Jide Adetunji,
GUAP

Who is GUAP and what do you do?

GUAP is a youth-lead, new media platform aiming to document, discover and nurture emerging creative talent. We want to become a viable place for underrepresented youth creatives worldwide. 

At VIDA, we define Next Generation Media Brands as having one or more of the following characteristics: Being disruptive, having diverse revenue streams, operating across multiple platforms and meeting the needs of an underserved audience/community. How does GUAP fit our definition of what it means to be a Next-Generation Media Brand? 

We’re definitely disruptive. Neither my business partner or I come from an editorial or media background. We started the company straight out of university – I was studying computer science and he was studying accounting and finance. It started out as a cause because we wanted to represent and showcase role remodels in underrepresented communities so that they had something to aspire towards. We decided that a magazine was the way to do that, but we wanted to make strictly visual content. That’s when we came up with all the augmented reality and started incorporating that into our platform. 

Our lack of experience is what led us to innovate. We quickly realised that we needed to be where the young people are, which is social media – Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, IGTV, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. We needed to be across all channels, and we also needed to tap into platforms of influencers within that space.

What’s your ‘why’?

When we first started, we didn’t understand the context of the media landscape or the impact of what we were doing. Because we hadn’t grown up in a community where young people end up going into creative professions, we wanted to provide case studies of people doing things outside of the norm. So, our original ‘why’ was to provide tangible role models. Now that we understand the context of what we’re doing and have found a business model within that space, we realise that this allows us to represent something bigger now. This type of new generation media platform is changing the way that brands market, how consumers receive marketing and the agency business model as a whole. 

How did you build your brand?

The first marketing campaign we did was all social media. We did a social campaign where we printed out 1,000 A5 flyers, and all they had on them was the GUAP logo – that’s all we had at that point. We went around all our friends and young people we wanted to target and got them to take their picture with it - kind of covering their face and only showing their eyes - and asked them to post it on social media, tagging GUAP. It created this hype and hysteria, like, ‘what is this thing that people are doing?’ We had close to 200 people on social media tagging us, and it just became ‘a thing’. It helped drive a lot of hype around our brand before we even launched. After that, we started making content. 

How did you develop your audience?

Aside from social media, another way in which we grew our community was through what I call ‘cross-pollination’ of audiences, so that’s when you identify someone who’s a perfect representation of your brand. Then you highlight and feature them, whether through an interview or by shouting them out. That way, they’re more likely to post the work you’ve done together and share it with their audience. It was a great way to grow our audience and community. 

Once we knew we had a community, we wanted to test it in real life. We had an event – the first event – in 2016. It was meant to be a live music showcase with 10 or so musicians and DJs. We just wanted to see how many people we could get out. The venue had a 200 person capacity, and we ended up filling it completely with a massive queue outside. We had to turn people away from the door, and that was the moment where we realised that we’d created something big. It was the first time we saw the engagement and community we’d made on the internet translate into the real world. 

How did you increase your revenue?

We always knew that we wanted to create spaces that young people could come to and fulfil their creative needs, but that’s a very ambition dream to have. Our first office was really small, so when we moved offices, we made sure that we had two rooms that we could use one for a podcast studio. The reason why we wanted to do that, from a business point of view, was because in the middle years we had an issue with cash flow. We were working with a lot of commercial clients like Nike, Adidas - you name it, any brand who wanted to target young people, we were working with them. The problem with working on those kinds of campaigns was that you don’t get paid upfront, you get paid months after the project has been delivered. That was causing us cash flow issues because we were waiting for large sums of money but not earning enough in the meantime to sustain ourselves. We needed something that was B2C that would come into our account every month and become guaranteed income, so we opened a podcast studio as an innovative way to do that. 

It also came from the need of our consumers – they tell us what they need and podcasting is a lane that lots of people wanted to get into. There aren’t many podcast studios in London that are affordable and accessible, so we offer membership options for people who have weekly podcasts, so they can get a membership for £50 for a month for 5 hours in a studio. We filled the gap in the market. 

How have you raised funds?

We’re raising funds right now, and it’s been a big learning curve because there are different types of funding routes. You have the VC route and the Angel route and, for our type of company, there’s a lot of speculation around how successful and sustainable it can be. You look at a lot of tech companies and they haven’t even got a working business model yet or a working prototype, but they’re able to create such hype around their companies and super-inflate their valuations. Ours is the opposite: We have a working business model, we have a working platform, we have a community… but there’s so much speculation as people don’t understand what we’re doing or know how long it will work for. We’re lucky to be surrounded by mentors and people who do have experience in the media space and do understand how things are changing because of the internet and social media. I think that’s what’s really helping us get through; having people who are forward-thinking instead of people who are stuck in the past.

What’s next?

Right now, we’re hiring and building a team. This is a big step for us because it’s the first time we’ve built a team who aren’t volunteers, basically. So, it’s a transition for us. We’re learning about managing, but it’s also giving us the opportunity to focus on the business side of things and worry less about the day-to-day tasks of the company. It means a lot more content, a lot more events, a lot more collaborations and a lot more engagement with our community. We recently did a documentary abroad in Ghana and one in Rwanda, so they’re just examples of how we can replicate what we’ve done in London and the UK, and duplicate it all over the world. We definitely see it as a global market.