a good time, and go out on the weekends. They are your sisters, cousins, and neighbors who go to church with you. I think the stigmatization needs to stop; we need to wake up. I go to bed very proud knowing there’s a random creator who doesn’t need to be a “Nepo baby” to make racks, take care of her family, and have “f* you money”**.
Adedayo: Finally, what do “digital sovereignty” and real agency mean for the African women on your platform?
Ife Omai: All Access is demonstrating what becomes possible when women have access to the tools and infrastructure to earn on their own terms. We have creators earning millions of naira monthly, challenging conventional ideas about who gets to build wealth and how. For me, the bigger question is: why shouldn’t more young Nigerians have access to opportunities like these?
A society cannot truly thrive while its women are economically excluded. And that includes all women, not just those whose professions or choices society considers respectable. No society can call itself progressive unless all its women have the opportunity to thrive.
That is the connection I see between the work we do at All Access and the future I want to help build. That is my contribution.
