ARTISH First Steps: Take 2, Day 0
we're almost ready, but first we should catch up.
November 2025. Quiet On Set Please.
This story of how all this got started is always worth being told, but we’ll do it a bit more documentarily this time.
ARTISH began as an art-tech collective in 2014 at the University of Ibadan. We were a small group of digitally skilled but unconventional artists, programmers, copywriters, and designers — experimenting with the intersection of creativity and technology. We hosted exhibitions and worked with small businesses, offering digitization services such as web development, content management, branding, and digital marketing.
In 2020, after years of operating as a loose group of friends, we officially incorporated the business as a media consultancy during the COVID-19 lockdowns in Lagos, Nigeria.
My co-founders and I had graduated between 2015 and 2016, and after years of building professional portfolios at 9-to-5 jobs, we combined our expertise and networks to run ARTISH part-time using a service agency model. The main services we offered were still digitization, but with a focus on content marketing. We built a reputation by publishing research-based editorials, then leveraged them for sales pitches to mid-sized and large enterprises.
In 2021, I decided to go full-time on ARTISH, pooling savings from my corporate career and contributions from my co-founders to raise seed capital for hiring writers, graphic designers, video editors, and digital marketers. The business model remained the same, but with increased dedication of time and resources.
But market realities soon began to hit.
Due to the lockdowns, the creative industries shifted toward influencer marketing, where follower count and digital impressions became the most valuable currencies in selling marketing services. As a business focused on creating actual digital creative assets and not their distribution, this was a shift we hadn’t prepared for. Our best adaptation strategy was to pitch campaigns where we created the marketing assets and partnered with niche, micro, and macro influencers to digitally distribute them. We recorded modest successes, the largest being a project for a major Nigerian bank to ghostwrite and promote a collection of industry essays on how COVID-19 and remote work were reshaping corporate culture for its C-suite executives.
The second market reality was that we now had to compete with larger agencies that had more influence and could command bigger budgets and higher margins for the same model. By Q3 of 2021, after failing to close new pitches and running out of runway, we began considering a pivot. Our experience working with social media influencers revealed a clear market for people trading influence or skill for money, forming the basis of our pivot to build a freelancer marketplace.
We built an MVP and began publishing essays on our insights into the creator economy—its market gaps and the growing influence of algorithmic hubs that threaten the actor-network functions essential for technology adoption and talent discovery. This trend also undermines the egalitarian ideals of Bill Gates’s “Content Is King,” which championed the internet as a path to individual economic freedom through content creation. Theories like Chris Anderson’s Long Tail and Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans envisioned a democratic internet where niche creators could sustain themselves through small but loyal audiences. Instead, Web2 metrics such as likes and follows amplified a “superstar effect,” concentrating most revenue among a few top creators while marginalizing the rest.
The result of our pivot strategy campaign was over 5,000 waitlist sign-ups and subscribers to our pre-launch newsletter. Unfortunately, this also marked our first real failure. With our capital runway dwindling, we were unable to raise venture funding to turn the MVP and raw market demand into a market-ready product. Having turned down RFPs for months, we had no incoming revenue. Some of my co-founders exited, and we temporarily paused operations to restrategize. We eventually returned to agency work and closed an RFP with Google in February 2022 for a six-month contract.
This project was different from earlier client engagements because, instead of using in-house teams, I managed a group of freelance researchers across Africa remotely from Lagos. This validated our failed pivot and changed how we approached sales. Project teams were assembled on the fly based on requirements, which reduced overhead and improved flexibility.
However, this also reduced our service offering to being a human resource middleman between talent and clients. Lower operational costs meant less risk, but made it clear that we had hit a value capture ceiling, and scaling required another software-led pivot. For this second attempt, we focused on market research into freelancing and the creator economy and learned three key lessons from a survey of 200 participants:
Both buyers and sellers of digital creative and freelance services face recurring issues like ghosting, poor work quality, and delayed/missed deadlines.
Poor communication and unclear payment cycles are major reasons projects break down.
Because of these issues, personal referrals remain the top way freelancers and clients find each other.
We began design in August 2023, and to date, we have been in the development cycle. Iterating and adapting along the way, while still pitching for agency work to generate operational revenue. One of the core shifts in product monetization strategy we made in Q2 2025 was that taking a commission from transactions was not going to be a sustainable model, nor would charging freelancers a subscription fee to apply for gigs. It also made it clear that one of the core issues with our 2021 pivot was a strategy focusing primarily on the talent side of the creator economy and not enough on the enterprise side, which ultimately pays for that talent.
This insight coincided with a broader shift in global labour. Artificial intelligence is transforming how businesses operate. As Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has observed, AI could eliminate many entry-level roles within the next five years. That reality presents a unique SaaS opportunity: as companies downsize, they’ll increasingly rely on contract-based, human-in-the-middle teams to bridge the gap between automation and creativity. This assumption has been further bolstered by customer discovery conversations in North America. From a survey of over 10 enterprise interviewees, the updated lessons learned ahead of our planned post-MVP pilot into the North American market are as follows:
The creator economy is a low-trust ecosystem because there are no dedicated project management tools for creative work; there are either super technical tools like JIRA, Asana or generic emails and calls that often lead to project communication breakdowns.
Project management is a higher-order service offering than a freelancer marketplace as a singular value proposition.
Existing project management tools are too complex and are often disliked by C-Suite executives required to use them to communicate project requirements.
A prompt-based project management tool that offers simplicity and structure could become instrumental in building AI models capable of creative problem-solving.
New Assumptions
ARTISH is now post-MVP as our technology is near completion and prepping for a beta pilot. We’re still doing the marketplace thing, and we still believe the internet capital should be more distributed in a digital economy. ARTISH just now directly responds to the market gap with a prompt-led project management workspace built specifically for creative work. The goal is to increase structure and reduce friction, making distributed collaboration more transparent and reliable. When creative workflows become more legible, the broader ecosystem becomes easier to evaluate, support, and scale, ultimately increasing the signal available to investors, founders, and teams.
Because AI cannot and will never replace humans, the visionaries who will define the next decade are those who understand the hidden architecture of innovation: the systems that determine who gets discovered, how creative work scales, and where technology elevates or eliminates human creativity. If you got this far, welcome to the start of the bloom.
PS: Follow us on Github, and keep an eye out on socials. This link points to a 10-page no-fluff non-fundraising slide deck, about what’s coming and where we are.
References
TechCabal. (2022, September 8). The creator economy, virtual communities and the future of African arts. [Online article]. Retrieved from https://techcabal.com/2022/09/08/the-creator-economy-virtual-communities-and-the-future-of-african-arts/
Substack. (n.d.). This is how we all win! [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://substack.com/home/post/p-42058747
Gates, B. (1996, January 3). Content is king. Three Steps Business. Retrieved from https://threestepsbusiness.com/content-is-king-bill-gates/
Business Insider. (2025, September 5). The CEO of Anthropic is doubling down on his warning that AI will gut entry-level jobs. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-cut-entry-level-law-finance-consulting-jobs-2025-9 (businessinsider.com)
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