Jide walked up to me with what I can only describe as the most on-brand opener possible for creatives and techbros in Lagos. His opening line, delivered completely straight-faced: “What are you building?”

We both cracked up. Somewhere between the laughter and the rest of the evening, we actually got into it. I found myself telling him about The Creator’s Backend — making him one of the first people outside my immediate circle that I had spoken to about it. He did not just nod politely and move on, as people tend to do at events when they are just waiting for their turn to talk. He actually listened, asked the right questions, and even became the first person to follow The Creator’s Backend page on Instagram.

And then he told me what he was building. Immediately, I said, ‘Okay. I need to have you on the series.’ And here we are.

Jide’s Origin Story

I begin, as I start every conversation in this series, with the same question: Why are you the way you are?

Jide takes a moment to think and then says, “I think it has to be a combination of how I was brought up, the things I have learned, and the things that just appeal to me. The way I present today is definitely a lot of self-learning, and experiences shaping what I believe and think. And I’m also trying to be rooted in God and faith-led. So it’s a combination of — would Jesus do this? Would today’s Jide want to do this? And what just feels natural. That’s a whole mix and match of everything.”

He goes on to talk about his mother, who I quickly learn is a main character in almost every story he tells.

Jide tells me a particular story from when he was nine, maybe ten years old. He was probably the youngest person on a bus full of adults making a long trip to Ghana. Somewhere past the Togo border, a fight broke out. People were shouting. Everyone was trying to calm things down or take sides.

Young Jide stands up and calmly says, “Empty barrels make the loudest noise.” Then sits back down. And just like that, the fight stopped. He does not remember the story himself. He is recounting it the way his mother told him, but he says it sounds exactly like him.

“I’m the type of person to sit down, introspect, identify gaps, and see or do the thing that solves the problem. And I guess if that happened in childhood, then obviously it has carried through to what I do today.”

It has. Quietly, persistently, and without fanfare, Jide has spent his entire adult life identifying the problem nobody else has named. Saying the one thing that stops the noise. Then sitting back down and getting to work.

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The Long Way to Design

Jide almost became a doctor. Before that, a zoologist. He loved animals as a child — still does — so of course, his first university choice was zoology.

His mother shut the idea down immediately. Years earlier, she had ended up in botany when she really wanted to study pharmacy. The opportunities she hoped for never materialised. Having lived with that disappointment herself, she was determined not to watch her son make the same mistake.

“She was like, you are not doing zoology. If you study zoology, you will be poor.”

He listened to her and prepared to study medicine. Then, another option emerged: computer science. The pull was hard to ignore. He had always been fascinated by computers and, by this point, had developed a growing obsession with design. Convinced the field would eventually lead him to design or animation, he enrolled at the University of Ibadan to study computer science.

It was a disaster.

“When I got in, I quickly realised that all we were learning computer science was how to program and how to code. And I wasn’t interested. So I started failing in school. By the third year, I called my mom and told her I wanted to drop out of school.”

The conversation forced a reckoning for both of them.

“My mum is a very typical Yoruba woman. She’s stubborn, opinionated, knows what she wants and has goals. I’m the exact same person, just in a different font.”

Faced with her son’s determination, his mother finally understood that this wasn’t a passing phase. He wasn’t simply tired of school; he genuinely wanted a different path.

Around that time, she stumbled upon an ad in the newspaper about an animation school in Lagos.

“She called me and said she’d found something. She worked out a payment plan with them and paid for the first six months.”

That was all he needed. After six months, he asked her to stop paying because he had learned what he needed to learn. He went back to school to finish his degree with a whole new set of skills.

Here, he takes a minute to appreciate his mum for supporting him even when she didn’t always get it or see where it could go.

“She trusted that whatever I was doing was legitimate and legal. Once she started seeing that I could make money from it, she was fine. She still says that she never saw the trajectory. She never realised how much money could be made from doing something like this, and she’s still very, very happy and proud.”

The pull toward design actually started years earlier, with animation. Watching The Boondocks had lit something in him — the possibility of telling Nigerian stories in that form. Curious about how animation worked, he researched Tom and Jerry and discovered that it had been hand-drawn decades earlier.

If animators could do that in 1945, he reasoned, surely he could learn the craft now. But the deeper he dug, the more he realised traditional animation required teams, infrastructure and resources he simply didn’t have. Design, on the other hand, offered a more accessible entry point.

“So I learned design and illustration instead. Then I started using those skills to make money on the side. I’d design a logo for somebody, a banner for somebody else.”

What began as a side hustle as a student soon became something more. Clients would pay him for a logo, then place it on poorly designed business cards, websites and marketing materials.

“I would get so frustrated because that wasn’t the plan. Then, I realised there was a whole ecosystem of work that could be done for one person to keep the consistency and quality. So I decided that instead of just designing and selling a logo, I’d do the logo, business card, invoice, and everything.”

That frustration pushed him into branding. If clients needed consistency across every touchpoint, he reasoned, then he needed to understand every touchpoint. So he learned web design too, expanding the range of problems he could solve.

As his reputation grew, so did the opportunities. Companies began to take notice, and before long, he was being hired for the skills he had painstakingly taught himself.

But employment brought a different kind of disappointment.

The companies he joined were often plagued by unhealthy cultures, difficult leadership, and little regard for either people’s time or creative integrity. Again and again, he found himself working in environments that felt fundamentally broken.

Rather than accept it as the cost of having a career, he began searching for a company that operated differently. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to build it himself. That decision became Toast.

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From Burnt Toast to Toast Studios

In secondary school, Jide was a dark-skinned, quiet boy who became an easy target for mean kids, who picked on him and called him “Burnt Toast.” At home, he complained to his mother, hoping for intervention. Instead, she offered a different kind of lesson: accept it, and it loses its power.

So, he went back and owned it.

“It just became a thing. A few months later, Toast was my nickname.”

Years later, in design school, the final project was to build your own brand. He had no idea what it would be called. So he thought — Toast Designs. A toaster logo. A play on the name from back in the day.

“That’s how Toast Creative Studios was born. It was originally Toast Designs. Then, we started to do a lot more than just designing, so it became studio.”

11 Years Later

The graph of Toast’s first decade is not a smooth upward curve. It is zero to ten, back to zero, up to twenty, back to five, up to fifteen, back to zero. Starting from scratch again and again.

I ask him what it actually takes to keep building something for that long.

“Stubbornness.”

Then, he goes, “Stubbornness and doggedness are very similar. Almost interchangeable. I’ve been very, very dogged in how much I want this to work and how much value I need this company to bring not just to our clients but also to the public, and the spaces we interact with.”

He describes the version of Toast he is building toward — a company that, if money were never a constraint, would simply become a problem-solving organisation. Fixing the things governments should be fixing. Cleaning up communities on micro levels.

“Every day I wake up, I try to solve problems. With a team of people with the same mindset, ready to put all of their energies together, imagine how many bigger problems we could solve together. That’s what I think my life goal is. And that’s why it’s hard for me to stop.”

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Jide’s Formula for Running a Successful Impact-Focused Business

After the first couple of years of the zigzagging graph with Toast, Jide sat down and wrote five steps.

Step one was the Toast Recipe Book, a complete documentation of every process, system, and idea that had ever led the company toward success. Written every week, over an entire year.

“Everything is so well documented now that if I die tomorrow, my team would know what to do with that account, legal, this person and that person. We have templates for everything.”

He calls it one of the things he is most proud of in his life.

Step two was auditing the team and ensuring the right people were in the right seats to follow the documented processes.

The next step was to produce a world-class project. Not just good work or very good work, but world-class, undeniable work.

“We have extremely high standards. We’ve done very, very good work. But there’s a standard that is undeniable that we keep working towards. And we know we can do it.”

Step four was radical selectivity with clients. He describes a five-star rating system. Is the client building something impactful? Can they pay the fees? Do they understand what good design is? Do they trust Toast with creative control? Is the leader kind and accessible?

Step five — use those resources to work on what Toast actually cares about most. Change the world with what has been built.

“We are still between step two and three. We’re not there yet. But we’re making progress.”

What Design Actually Is

When you get the opportunity to speak with a notable designer, it’s only right to ask what people misunderstand most about design. He responds like someone who has been waiting his entire career for that exact question.

“Everything.”

Toast Academy has trained over fifty people in six years. And the first lesson — every single time, with every single person — is the same.

He asks the same question every time: “What is design?” And every time, the answer comes back: “Making things look beautiful.” To him, that answer reveals just how misunderstood design really is.

“That’s not what design is. Nobody cares whether it’s beautiful or not. They just care that it works.”

He reaches for his favourite illustration. Imagine the most beautiful chair in the world. It’s golden, ornamental, covered in diamonds, spectacular and undeniable. Everyone wants it. But it has three legs.

“You will not sit on it.”

Now imagine a plain wooden chair thrown together by a random carpenter. Four legs. No decoration. Functional, and unglamorous.

“That’s the point. A good designer makes things that work. Any solution that works came from the design process.”

He goes further, making the case that design is not a profession but a human activity — present in communication, writing, and the way you adjust how you speak to someone the second time based on how the first conversation landed.

“Writing is such a great example of design because you are putting words together to communicate something for a purpose. The moment there’s a purpose behind it, a problem that needs to be solved, then it becomes design.”

He draws the line between design and art with the precision of someone who has made this distinction thousands of times and still finds it worth making.

“Art is expression. I feel like this today so I’m going to show you how I feel today. But the moment there’s a purpose behind it, it becomes design.”

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Which Chapter Are You In?

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend asks the same question at some point: if your creative journey were a book, which chapter would you say formed the core of who you are today?

Jide does not hesitate as he says, “I would title this chapter — acceptance.”

He unpacks it carefully. He has done the 3 am grind. He has caught an Uber to the office at 4 am because a deadline needed to be hit. He has done the many nights without sleep, the relentless proving, the output driven by the need to show that he belonged, that Toast belonged, that all this was real.

He has also done the opposite, not caring, creating purely for himself, and refusing to perform for any audience.

“I’ve had many, many chapters in my life. And I think right now I’m just in a place where it’s a lot of acceptance. I’m accepting the day for what it is.”

He describes the two kinds of days that coexist inside this chapter. The days when the creative juices flow and everything lands, and you end the day feeling like the highest version of yourself. And the days when you are frustrated and dissatisfied and convinced that nothing you did was good enough.

“But in this phase, the one constant is that I’m showing up. There is consistency.”

Jide gives a specific example. If the plan is to post on social media every day, he is not going to stop because he did not like how the last post performed.

“Once I’ve kept the promise to myself — whatever comes from it, I’m accepting it and I’m moving past it.”

The way he puts it, acceptance is not lowering your standards or making peace with mediocrity. It is the specific discipline of showing up anyway and doing the work without demanding that it immediately validate itself. A practice I think more of us creatives need to adopt.

The Main Product Was Never the Work

I ask him what leadership lesson he learned the hardest way.

“I came into this thinking I was a patient person. No. I’ve caught myself many times in the middle of frustration thinking, ‘What?’ ‘Why?’ ‘What is happening right now?’”

Patience, for Jide, is not simply waiting without complaint. It is about seeing potential rather than performance. It is looking at the version of someone they are becoming rather than the version standing in front of you today.

“If all you’re doing is super focused on this version and you’re not looking at potential or intent, you will miss out on so many beautiful people.”

Over the years, he has received messages from people who passed through the studio, describing not just how their skills changed but how they changed. Their values, temperament, and how they see themselves. Many of his closest friends, people who will be at his wedding, are people he worked with.

Outside of the people, which he insists is his greatest achievement, Jide’s second-best win is liking who he sees when he looks in the mirror.

He goes on to offer some context.

“Growing up, expectations for someone like me were not high. To any degree. It wasn’t the easiest situation or the easiest upbringing. The expectations were not nearly as close to what the reality is today.”

He is quiet for a moment.

“That doesn’t mean I have a billion dollars in my account and I’m on top of the world. It just means that I’m in a place where I wake up in the morning and I feel free. There’s a lot of peace. I think my biggest achievement is looking at myself in the mirror in the morning and saying — I like who I see.”

The Dream He Is Already Building

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend ends the same way. Same question, every time, no exceptions: What’s one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to go after yet, and what’s been stopping you?

Jide’s first answer is a campus. A Toast Academy campus, a physical institution, an alternative to university, built specifically for people like him. Creatives who walked into conventional degree programmes looking for something those programmes could not give them.

“This is the type of place I would have loved to go to right after secondary school. I spent four years in university thinking I would find it there. I didn’t find it there. Hence my failure. If I could create a place like that for people who are just like me, that would be the biggest thing.”

His second answer is already happening. When we met and got talking, Jide told me about his plan to create Nigeria’s first design museum right at the Toast headquarters in Ibadan, and now it’s in the works.

Expect to see old vinyl covers from the 1960s. Milo tins with their original packaging. The actress pictures that used to hang outside every barbershop in Lagos. Secondary school badges from institutions across the country. Old movie posters. Signage. Screen printing demonstrations. Basically, the physical evidence of the design history that most Nigerians don’t even realise they have.

“We’re going to show you how they used screen printing back in the day. Old ads playing. It’s going to be such a nostalgic, beautiful experience to walk through.”

He leans forward.

“When you see it, you will know. We don’t have to say this is the world-class one. You will know it’s world class.”

Nigeria has a design history. It has always had one. Someone just needed to be stubborn enough, and dogged enough to go and collect it.

Jide Awulonu found the problem, and he is not leaving until it is solved.

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

After his bachelor’s degree, Demi Banwo packed a suitcase in North Carolina in 2012, put everything else in storage, and came back to Lagos to renew his student visa before moving to Los Angeles to study acting. Everything seemed to be going well. He had auditioned for Glee, where he met a casting director who told him, ‘If this is what you want to do, go for it.’

So, he did, or at least tried to. But unfortunately, the visa interview did not go well.

“I gave myself twenty-four hours,” he tells me. “I fought with everybody, God, and the world for twenty-four hours. And after twenty-four hours, I was like, ‘Okay, what’s the plan?”

Thirteen years later, Demi is still in Lagos. LA never happened. But the plan — or rather, the absence of one — turned out to be its own kind of direction.

Stuck in Lagos, he decided to do his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) at Smooth FM, stayed on after service, and became an OAP. During that time, he also shot weddings on weekends, something he had picked up as a kid. Then, he found his way onto the set of a short film, where he met Lala Akindoju, the person everyone in Lagos had been telling him he needed to find.

That set led him to Ndani TV’s Gidi Up, where he played Yemi, a primary character. Working with the cast, which included Somkele Iyamah, and Daniel Etim Effiong, he realised that he needed more.

“I realised that as an actor, I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew the theory of film. I probably could have directed at the time. But not as an actor.”

That realisation sent him to ArtsEd London, where he earned a master’s in acting and spent a year he describes as one of the best of his life.

Then, green passport problems closed doors for him in London, Hamilton, Lion King on stage, and Game of Thrones, all conversations that went well until they got to the passport. So, Demi came back to Lagos. And got right to work the next day on RedTV’s comedy series, Inspector K, which he produced and starred in.

“That’s actually where my journey with production started. I literally saw that from inception to making the show.”

Since then, he has appeared in Chief Daddy, The Lost Okoroshi, Blood Sisters, and executive-produced Gangs of Lagos. In 2020, he launched his production company, Depth & Optics Productions, with Adesegun Adetoro after reading Bob Iger’s memoir. He also founded the Working Talent Agency, with Adetoro and Taiwo Adeyemi.

Then, in 2022, he recorded a voice note during a night run that would take up four years of his life and carry more of himself than he initially intended.

I begin, as I start every conversation in this series, with the same question: Why are you the way you are?

“I think with each thing I can trace it back to my upbringing and my family,” he says. “Not in the sense that my family is formally creative; most of my family are either working in law or finance. But there’s a creative streak in the family.”

He traces it precisely. His father had two CDs that played on repeat in their house — the soundtracks to Chicago and Sunset Boulevard. Demi and his sister grew up listening to them. Then there was the cinema trip at age four when his aunt took him to see Jurassic Park.

“I remember being so terrified, but I couldn’t stop watching. Every five minutes, she would put my head down on the seat or use a scarf to cover my face because I was scared and crying. But I would continue watching, and keep on screaming.”

He chuckles at the memory.

“Every time I think of film and the types of film I want to make, it traces back to Jurassic Park. Those are the kind of films I enjoy. Those are the kind of films I want to make.”

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The Jack of All Trades Who Learned the Full Quote

Demi grew up being called a Jack of all trades, and he hated the phrase. Then he learned the rest of it: “Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.” That last part changes everything for him.

Photography, baking, radio, acting, producing, directing, talent management — each thing traces back to something specific. His sister was a photographer, so he picked up her cameras when she was not around and figured it out. Three or four aunts baked; he went to their places, helped out, and somewhere along the way, it came naturally to him. Radio began with a secondary school excursion to Cool FM, where he got to go on air.

“There are a lot of things I do that I didn’t have to try too hard for, which has its own downsides.”

The downside, he explains, is that when you are naturally gifted, when things arrive without effort, you build no tolerance for the moment they require effort. You have not developed the muscle.

“With people that are, quote on quote, naturally gifted and don’t have to try too hard for things, there’s a tendency to run when it gets hard. That ability to stick with something even when it’s hard is something you have to build.”

He has watched this pattern in himself. He has watched it in friends who are built the same way.

So, he lets that sit for a moment, then says, “For me, film is the one thing I’ve chosen to stick with.”

Then, after a beat, something more honest: “At this point in time, I don’t know. Maybe it’s time to follow that instinct and cut and run.”

He catches himself. Laughs slightly, then adds, “Nah. It’s just because of what I am going through with this cinema run right now.”

But the fact that the thought arrived — even briefly, even jokingly — tells you something. The Other Side of the Bridge cost him four years. The cinema run has stretched him. And for someone who has spent his whole life moving easily between things, choosing to stay is itself the hardest part of the work.

The Voice Note That Changed Everything

Demi’s latest project, The Other Side of the Bridge, came from a place of frustration.

It was 2022. Demi was approaching ten years in the industry and felt, by his own account, that he had not yet acted. Not really. One scene here. Two days on set there. He was the person you called when you had a small role that needed elevating, and while he always tried to bring everything to it, he knew what it was.

“I remember talking to a friend, and I asked him — when my name comes up, what do people say? And he was like, ‘oh, you’re the guy that does a lot with a little.”’

There was also the money problem. Except it was not really a money problem.

“There are two things I had always heard. One, we can not afford you. And I’m like, how do you even know you can’t afford me? You’ve not even asked yet. Two, people would often reach out saying, ‘I have this role, but it's too small for you.’ And I'm like, ‘Okay, can I be the lead? Since this one is too small for me, let me take the lead.’ But I would often get, ‘You are not quite that guy.’”

Demi was stuck. People thought he was too expensive, too big for small roles, but not yet established enough for leads. And being a film executive was not helping.

“The executive thing came up, and at that point people were like, ‘We definitely cannot afford you now. As an actor, production and executive work usually comes later in your career after you’ve established yourself as an actor. But in my case, I hadn’t established myself as an actor yet, and then boom, we did Gangs of Lagos.”

While dealing with this internal frustration, he visited the set of Brotherhood, where his friend and longtime collaborator, Jade Osiberu, was filming on the Third Mainland Bridge. Standing there, looking around, he felt something he describes as a righteous anger.

“I kept looking around and I was like, ‘yo, I’ve never been a part of anything this big in a meaningful way.’ I remember feeling the same way when I watched Blood Sisters. There was so much for those actors to work with. But I never had that sort of experience.”

He went home. That night, he went for a run, and the idea came to him, so he recorded a voice note. The basic structure of the film came out fully formed — two fighters from either side of the Third Mainland Bridge.

“About 70% of that voice note made it into the actual film.”

Then, as the story developed, something deeper began to surface.

“The elements of my relationship with my mum came in shortly after.”

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Figuring Out The Personal Part

Femi, Demi’s character, stepped away from boxing for five years while his mother was sick. In the film, we see him trying to find his way back after her death.

Demi also lost his own mother, but he did not set out to make a film about that. This personal element arrived later, specifically during three days in Abuja with Emil Garuba, one of the film’s writers, in conversations that felt less like a script-development session and more like something else entirely.

“It felt like talking to a therapist because there were a lot of things that I was saying that I had never said before. So, I didn’t think of it as ‘Oh, we’re writing a script.’ It just felt like I was talking to a friend about this experience.”

When the draft came back, something had shifted. He read it, and his reaction was immediate.

“Oh shit. Because some of the things I said were now lines in the script. And again, these were things I had never said before. Things that even I didn’t know that I was feeling. So I think it wasn’t until I got that draft of the script back that it felt personal.”

He did not warn his family about the depth of the film. They only knew it was a boxing film and came to the first screening without knowing anything more.

“I remember sitting beside my dad on that screening. We had a conversation after. There were things that we had all been experiencing that we had never really talked about, and I think the film helped to open some of that up.”

He pauses, then adds, “Recently, I learnt that my brother had no idea how my mum died. And so we just had that conversation a few weeks ago. This was in the lead-up to the film’s release. The film came out on the 17th of April. She passed on the 14th of April."

He says this without drama. The way you say something you finally found the words for it.

“The film helped to have certain conversations, which is also what I hope it does for other people. That you watch it and it helps you access certain parts that maybe you haven’t been able to access before. Because that’s what it did for me.”

Demi is quiet for a moment before saying, “To be very honest, making the film itself, regardless of how it does financially, even though it needs to make money, is a win in itself. Because it has helped exorcise some of those things I’ve been holding in.”

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The Cost of Being Both the Actor and Producer

The training took a year. And carrying the producing role while also serving as the lead was harder than he had fully anticipated.

He describes specific moments on set — production crises pulling his attention as producer, and then being called to act. Dropping one entirely to run into the other.

“There are times when we’re having a production issue on set, and I’m dealing with that, and then they call me, and they’re like — Demi, you need to be in this scene. And then I drop that, run into this scene, do this scene, and then come back and deal with production.”

Looking back, he admits that taking on both responsibilities took a toll.

“As an actor, there are times when you need a process to enter a scene that takes time and focus, which I did not have because I was producing. So I do think that in some places the acting suffered.”

To get ready to play a boxer convincingly, Demi and his co-lead, Tobi Bakre, had to train for a year. Compared to acting and producing, he found the training almost simple.

“The training was the easy part, actually. With boxing, if you show up and you do what you’re supposed to do, you get the results. It’s like math. One plus one is two.”

What it Takes to Pull Off a Cinema Run in Nigeria

The Other Side of the Bridge was not originally intended for cinemas. It was meant for streaming. Then the streaming landscape shifted. At this point, it had been four years since Demi started working on the movie, and he needed it to be out.

“I feel like I haven’t been able to fully think about anything else until now that it’s out. It almost feels like I’ve been stuck on the other side of the bridge for four years.”

Demi learned the hard way about the enormous gap between making a good film and getting people to see it. He discovered that the marketing budget is separate from the production budget. Often larger. And it is not an investment because there is no return on it. He also found that premieres cost more than most people imagine.

“You have to go and find the money to market the film. And in our case, we’re trying to market a film that we shot years ago. Marketing money is essentially free money. You are looking for money you don’t have to pay back. And investors don’t like to hear that.”

He does the math out loud. The splits with the exhibitors and the distributors. Four years of work. And then the numbers at the end.

“You’re looking at the splits and you’re like, ‘I did all this work for how much?’ I think that’s the hardest part. As a producer, you’ve put in all this work for four years. Then you’re looking at these figures at the end, and it’s like four years for this?”

He also talks about casting differently now, something the cinema run changed his thinking on. In the Nigerian cinema landscape of 2026, where getting people out of their houses to pay increasingly expensive ticket prices is a challenge, the question of who is in your film and who will show up for them is a practical one that can not be separated from the creative one.

“In Nigeria, there’s the effort of getting ready for the cinema. The cost of transportation. Cinema is expensive, and for a lot of people, what makes it worth their while is seeing their fave. Whether that’s via meet and greet or seeing them in the film.”

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Demi’s Creative Edge

I ask Demi what he would say his creative edge is, considering everything he does — acting, producing, directing, talent management, and baking.

He thinks for a moment. Then gives me two things.

“One, I have a huge amount of empathy and emotional intelligence, which I think is an underrated skill in our industry. Because if you know how to manage people, you get very far. I’m not the smartest person in the room. I may not be the hardest-working person in the room. But I’m the person you actually enjoy working with.”

He describes a reality in casting that most people do not say out loud.

“Sometimes the decision comes down to who we are going to enjoy working with. Who’s going to make this a good time? And I’ve always been that person. We shot The Other Side Of The Bridge in 2023. Three years later, the actors are still showing up. That’s not a small thing.”

The second thing.

“I think I’ve been blessed with good taste. Whether that’s in film, in people, in food. I think I have good taste. And that’s what sets me apart.”

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What He Knows Now

Near the end of our conversation, I ask Demi what he understands about himself now that he did not before this project.

“One, I can do hard things. Because all of these things have been hard and I have not died yet.”

He pauses.

“I think I give myself little credit for that. For being able to figure out these different things. Because left to me, I’ll just be one of those actors that just show up, act, and go home. That’s my ideal life.”

He also describes what he now does with what he has learned. Someone called him about their cinema run, a film coming out two weeks after his. He picked up the phone and told them everything that was waiting for them.

“I said, this is what I’ve experienced, and this is what’s waiting for you in front. So whatever you can start doing to prepare for it, do that.”

He is clear about why.

“I see myself doing more of that. Making it just a little easier for somebody coming behind me. There’s no reason why you should have to experience what I experienced. Experience your own set of things, and then make it easier for the person that comes behind you.”

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The Dream He Hasn’t Started Yet

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend ends the same way: What’s one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to go after yet — and what’s been stopping you?

Demi laughs slightly before answering.

“I just want to make good big films because that feeds everything else. Film is hard, but it’s not as hard when everything is available. When there’s money. You actually enjoy it. Because you now get to be fully creative.”

He mentions Marvel as a dream he has held for a long time and doesn’t plan to abandon.

“Marvel is still the goal. I would still love to do a Marvel movie in any capacity. Whether that’s as an actor, as a producer, as a director, even as a talent manager.”

He also wants to fix distribution, and direct a rom-com, one with a Nigerian history element underneath it, because he is a Nigerian history buff.

And then there is the bakery.

“The bakery is the one that is making sense right now. It’s making more sense than film is making right now. If you people hear that Demi is a full-time baker now, don’t be surprised.”

Then, he goes, “I think I’m ready to have fun now. The Other Side of the Bridge has helped me get through the sadness and the depressing stories. Now let’s just have fun.”

The Other Side of the Bridge is still showing in cinemas nationwide. Go see it!

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

On the outside, it looks like he has arrived as an accomplished YouTuber and content creator. But from the inside, Tito will tell you, it looks considerably more complicated.

“Every year the new people are coming in,” he tells me, leaning forward slightly, “with their own skills and up-to-date stuff. Eating into your market share or whatever. Even though the sky is big enough for all of us to fly — dealing with it, you just have to shake it off and get in the race.”

He says this not with bitterness but with the specific self-awareness of someone who has been honest with himself for long enough to know the difference between a problem and a condition.

I begin, as I start every conversation in this series, with the same question: Why are you the way you are?

“Because that’s how God made me,” he says. Then, after a beat: “I’m a person who plans. I’m organised. I’m a creative. I’m expressive.” He pauses. “I’m not an idealist. I wish the world were an ideal place but it’s not. I prefer to be an idealist. But reality forces me to be a realist.”

It is the kind of answer that tells you everything about how a person operates — the tension between who they want to be and who the world has required them to become. For Tito, that tension has been both a creative constraint and a creative engine for over a decade.

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How It All Began

Tito studied economics at UniLag, then served in a stockbroking firm in Kano. When he returned to Lagos, he worked at another stockbroking firm, then at an HR consulting firm. During that time, he started following photographers around over the weekends, purely because he wanted to. Not to learn a trade. Just because the interest was there.

“I had an interest in photography, in addition to my 9-to-5.”

He photographed a friend’s Nikah (an Islamic marriage ceremony). Got paid for it. Then, the side hustle started paying almost as much as his salary. Then more. The logic became undeniable.

“With many entrepreneurs — creative or otherwise — you get to a point when what you started doing as a side hustle is now paying you almost as much as your salary. And then as the point starts paying you more, they’re like — ah, why am I even doing this 9-to-5? I got to that point with my 9-to-5.”

So, Tito left. Started a YouTube channel to talk about photography — specifically, to talk about the client side of it. What to expect when you book a photographer. How to make your session go better. Not because the market demanded it, but because he noticed a gap nobody else was filling.

“Lots of foreign photographers were doing content for the photography community. Lenses, cameras, settings. But I wasn’t catering to that. I felt like people were already covering that, but not enough people were covering the client aspect of it.”

Then the channel evolved. Relationship discussions. Personal finance. A long pause on personal finance. Nollywood reviews. And now — a deliberate pivot back toward personal finance, driven less by passion than by economics.

“Nobody wants to be a hungry creative or a starving artist. So yeah, this is why I’m making this move.”

He says it plainly, without apology. It is one of the most honest things I have heard a creative say in a long time.

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Which Chapter Are You In?

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend asks this same question at some point: if your creative journey were a book, which chapter would you say formed the core of who you are today?

Tito thinks about this through the lens of the three-act narrative. Setup. Conflict. Resolution.

“What informs or informed where I am now will be conflict. The decisions I’m making now in my creative career are a reaction to the economy. Cinema tickets are getting higher. Not too long ago, just before COVID, there was 1K Wednesdays. You could see as many movies as you want for one thousand naira on a Wednesday. Today, a Nollywood film costs 8,000 naira to watch. That’s not even a blockbuster.”

The fewer people who go to the cinema, the smaller the conversation around Nollywood films, the less traction his Nollywood reviews can generate. He sees the math clearly. He is not pretending otherwise.

“Nollywood is going through a tough time financially. And it’s having ripple effects on what I do with regards to Nollywood reviews on YouTube. So, the safe bet for me would be to pivot and go back to my personal finance stuff. There’s quite a huge market for that.”

He links it back to the chapter question.

“Conflict. Because where I am now creatively is a function of being in the middle of the book, where there’s conflict, and I’m trying to figure stuff out.”

What strikes me about this answer is the clarity. Most creatives, when they are in the middle of something difficult, either dress it up as something more palatable or refuse to name it at all. Tito just calls it what it is. And there is something quietly powerful about a person who has been doing this for twelve years and still has the self-awareness to say — I am in the hard part. I know it. I am still here.

What Over A Decade Has Taught Him

Ask Tito what changed the most over a decade of creating, and he gives you an answer that has nothing to do with the camera or the content.

“System and structure is really important.”

He says it with the emphasis of someone who learned this much later than he should have.

“Yes, you’re a creative. You feel like — ah, when the spirit comes upon you, you just create, right? But it’s not that easy. The spirit may be upon you but there’s no light, or gen sound, or a cat or chicken making noise. One thing or the other.”

Now, he has sorted all that out with a content calendar. A weekly review of what got done and what carries over, and a dedicated studio instead of a setup-and-teardown routine every time he wants to film.

“That was eating into the time. I had to learn systems and processes through the years. It took longer than it should have, but I’m here now.”

He is also clear about something that many creatives resist admitting: structure does not look the same for everyone, and the version that works for you is the only version that matters.

“It could be some other creative is like — I need to wake up at 5am and shoot for five hours. And you are like no, I need to sleep all day and wake up at midnight and start shooting. It doesn’t seem like it makes sense, but it works for you and that is your own structure. More people need to realise — if you are a creative, you need structure to really achieve your dreams and your goals and your passions.”

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Dealing With Creative Exhaustion

As someone who has been doing this for over a decade, it’s only right that I ask him about creative exhaustion — how he handles the gap between being genuinely tired and being afraid to evolve, and he is refreshingly honest.

On creative exhaustion specifically, he has developed what he calls the minimum viable version, a philosophy that more creatives need to adopt.

“Maybe I want to do a video on stocks to look out for in 2026. I want to ideally do a 10-minute video. And I’m not in the mood. I’ll be like — okay, what’s the 90-second version of that content that you can do even though you’re not in the mood? Can you fake it for 90 seconds on camera?”

He also knows when the minimum viable version is not the answer. Sometimes you just wait.

“I’ve been around the block long enough to know that some days you don’t feel like it, but the following day or the following week you’re back in the saddle. You snap out of it. And then there’ll come a time sooner than later that you’ll be on fire. Maximise that time. Pour out all your ideas. Film as much as you can to compensate for the times when you won’t be in the mood.”

On evolving with the times, Tito says, “I can be self-aware and accountable enough to say yes, maybe the success I’m looking for will be in this place that I’ve refused to go to.”

He means short-form content. TikTok. Instagram. He has been on YouTube for over a decade while the landscape shifted around him, and he knows it.

“The YouTubers I’ve known for years — a lot of them no longer focus on YouTube. They’ve evolved. They’re now on Instagram and TikTok. If I’m really chasing the money, I should follow the money. And the money, by all indications, is on short form.”

But he is also careful not to let that become a verdict on everything he has built.

“Just because it’s 2026 and everyone is doing TikTok, it doesn’t mean that by staying on YouTube, you haven’t evolved. YouTube is not going away anytime soon. That’s why they have YouTube Shorts now, because they’re freaking out. People like long-form content.”

He holds both truths simultaneously. The pragmatism and the defence of his own path. Neither cancels the other out.

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The Responsibility of a Public Voice

Tito has been reviewing Nollywood films for years. He has built a recognisable voice, a rating system, and a community that trusts his take. And in all that time, he has made a deliberate and considered choice about how to use that platform.

He begins with a distinction that matters more than it might first appear.

“I always correct people and say, I’m not a critic, I’m a reviewer. I didn’t go to film school or study that to be able to properly critique a work of art. I review based on the experience and the knowledge I have.”

His approach to that reviewing is shaped by something he heard from Joel Osteen.

“There are enough negative words in the world, but there aren’t enough people speaking positivity and lifting people up. So, even if I don’t enjoy a film, you can express displeasure and still be a human being.”

And there are films he chooses not to review at all.

“If there’s a film I’ve seen that I cannot say any good thing about, I just don’t review it. Funny enough, those are the kind of reviews that do really well — because people like when you go for the jugular and are ready to rip people apart. But these are fellow creatives who have put blood, sweat, and tears into creating this work.”

Tito has also navigated the personal cost of that position. As his career has grown, so has his circle, and with it, the difficulty of being honest about the work of people he knows and respects.

“Over the course of the last few years, I have met different people in the film-making industry. I have to admit it’s harder to critique their films when I’m displeased with them. I find myself being even more careful. A film came out recently by a filmmaker that I respect and like — but I really didn’t enjoy the film. And I knew they were going to see my review.”

He pauses.

“But it’s part of the course. If they understand what I do, they understand I’m just doing my job and it’s nothing personal.”

He also articulates something about the role of a reviewer that reframes the entire conversation — something a filmmaker told him recently that he is still sitting with.

“A filmmaker brought my attention to the fact that people like me are also important because we are like a data bank. A lot of filmmakers don’t watch other Nollywood films, they avoid watching others’ movies because they may unconsciously take ideas. So, they watch my reviews to gauge the reception of a film. We’re aggregating knowledge of why certain films worked and why certain films did not. That would be a good resource for certain people to reference.”

On Creative Rituals

At some point, I ask him what creative rituals help him stay consistent.

His answer is grounded and practical, as things learned through years of trial and error tend to be.

“Having a to-do list, a list of content I want to film. It’s one thing to have your ideas in your head, but once you start putting things down — I came here today and before we were ready to film, I had some time to myself and I realised I didn’t have my notebook. I was kind of frazzled. Because I always like to write down my objectives for the week, my to-do list for the day. What I got done last week. What’s carrying over. What I didn’t get done. I have a planner for that.”

He describes it not as a creative ritual in the romantic sense but as the foundation that makes creativity possible. The thing that turns intention into output.

“My main ritual, with many aspects of my life, including the creative stuff, is to put things down on paper, or in my notes app, and check in with that throughout my day and throughout my week. That has really helped me get stuff done.”

What Tito’s Greatest Achievement Actually Is

I ask Tito what his most meaningful achievement has been. He does not reach for the obvious answers — not the US Missions recognition, the longevity, the two channels or the loyal audience.

“Getting people to take their personal finance more seriously.”

He describes it in specific terms. Someone opening an investing app after watching one of his videos. Someone who saved consistently for years and then had a family medical emergency, and it was that saved money that got them through.

“If one of my videos is what led to somebody taking that step to be more responsible with their finances, that is huge for me. To an extent, you would almost call it life-changing work.”

It is the answer of someone who has been clear about why they do this for a long time. The moment when information becomes action, and action becomes a life slightly more secure than before.

The Dream He Hasn’t Started Yet

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend ends the same way. Same question, every time, no exceptions: What’s one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to go after yet — and what’s been stopping you?

Tito says one word.

“Events.”

He means physical events. Last year, he put together a speed dating event. Now, he is focused on doing more, including the personal finance workshops he has been thinking about for years. And the specific gap he spotted recently that nobody else seems to have noticed: events for single people above thirty-five — in their forties and fifties — who are looking for love but are largely ignored by an events market that skews toward the twenty-somethings.

“There are lots of single people looking for love. The only outlets we have are the apps. Events are few and far between. And most of the events that exist cater to people in their twenties and early thirties. But there are lots of people above thirty-five, in their forties and fifties, who are also looking for love. That is an unserved market that should also be catered to.”

What the speed dating event taught him was about more than logistics.

“I learned that women part with money much easier than men. I sold out my women’s tickets in a week. It took me a month to sell out my men’s tickets.”

He unpacks this with the same careful, slightly amused analysis he brings to his film reviews. The social dynamics. The economics. The specific way men think about their money and what they are protecting it for. It is a micro-study of human behaviour, grounded in lived experience.

The events are coming, starting with a ‘speed-dating’ event this time for people looking to make friends on Saturday, May 2, 2026. The gaps in the market have been identified, and the man who spotted it is building toward it — one content calendar, one planner, one minimum viable version at a time.

The conflict chapter, it turns out, is not where you get stuck. It is where you figure out exactly what you are building. And Tito Abumere has been building for a very long time.

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

His father owned cameras, which he used constantly on random afternoons and ordinary days that did not announce themselves as worth remembering.

“Even on days when he just beat us,” Ryan tells me, chuckling at the memory, “he would just be in the mood. He used to randomly take photos of us playing outside, and all those things.”

There were also newspapers, specifically Punch, because it was one of the few that had coloured photos or any photos at all. Ryan would flip through the pages as a child, completely uninterested in the columns, drawn entirely to the images.

And then there were the billboards. He was very young when he started noticing them — really noticing them, in the way that signals something forming underneath conscious thought.

“I was always fascinated by how they came to be. How did they enlarge these pictures to be this big? How did they capture this photo?”

He did not know what any of this meant. None of it seemed, at the time, like it was having any effect.

Years later, Ryan has become a highly sought-after portrait and fashion photographer whose work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Getty Images, and GQ South Africa. He was named one of Lagos’ Top 50 Photographers in 2024.

As we settle into our conversation, I begin, as I always do in The Creator’s Backend, with the same question: Why are you the way you are?

“I grew up around a lot of photos,” he says. “My dad was a huge movie fan. So, he would buy a lot of video cassettes, then DVDs, and cable TV. I also watched a lot of cartoons. All these things didn’t seem to have any effect on my life. But when I sat down to do a bit of introspection, I realised that my fascination for certain things find their roots in all of these little things.”

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The Long Way Around

Ryan did not arrive at photography quickly or directly. His path there was shaped by failing mathematics, a mother who owned a school and had her own ideas about her son’s future, and years of teaching while the desire quietly gathered within.

After finishing secondary school in 2008, he was unable to gain admission to university because he failed Mathematics. Rather than have him spend an extra year at home, his mother encouraged him to enrol in a college of education.

“She made it look as if it was an idea that I thought from within me,” he says, laughing. “Mind you, my mum owns a school, so she wanted one of her children to have a certificate of education.”

It was after graduating in 2012 that he first told his parents he wanted to learn photography. He was living in Ikorodu at a time when photography was not considered a prestigious career.

“If you’re a photographer in Ikorodu, it’s a minor job. It wasn’t a thing of pride for my mum to say my son is a photographer. But I wasn’t seeing photography like that. I was simply seeing photography through the lens of all the things that I had grown up with.”

Still, it took three years before he picked up a camera. Between 2008 and 2015, he made his mum proud by teaching at every level from junior secondary to primary school. He is, as he notes with some amusement, a certified teacher.

Then one rainy evening in 2015, bored during a long break, he picked up one of his father’s cameras and off he went.

“I hadn’t learnt any theory, any skill whatsoever. But I found out that I was taking photos. I didn’t even know that they were great photos until years after when I looked back at them. I was like — wait.”

He shakes his head slightly, still mildly surprised by the memory.

“That’s the thing about being a creative. You have spent years ingesting and digesting materials subconsciously or consciously. When you want to start creating, you’re regurgitating all those things without even knowing.”

What Ilorin Gave Him

In 2017, after gaining admission into university, Ryan began to take photography seriously in Ilorin, studying it with intention and committing himself to the craft. At the time, the city didn’t offer the kind of work that pushed or challenged him, so he turned outward, looking to Lagos and studying photographers on Instagram from a distance.

What he could not have known then was how much the absence of pressure was protecting him.

“I tell my staff and people that I’m teaching — I don’t shoot as much as I used to shoot when I was in Ilorin. I used to shoot every day. I used to create every day. There was nobody to criticise what I was shooting because in my lane, I thought I was doing excellently.”

The repetition built something that could not have been built any other way.

“It helped me build capacity. Such that when I moved to Lagos — people were like, are you sure you just moved to Lagos?”

Throughout his time in Ilorin and his early years in Lagos, he borrowed cameras and rented equipment, focusing on simply creating. He did not buy his first camera until 2022.

“When I started photography professionally in Ilorin in 2016, I was renting and borrowing cameras. But even that in itself wasn’t an impediment to me creating. I didn’t mind borrowing cameras or renting equipment. I was creating with them anyway.”

He also carried something else out of Ilorin: a clarity about what he was creating for.

“I wasn’t creating for Instagram. A lot of creatives act as though they are working for Instagram. We’re not working for Instagram. It’s a platform for us to show what we’re doing. While I was in Ilorin, there was no pressure for virality. Ten likes was enough for me. You should be creating for creating sake, for your mind’s sake, for expression’s sake, for legacy, for generations.”

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The Backend of a Portrait

Ask Ryan what draws him to a face, and he will tell you something truly profound.

“I strongly believe that every other thing in the photograph is an accompaniment. The face of the subject, the face, the eyes, the emotions in the face — that’s what tells the most story. I try to make sure that nothing else within that frame is taking your attention away from the face.”

This is why his photographs look the way they do. The simplicity is not an aesthetic choice. It is a philosophical one.

“If I cover the face of the subject, say I’m trying to get creative and I cover the face, even if I embellish the photo with a lot of props and things, it becomes an abstract. You now have to give your own meaning to it. That’s not what I want. I want you to see my meaning or my interpretation of the subject or client.”

He describes a moment in 2023 when he asked God to show him how to use photography.

“God said, ‘if you can help people see themselves the way I see them, then you’re successful. You’ve done it.’ And I have run with that. I run with that so much that I try not to use other things to help people see themselves. I want you to see yourself. So it has to be as simple, original, and authentic as possible.”

At this point, I bring up one of the pictures that solidified Ryan’s gift to me, a picture of Bunmi George’s mum that stopped me in my tracks when it popped up on Instagram. I had seen her pictures many times on Instagram, but that image was totally different. It was the same person, seen through a more intentional, more reverent lens.

At this point, I mention one of the images that cemented Ryan’s gift for me — a portrait of Bunmi George’s mum that quite literally stopped me mid-scroll on Instagram. I had seen her picture a few times before; I knew her face. But this was different. It was the same person, yet rendered through a more intentional lens, as though he had uncovered something deeper and asked you to sit with it.

For Ryan, that difference is the point.

“My pictures may seem simple, but they are that way because I want you to see God’s version of you.”

What He Actually Does on a Shoot

The clarity call comes before everything. Ryan does not meet his clients on the day of the shoot. He meets them long before that — learning their Instagram, studying how they caption their own photographs, noticing which side of their face they favour in selfies, reading the emotional subtext of how they present themselves when no one has asked them to perform for a camera.

“For women, I like to see when they’re taking selfies in their photos on Instagram. How do they feel? What’s on their face? I already know how to position you, where you would rather put your face, when I’m photographing you.”

On set, he describes himself with a list that grows longer the more he thinks about it.

“While I’m photographing, I am therapist, counsellor, hypomaniac, cheerleader, signer, sometimes stylist, sometimes hair stylist. It’s a lot of work.”

He controls the music — asking clients what they love before deciding what will play — because he has learned that the right song can do what no pose instruction ever could.

Ryan describes a client who came to him seeking photographs that express joy and appreciation. He could not find the expression through direction. For thirty-five minutes, nothing landed. Then the Holy Spirit led him to a specific song. The client began to cry on set.

“I just continued capturing how she was worshipping. And that was all she needed for the expression to be joy and appreciation. There was no pose I could have given to show joy and appreciation.”

He pauses.

“Because I listened to her and I knew what she wanted to express, my mind was consistently saying — how do we get it? Holy Spirit, how do we get it? Because I ask Holy Spirit a lot of questions when I’m shooting and He gives me ideas.”

For Ryan, really seeing his clients and showing them who they are matters more than simply taking pictures.

“Anybody can give you nice photos. But really seeing your clients, really seeing who they are, and helping them come out of whatever shell, that’s what lingers. That’s what brings them back. The value that you get is during the photography period. While I photograph you, the emotions that you get, the emotions that you exude during that process — those are the same emotions that help you appreciate your photo more. When people recommend me to their friends, they don’t talk about the photos. They talk about the experience.”

He says it with the certainty of someone who has watched this happen too many times to doubt it.

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Amaranthine

In 2025, Ryan put together his debut solo exhibition. It was called Amaranthine — named after a mythical flower known for never dying.

The idea came to him in 2023, through God.

“All my ideas come from God honestly. Of course God would use what you already have. With David, with Samson, with Moses — he used what they already had. So God gave me the idea, but the idea met me prepared.”

He spent a year and nine months on it. During the first year, he didn’t take a single picture, focusing instead on understanding the group of people he was working with.

For the project, he chose to work with older people, men and women in their fifties and sixties who had once been deeply fashionable and had, over decades of life, set that part of themselves aside. Not because it was gone, but because survival took precedence. Ryan believed their relationship with fashion was still there. It just needed to be found again.

“Amaranthine is a mythical flower that’s known for its undying qualities. I used that to describe the phenomenon of fashion not dying no matter what’s going on in life. No matter what you’re experiencing physically, once you’re exposed to resources and time, you’ll be able to express that part again.”

What he did not anticipate was the effect the project would have on the people watching it, not just the people in it.

“People began to see themselves aged. Would I still care for fashion when I’m 60? Would I still be financially capable of maintaining this style when I’m much older? The subjects had almost forgotten how awesome they used to look, who they used to be. Once they put on the outfits, you could see — they didn’t become new people. They became who they used to be once again.”

He had gone into the project intending to help audiences see the people on the street differently, but got more than he bargained for.

“I was hoping people would see that these people on the street are more than you can see. I wanted to helping people see others, not realising that I would also make them seeing themselves too.”

What He Tells Himself

Ryan has two creative beliefs that he returns to when everything else gets noisy.

The first sounds like confidence, and functions more like armour.

“I like to convince myself that nobody photographs the way that I do. Imposter syndrome doesn’t go away. We grow better at dealing with it. Even the greatest in whatever industry still experiences some level of imposter syndrome. I have grown to convince myself every time that nobody can do it like that, even on days when I don’t feel like my work is great.”

The second is less about the work and more about the life surrounding it.

“Times and seasons,” Ryan says quietly, like something he has had to repeat to himself on multiple occasions.

“2020 and 2021 were the hardest seasons of my photography journey. Anybody who was seeing the work I was putting out there would have thought things were great. But things were not. I didn’t have a place to stay of my own. The entire year of 2021 I was squatting. My finances were terrible. I was doing great work but I wasn’t getting paid what I was worth.”

He looks at that time now with a specific kind of distance.

“When I look back at that time, I don’t remember how difficult it was anymore. It’s just times and seasons. Whatever difficulty I’m experiencing now, as long as you’re stewarding all that you have right now, it always gets better.”

It is, he says, the same mantra he is holding onto now as he prepares to expand his practice to Paris. A new city. A new client base. The same craft. The same God. Different season.

Which Chapter Are You In?

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend asks this same question at some point, no exceptions: if your creative journey were a book, which chapter would you say formed the core of who you are today?

Ryan thinks about this differently from anyone else I have asked.

“You know all these books that have two stories in one? Book one, book two — in one book? Where you get to the middle of the book and there’s an entire different story. And then at the end of the story, they blend it with what ended in the first phase?”

He is describing Ted Dekker novels, specifically, the structure in which two parallel narratives converge.

“Because I’m in a transition phase — I’m expanding my business out of Lagos, Nigeria to Paris, France. It will require a lot of change. Not intrinsically changing my style. But in the way I express it, because of the cultural context of Europe. It requires that I start grinding afresh. Building a new client base. A lot of patience — knowing that you established yourself somewhere and you have to do that again somewhere else.”

He says this without bitterness or complaint. But you can hear the weight of what it requires underneath the measured tone.

“It takes a lot of trust. Trust in the process, trust in God, trust in the skill that is there. So it’s a new phase. Just like the same book but another story. Which I know at the end, both parts of the story will connect.”

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The Dream He Won’t Name

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend ends the same way: What’s one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to go after yet — and what’s been stopping you?

Ryan goes quiet before telling me a little about what he calls the Legacy Project.

“This project will take me three years or more to finish. I can’t finish it in a year. Amaranthine stretched me, but this will stretch me even more. God gave me the idea, so He will sponsor it.”

Having seen all the amazing work Ryan continues to put out, I totally can’t wait to see the Legacy Project.

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

Deji was 11 or 12. He did not know what Public Relations (PR) was. He just knew that something about the game felt familiar. Intuitive.

“Imagine just being like an 11 or 12-year-old absorbing all of this information,” he tells me. “And then there was another game with a similar concept. You take a band from playing in garages to playing at Wembley Stadium. It had PR stunts in it. As an eleven-year-old, I was already starting to realise the efficacy of a PR stunt.”

Years later, when he became the PR Lead at Chocolate City, working with Grammy-nominated artists on campaigns that won international awards, it felt almost effortless. Like stuff he had practised before.

I begin, as I start every conversation in The Creator’s Backend, with the same question: Why are you the way you are?

He does not hesitate.

“I think it was predestined, man. A lot of who I am today — I’m starting to find out that I’ve always been. The quest to discover yourself essentially just leads you to who you were as a child. Who you always been. So I think I’m the way that I am because God made me this way.”

The First Things He Made

The earliest memory of creation that Deji can access is a comic book.

Not reading one. Making one. He was in primary school — primary three or four, he thinks — modelling it after the drawings from Super Strikers, adding his own dialogue, plot, and narrative.

“That was like maybe my earliest thought of what creating looked like,” he says.

Outside of that, he was always writing. Essay writing was something he genuinely looked forward to. Holiday essays. Opportunities to put his thoughts down on paper. The instinct to make meaning from language showed up before he had any framework for what to do with it.

Then secondary school arrived, and so did rap.

“I used to write raps. We actually recorded a few, even though I can’t really access a bunch of them. Music was one of the things that caught me early. I was always fascinated with the form. But it seemed distant as far as creation was concerned because, as a child you just can’t conceptualise what making a song actually entails.”

What changed it was his older brother — who was part of a rap group in secondary school, had some notoriety, and one day Deji heard his voice on a recording.

“Hearing your own brother’s voice on a recording is like ‘okay, this thing isn’t that far away.’ That instantly let me know: this is possible.”

A few friends. A few recordings. The rest, as he puts it, was history.

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Which Chapter Are You In?

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend asks this same question at some point, with no exceptions: if your creative journey were a book, which chapter would you say you are at right now?

Deji thinks for a moment.

“I think the chapter is about surrender.”

He says it quietly, with the weight of someone who has arrived at a word after a long search for it.

“It’s as much a creative endeavour as it is a spiritual one. A lot of my creation — and I guess just even my being — is inspired by the spiritual, inspired by God. I’m Christian, so it forms the backbone of a lot of the stuff that I do.”

He goes on to offer more context, saying, “I feel like I’m on the precipice of launching into significant growth. This last year feels like a stepladder into bigger, into expansion. So this current chapter is about preparation. And that preparation really comes from surrendering to my identity as well.”

He pauses, choosing his next words carefully.

“I’ve surrendered to the identity of being a creative. But I’m now also surrendering to the idea of being an excellent one.”

Because his gifts came easily — the writing, the voice, the ability to hold a room — he did not value them the way things you have to fight for tend to be valued. He did not see them clearly. A friend once told him, half-jokingly, that he was fake humble. Deji insists he was not performing humility. He was simply underestimating himself with complete sincerity.

“2025 was God revealing my value to me,” he says. “I’m becoming more comfortable with being like — I’m one of those guys. And it’s not easy, because the line between knowing your value and being cocky is not very wide at all. You have to constantly watch for it.”

Then, with the precision of someone who has clearly thought about this at length: “As much as you value yourself, you always have to do a constant reevaluation. I always have to ask: what am I doing? How does this behaviour line up with the value system I have in my mind? And also just — who am I trying to be?”

The Moment That Gave Him Permission

Deji did not set out to become an actor. It was one of the million things he had wanted as a child that the logic of adulthood had quietly filed under nice to have.

What changed was a video he posted on Instagram. After being told for years that he had a good voice, he decided to put something out there about wanting to do voice-overs. Just putting it into the world and seeing what came back.

What came back was Abimbola Craig — the lead of ‘Skinny Girl in Transit’ — reaching out to ask if he would like to act.

“Within a week of auditioning, I was on set. Things just don’t happen like that. People don’t audition that quickly and get cast that quickly. A lot of it felt very divinely orchestrated.”

He describes day three of filming, standing on set with people he had grown up watching on screen and with actors he admired. And something unlocked.

“I was like — clearly there are options in this life. And in that moment, I was like: I’m going to try.”

However, Deji did not quit his job immediately. He was sensible enough to save a landing pad first. But the decision was made on day three, before the final day of filming had even come.

“There was no spreadsheet or presentation that was going to give me close to the feeling I had on that set. I needed to chase this feeling as much as possible because, for a long time, I went years thinking I was not ambitious. Then I realised: it was a function of not being passionate. I’m unfortunately one of those people who has to feel something.”

He says unfortunately with the kind of self-aware amusement that suggests he no longer actually considers it unfortunate.

“Instead of fighting myself to fit a square peg into a round hole, I just need to find more things that seem like me and do more of them.”

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Which Lane Feels Like Home?

Deji is a true multihyphenate. Actor. Voice artist. Host. Podcaster. Writer. MC. PR strategist. And even a stand-up comedian. I ask him which lane, when he is honest with himself, actually feels like home.

His answer — “Writing. The video essays that I do. Fundamentally, if I’m being very honest, that is where my power is. Speaking is a superpower for me, I’ll say. But writing and really sitting down and constructing my thoughts is one of my greatest skills. And I’m only just realising that more and more.”

He describes the feeling of writing his video essays — the research, the construction of argument, the way ideas become architecture on the page — and contrasts it with everything else he does professionally.

“With writing, there’s no wandering eye over it. I don’t really have to answer to anybody with those. With everything else — acting, voice over work — I’m constantly editing myself for the sake of somebody else’s goal.”

He is honest about what happens when passion becomes profession, a struggle many Nigerian creatives, including myself, can relate to. The thing you loved becomes the thing you sigh before starting.

“If you do it enough, you get used to it. And the love can disappear. So it has to be deeper than I enjoy it. It has to be.”

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The Character Problem

Late in our conversation, Deji says something profound that many Christians might relate to.

“The success part of it — and I say this with the utmost humility — is pretty much inevitable, just based on the conversations I have had with God and who he places me as. But my concern is to be the person that is worthy of stewarding those things.”

A friend told him recently: you do not learn how to be a person of character when you get there. You build it before. And Deji believes this with the specific intensity of someone who has watched, up close, what happens when people arrive at success without having done that work first.

“I always have conversations with younger people who are trying to figure out what they want to do. And I tell them: man, I hear you on wanting to be more ambitious and wanting to go out there. But for a lot of people, the only thing that is protecting them from complete perdition is the fact that they haven’t blown yet. The second you get this thing, it’s going to destroy your life. Because you no longer have people to answer to. You have all sorts of piranhas around you who will just take, take, take, take. And they will enable you to do the worst things as long as the bankroll keeps coming in.”

He pauses.

“In the physical realm, there’s no bigger multiplier than money. Everything that you do now that you are not great at — work on it now. If you have a problem with discipline or a womaniser, now is the time to work on it. Not when you get there. Not when the exposure arrives.”

He is doing the internal work out loud, in real time, in a way that makes you want to do the same.

What He Does to Stay Creative

I ask him what creative rituals keep him grounded and consistent.

He thinks about it genuinely, the way someone does when they are not reaching for a polished answer but actually taking stock.

“I always read. And something I am trying to incorporate more of is writing, because writing is no different from thinking. When you do research on a subject extensively, you come away with a broader knowledge, but also an improved vocabulary. Words that I used in this conversation today came from an article I wrote about my favourite verses of 2025 a few weeks ago. Because I’ve read over that thing a billion and one times, those words have stuck.”

He also describes something he calls student mode — a posture of perpetual inquiry that he has been in for so long it has become indistinguishable from his personality.

“I always ask questions. I never get tired of asking questions. People have so much knowledge. So, I’m always asking questions. Staying teachable. When I watch content or videos, I take a second to appreciate what makes it good because there’s always something you can take.”

He pauses, then adds the thing that I think matters most.

“I’m a very big proponent of never attempting to reinvent the wheel. Instead, you can leave your own mark on it. By taking from all these different sources, you can end up creating something that feels unique, feels distinct, feels singular.”

The Dream He Hasn’t Started Yet

Every conversation in The Creator’s Backend ends the same way. Same question, every time, no exceptions: What’s one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to go after yet — and what’s been stopping you?

Deji says, “I think there’s a producer lurking.”

He produces already. He has a good ear. He has spent the last year studying Afrobeats on what he calls a very academic level. Searching for layers. Combing through records. Building the kind of taste that takes years to construct quietly before it becomes visible to anyone else.

He tells me about Tejiri Akpoghene, a producer who worked with Tems on Higher, a song that was eventually sampled for Wait For U by Future. A labour of love between two people who believed in each other before the world did. And then, years later, royalties from one of the biggest names in music.

“I look at that as one of the craziest ways you can have passive income. Because music just constantly morphs. He can make money today from streaming. Tomorrow it could get synced for an ad or end up in a movie. You just never know. So that’s something I’ve always silently thought I wanted a piece of. It doesn’t even have to be a big one.”

He laughs.

“Let me just be a credited songwriter on the remix of All I Want for Christmas Is You. Do you know what I mean? Just so I can have that passive income constantly coming through.”

The A&R side draws him too — the years of academic listening, the industry knowledge, the ability to hear where things are going before they arrive. He also wants to direct eventually.

At the beginning of our conversation, Deji and I talked about how the quest to discover yourself essentially just leads you back to who you have always been.

I keep coming back to that. The 11-year-old with the Nokia phone, unintentionally learning the mechanics of the music industry through a mobile game. The primary school boy making comic books. The secondary school kid writing raps simply because the form fascinated him. The young man who posted a voice reel into the void and somehow ended up on a set acting.

None of it was accidental. None of it was disconnected. It was all the same person, building the same thing, one brick at a time — sometimes without even knowing that a structure was going up.

The chapter he is in now is surrender. Preparation. The disciplined, unglamorous, essential work of becoming worthy of what is already on its way.

He believes it is inevitable.

Looking at everything that has already happened, it is very difficult not to root for Deji Osikoya.

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

The walls are peeling in exactly the right places. A dryer hangs above a cracked mirror. On the wall near the door, a faded sticker reads Jesus is Lord. The mirror has years of hairspray pressed permanently into its surface. The spray has stuck so long that it has become part of the glass.

Here’s the thing: none of it is real. Every single detail was placed there by one person: the award-winning production designer Anita Ashiru, founder of AA Creatives.

“I don’t want the space to look like a set,” Anita tells me. “I want it to look lived in. I want people to get lost in it.”

Anita is a production designer. But simply calling her that, in my opinion, is limiting when what she actually does is build worlds. Whole, breathing, inhabited worlds that make people forget that anything was constructed at all. In five years, she has done this for some of the biggest names in African music — Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Ayra Starr — and in the process helped redefine what Nigerian visuals can look like on a global stage.

I begin, as I do for every conversation in this series, with my favourite question: Why are you the way you are?

“I think it’s an accumulation of so many things,” she says. “Definitely my upbringing, my exposure. And just — I think the values and principles I hold really close to me. Yeah. The bad and the good.”

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In The Beginning

Anita grew up in Ibadan with a creative mother — they made candles together, sold them at church, and handmade everything from gift bags to costumes. By 15, she was running a blog, organising events as her school’s social prefect, and doing something that nobody at her secondary school had ever done before.

She painted a backdrop for the school’s end-of-year production. The theme was time travel. She designed and painted the entire thing herself.

“They could have easily said no. We’ve not done this before, it’s too risky. But they gave me a chance.”

That was 2011. In 2026, her old teacher still uses it as a reference point when speaking to students saying, she started before she graduated secondary school. You can start now.

What strikes you about these stories is not the creativity — that much is obvious. It is the fearlessness. Or more precisely, the complete absence of the paralysis that tends to arrive with adulthood. When I point this out — that the fearlessness she had at fifteen still shows in her work now — she goes quiet for a moment.

“Back then I didn’t have a lot to lose,” she says. “If I get broke and it doesn’t work out, I’ll fall back on my parents. I had a safety net. But I’m turning thirty this year. I can’t take stupid risks the way I used to. The things I want to do now are more capital intensive. There’s a lot more risk attached.”

Then, almost to herself: “I need to borrow some of the audacity I had when I was fifteen.”

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The Environment That Made Her

Figuring out Anita’s particular zone of genius begins with understanding the specific household she grew up in.

Her mother is creative in exactly the way Anita is. Not as a profession at the time, but as a disposition — constantly making things. Her older brother is the opposite. A bookworm, into current affairs, the kind of child who sat with their father at age seven watching CNN because that is genuinely what interested him.

Two completely different people raised in the same house, both encouraged fully.

“My mom and I would make candles and I’d sell them in church. My eighth birthday — my mom handmade all the gift bags. Everything was custom made, she used fabrics. And I was in the house helping her stitch the buttons. This was by age eight.”

She credits her parents with something specific and rare: the ability to see two different personalities and nurture both without trying to make one into the other. Her mother, in particular, seemed to understand early that Anita’s relationship with making things was not a hobby to be managed but a signal to be followed.

“My parents quickly understood — just based off of the way I was growing up — that I was very enterprising. Very entrepreneurial. I always wanted to do stuff.”

The blog she started at 15 with her best friend — inspired by Linda Ikeji, built on WordPress in a single evening, published and shared that same night — is the clearest expression of how she was wired. No research period. No planning phase. No waiting until conditions were perfect.

“I sat down one evening and opened a WordPress blog. Without any writing knowledge, I wrote a post. That same day I started sharing the link. We have the idea right now, let’s do it. It was spontaneous risk-taking. Now as adults, we start overthinking. We’ve forgotten how to start small.”

How She Found Her World

After secondary school, Anita decided to go to fashion school. While deciding which fashion school to attend, she and her mother paid a visit to her brother, who was studying at a university in Nairobi, Kenya.

While walking around campus, Anita noticed a group of students — cameras in hand, blue hair, completely unbothered by how they looked — who were visibly in love with whatever they were doing.

She asked her brother who they were. “That’s the journalism department,” he said.

Anita and her mother walked straight in, and saw classrooms that looked nothing like classrooms — students presenting in circles, collaborative, unconventional. She walked into the dean’s office and had what she describes as a very honest conversation. After discussing her interests, he told her to apply, and she picked up the admission form that same day.

“That university environment was very similar to my secondary school environment — it encouraged every single stupid idea I had. I would literally walk to the department head and say, we’re doing this. And everybody was like, ‘oh yeah, let’s do it.’”

Years later, that same instinct followed her to production design. When she first visited a film set with a friend, she didn’t know what production design was. She just gravitated toward the design elements. Someone asked if she was the art director. She went home and looked it up.

“I fell in love with it because it lets me express myself in a way that feels intuitive. There’s no right or wrong. Just vision.”

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The Backend of a Visual World

Ask Anita how she decides which details matter and which don’t, and she will tell you it starts with understanding the brief — not just as a creative task, but as a branding problem. Her background in marketing means she asks a question many production designers don’t ask first: what is this actually trying to communicate?

“A lot of what we put out there — clients are coming to pay money because they’re trying to sell something. Understanding exactly what the client is trying to achieve helps me prioritise. And it means I’m able to push back on a lot and justify everything.”

She describes a recent commercial where her vision diverged significantly from the director’s. On paper, the director’s instinct should have carried more weight. But Anita pushed back — politely, specifically, with reasons tied to the brief. The meeting with the client went well. The director texted her afterward: thank you. Imagine if we had changed those things.

From that strategic understanding, everything narrows into detail. What is actually in frame? What does this space need to feel like it has been lived in? The details she includes are never arbitrary — a chalk mark on a wall, a specific way a frame is hung, the exact degree to which something is crooked.

“If it needs to be crooked,” she says, “it has to be crooked.”

She reads scripts the way she reads books, imagining what is implied but not written. If there are children in the house, she asks: how long have they been there? What did they touch? Where did their hands leave marks? The story doesn’t need to say it. But the world she builds will show it.

“When I read scripts, I expand on them like I’m reading a book. Okay — what am I seeing? How do we know kids live here, even if the story never says it?”

Her visual signature, when I ask her to name it, comes out in one word.

“Authenticity.”

She sits with it. Then, goes on to explain: “It’s rooted in realism and surrealism. Even if I’m creating a futuristic world, I design it with the same intentionality. Everything has to feel real. This place really does exist somewhere. Where is this place?”

When I tell her that calling what she does production design feels limiting — that it is more like world building — she pauses.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s exactly what it is.”

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What Excellence Actually Costs

Anita’s work stands out for several reasons, including her quest for excellence.

“I always tell my team that we should always be going for excellence. Excellence in terms of what every single thing should look like. Small things need to just be in the right place. Everything just has to look right for me to feel like we have done our work properly. When the camera is rolling, I’m right there holding the monitor. I’m checking the frame, looking to seeing that everything is perfect.”

She is matter-of-fact about the invisible labour of her work in a way that is quietly startling. It’s the pressure of being the person a client has decided to believe in — not just to execute a brief, but to interpret it, expand it, make something that neither party could fully imagine before it existed.

“It is me they believe in,” she says. “They believe in my own ideas, my own execution. And unlike statistics, where numbers are selling you — what they are paying for are my ideas. They believe I can execute something that everybody will be impressed with. There is a bit of pressure that comes with that.”

However, Anita is careful to separate that external confidence from what she needs internally to deliver on it. “I need to be in a peaceful state. As long as my mind is clear, my brain is working overtime. Working faster.”

Her rituals for finding that peace are varied and specific. When she is stressed, she watches a movie, sculpts, paints, and listens to people she finds inspiring. She goes to the beach. She travels to places where art is alive in the streets — New Orleans, Greece — places that recalibrate her sense of what is possible.

“I went to New Orleans and you’re strolling and you hear a beautiful jazz singer performing for free. You just stand there. You leave inspired. You leave feeling like: I’m just getting started. I need to do better.”

There is also Amala. She says it with complete seriousness. “I feel like there should be a study. How Amala elevates people’s mood. I think it has some dopamine in it because I’m not kidding — you eat Amala and you’re smiling, you’re happy, you’re ready to go.”

Anita’s Pride and Joy

Her greatest achievement, when I ask, is not the Future Awards Prize for Creativity and Innovation she won in 2024. It is not a Berlin Music Video Awards nomination, or a campaign, or the behind-the-scenes shot that made a friend text her: what you're doing for Nigerian art is history-making. It is none of the things the world can see.

“Being able to form an actual team and build a brand around something I genuinely love. And I know it sounds basic — but it’s really not.”

She describes a year when several of her team members bought their first cars. Some of them married with children, sending their kids to school, taking care of their homes, all of it connected, in some way, to the work she built.

“This is just based on working with me. Wow. I’m able to impact lives like this. That’s one thing I’m genuinely, genuinely really proud of.”

She knows why this matters to her the way it does. She knows where it comes from. She has a great support system in her parents, who encourage her creativity. People took chances on her — her secondary school teachers who let her paint that backdrop, the dean in Nairobi who saw something and told her to apply, the creative environments that said yes when they could easily have said no. She is paying that forward, deliberately and at scale.

“Even if I get 100 people in a room and I’m able to impact two of them — for them to believe in themselves and take it as a career and change the world through their arts, I feel very accomplished.”

Anita’s Third Act

At some point, I ask: if your creative journey were a book, which chapter would you say you’re currently in — and why?

Anita considers it carefully.

“I honestly think I’m just in the second chapter.”

She catches my reaction and laughs. “No, I’m serious. I won’t feel like I’m at the end of the second chapter. Because I’m at a stage where I’m reassessing a lot of things. What next? I’m ready to do something different. Ready to take it up a notch. But — what is that going to look like?”

Anita maps the chapters out. The first was discovery — trying different things, taking risks, putting her hands into everything, working a 9-to-5 for two and a half years just to see what that felt like. The second is where she is now: she has tried and tested enough to know what she loves. She has won awards, built a team, and worked with the biggest artists. But she has arrived at a point that many creatives often do — the place where you have proven yourself within a known set of terms and now need to figure out what the next, bigger terms look like.

“Do I want to do film? Do I want to build a creative academy? I love teaching people. I love helping people discover their own creative talent. But I also love creating, I love production design. I don’t want to lose that. So I’m at a stage where I’m thinking — in this third chapter, what exactly do I want to be known for? What kind of legacy do I want? How long will it take me to get there? What do I need to start doing now?”

She is asking herself something that many creatives avoid asking directly because the question implies the possibility of a wrong answer: not just what do I want to do next, but what does that demand of me right now? But having the courage to sit with yourself and wrestle with this is a great place to start.

The Dream She Hasn’t Started Yet

Every conversation in The Creator's Backend ends the same way. Same question, every time, no exceptions: What's one creative dream or pursuit you haven't fully allowed yourself to go after yet — and what's been stopping you?

Anita doesn’t hesitate.

“Procrastination, and wanting everything to be really perfect.”

The dream is one she has been thinking about for years without acting on — she wants to take art to children in orphanages across Lagos. Not as charity, but as enterprise. Paint, tie-dye, beadwork. Then an auction to sell what they make. Have the children earn their own money from something they made with their own hands.

The idea came from a story her mother told her. A man sketching on the back of an Indomie carton, using a pen because it was what he had. Her mother went to a bookshop, and bought him a proper sketchpad and pencils and gifted them to him. The man broke down. He had never owned his own sketchbook.

“A lot of underprivileged kids don’t have access to fully exploring their talent. Because art is expensive. How can I, in my own way, bridge that gap?”

She already has the name, the model, and a supportive mother who, when Anita mentioned the idea last year, immediately went out and bought ceramic powder, molds, and aprons from China.

The support is there. The audacity is the only thing she needs to get from her younger self.

“I need to borrow some of the audacity I had when I was fifteen and just do it.”

Looking at everything Anita Ashiru has built, it is hard to imagine she ever lost it.

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey, and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

Taiwo Adeyemi has spent over a decade making other people’s creative careers possible. He is the person you call when your deal is falling apart, when you don’t know your worth, when you need someone to see the thing you’re building before you can see it yourself.

That instinct led him to create Boxx Culture, a creative consulting agency for visionary talent, and Polygon, an integral part of the creative ecosystem shaping how creatives gather, collaborate, and scale.

Our conversation is happening right here at Polygon on a weekday afternoon. There is something about the architecture — intentional without being precious, communal without being loud — that tells you something about its creator before he speaks.

I begin, as I plan to start every conversation in this series, with my favourite question: Why are you the way you are?

Virgil Abloh is one of Taiwo’s references. “I think I’m complex because of the different influences I’ve consumed. Different parts of the world, different ways of life, different kinds of people. I’m aware because of how much I have consumed from the kind of people who are design thinkers. Virgil Abloh is one of the people I have consumed a lot from,” he says.

Dropping out of school is the other. In his words, “Dropping out of school meant proving the world wrong. I had to over-read, over-study, over-research… in order to figure out how life works, and how people are.”

With something close to amusement, Taiwo adds, “I overdid it to the point where I’m like, ‘okay, maybe you should take it easy’.”

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Taiwo’s Origin Story

Taiwo’s journey began as a boy who was constitutionally unable to be ordinary, and a family that tried, with love, to redirect that into something normal.

His father is a pharmacist. His mother is a nurse. The house ran on medicine, on the professional logic of paths that had guaranteed outcomes and known shapes. When Taiwo made clear he couldn’t stand blood, they redirected toward engineering — his brother-in-law had gone that route, had money, had a shape to point to. Taiwo tried it. It didn’t work. And then he did what he calls “the unthinkable.”

He dropped out of school to chase advertising and creativity. With no map, no permission from anyone who had done it, and no guarantee that being different would translate into anything other than a difficult life.

“I just couldn’t help but chase creativity and anomalies. I used to take risks like no man’s business.”

He is careful to say that difference is not always a good thing. He has thought about this, clearly and without romanticism. “You are either going to be really successful or you end up in jail. Really frustrated.”

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Finding His Edge

The earliest confirmation that Taiwo’s difference was an asset, not a liability, came through his good friend, the late Uche Ugo, who called him to Lagos for a potential gig. He came, took a design internship at an advertising agency, and within six months to a year had been recruited as a creative director somewhere else — earning 150,000 naira, a big deal at the time, simply for being creative.

“I figured, maybe i wouldnt be earning this way if I’m like every other person doing the typical things. So it kind of felt like it was working, and maybe there’s an edge. And when I find an edge, I double down and sharpen it.”

Then came Ferdinand Adimefe, whom Taiwo fondly calls Ferdy and describes as a legend in the industry whose flowers, he says, remain underdelivered. His impact on the creative people who passed through him is understated. Taiwo is one of them.

“Everything I know, creative wise — even the way I speak — if you listen to Ferdy enough, you can tell that influence. The way I talk about my work, everything. Ferdy was the one who gave me creative confidence, and I’m forever grateful to him for that. Because I was coming from a place where my work was not really recognised.”

But within his first week with Ferdy, he was already seeing his work on billboards. The trust was immediate, and generous. The confidence it produced became the foundation for everything that followed.

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The Creative Dilemma: Money or Creativity?

Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, Taiwo says, “I need boring money.”

He goes on to explain how he met a man whose entire job is to maintain airport tarmacs across Nigeria. Twice a month, he travels, checks surfaces, does his work, and goes home. Consistent, recurring, completely unglamorous. A billionaire, Taiwo adds, which is the detail that lands. He cites other examples: the person whose job it is to clear plastic from the ocean. The stockfish importer. The person who frames artwork in Shomolu. All boring, routine, but consistent and safe.

“Creative money is enticing. It’s fascinating. You love what you do. But it’s not safe. Boring money is safe.”

While a creative career can change your life, produce remarkable work, build a reputation, and community. More often than not, it doesn’t produce the predictable income that buys you the freedom to do the creative work on your own schedule, at your own standard, without desperation distorting the decisions.

So, of course, I ask whether he would take boring money if the only condition was to stop engaging with creativity entirely. He considers a three-year run. “I don’t know if I’ll survive it,” he says. “I can try not to produce creativity, but to not even consume is near impossible. I get calls every day to contribute to something creative, so I won’t take any calls.”

Then he softens his position, saying he would take the option at sixty. By that age, he could leave creativity and choose love and family, but only for three years. He is, he says, a family person in ways that capitalism has not yet allowed him to be. He wants to do school runs with his sister. He misses his nieces and nephews. “I’m that guy,” he says. “It’s just capitalism that has not allowed me to get there yet.”

What Comes First — Excitement, Doubt, or Clarity?

Every creative is different. Some get clarity, others excitement, and some doubt when an idea arrives. I ask him, when an idea arrives, what happens first.

“Excitement. In the moment when the idea is coming — never ever doubt. But it’s on the other extreme of doubt.”

He explains. When an idea lands, his belief in its potential is immediate and total. “I believe, no matter how crazy that is, I believe I can do it. The initial stage is all about excitement and gratitude that my brain has the capacity to produce something like this. And I’m very grateful for my brain.”

His greatest fear, he says, is not failure; it is dementia or Alzheimer’s. Any brain ailment that takes the mind before the body follows. “You are the living, but you are dead — especially for someone like me whose mind produces what it produces.”

In the initial rush of an idea, he says, he can already see the end. The completed version, the full scale of what it should become. “My job is just to walk back from there. It’s not just that something has the potential to go that far. It’s more that this SHOULD go that far, and I then start working back from it.”

Then reality sets in — the name for the thing, the team, the logistics. The analysis paralysis. The doubt. “But initially,” he says, “it’s exciting.”

The Fear Nobody Tells You About

Over the past decade, Taiwo has had a long creative arc — from a short stint as an artist in school to becoming a graphic designer and talent manager, and now to his fully established place in the ecosystem as the culture middleman. I ask whether he still deals with the fear, doubt and anxiety that come with sustaining a creative career over that distance.

His answer stops me.

“Ten years in, I don’t think I am freer or more confident. I think I’m more afraid. I’m now finding that avoidant. I am choosing the easy way out. I am procrastinating. I am choosing not to do it. That’s jarring. Very jarring.”

The conventional arc of creative confidence runs like this: young person starts out reckless and fearless, gets enough wins to build real confidence, finds their footing, and moves with authority.

But underneath that lies the parts nobody talks about — the older you become, the more you understand the cost of failure, the more the risks that once felt thrilling start to feel dangerous.

“Time should give you experience and give you more confidence. But it actually does the opposite. It jades you. It makes you see too much of life, and then you internalise the fears. The kind of risks I would take five years in — I won’t take them now. I’m now more calculative. More careful.”

Then, with a pensive look, unprompted, he adds: “I think it’s important to fight to keep the fearlessness you had as a young creative. Don’t think it will stay because you have more experience.”

The Hardest Thing a Creative Can Do

Taiwo cares about preserving history, which he does so through Losing Daylight and building for the future with projects like Polygon. I ask how he balances honouring what came before while building for what’s coming next, without getting stuck in between.

“It’s hard,” he says. “The most important person in Nollywood today is Funke Akindele, and the reason is not just because she’s breaking box office records. It’s because of how she has been able to navigate this dilemma.”

The dilemma he means is one that quietly immobilises many creative careers: the fear of following your own success. When you have made something that works — a film crossing a billion, a campaign people still remember, a project that defined a moment — the next move becomes terrifying. If what comes next doesn’t match or surpass it, you risk confirming what imposter syndrome has been whispering all along.

“A typical creative person will sit down and be afraid to do the next thing, because if the next thing does not beat this one, you will literally lose your mind and call yourself a failure. Funke doesn’t seem to be afraid. She does it again, and again. I think however she does it is what all of us collectively go and learn.”

Taiwo is honest about having been stuck there himself. “I peaked early. In 2018, I was already managing Nse Ekpe Etim, the biggest star in Nollywood. So where do you go from there? And you’re convincing yourself that there’s still more — but what is the more, within the context of Nigeria?”

According to him, this is part of why so many talented creatives relocate: not because they have failed, but because they’ve hit a ceiling in one place and need to find another.

“The hard part is connecting those dots because imposter syndrome will continue dealing with you and leave you wondering if you are the one who did that thing. You look at your track record and start wondering if it was a fluke, or just luck. So you don’t want to try it again because you’re afraid it might not work. Then you confirm that you’re really a scam. It’s hard.”

What Happens When You Build Space

Taiwo admits that Polygon continues to surprise him with how people choose to use the space. The most surprising being weddings.

“People want to get married here. It’s the biggest lesson I’ve taken from this place, honestly. When you make space, things, stuff happens. But it also shows you that once the work is out, it’s no longer yours. The world takes it and uses it in ways that make sense to them.”

The secondary lesson he has taken from watching Polygon become what it is is the importance of consistency. He frames it as the most repeated and most underestimated piece of advice in circulation. “It’s too easy to say that people don’t even consider it to be true.”

Here, Taiwo references Bus Aunty — the woman on TikTok who has been taking selfies with the same London bus, at the same angle, since 2018. Nothing changed. She did not upgrade her device or alter the format. And then, in the space of one year: Burberry. The Prime Minister. The Mayor of London. The overnight success that was actually six years of showing up.

“There’s something that consistency does to the universe. It kind of forces it to bend to your will. At some point, it just caves in for you. And when it caves in, it comes all at once.”

That, he says, is also what happened at Polygon. They just kept going every day.

Knowing Your Creative Power

Late in our conversation, Taiwo says something extremely profound.

“I don’t think I am all that in the sense of creativity. I am more of an innovative mind than an inventive mind, and it’s important to know who you are.”

He points to Solomon Osinloye — the architect who designed Polygon — as an example of what an inventive mind looks like. Someone who can conceptualise from nothing. Who looks at a blank space and sees the thing that isn’t there yet. When Taiwo met Solomon, he started telling people he didn’t think he was creative, because that — gesturing at Solomon’s capacity — is what creative looks like.

Taiwo says what he does is different. He needs a seed, something to consume, absorb, process. Then what he produces with that seed, he says, may well surpass what the inventive mind conceived. He holds this without apology. “Just give me a tiny bit of inspiration,” he says. “That’s one of my greatest gifts. I know how to magnify it. So, I sit in that. I’m constantly consuming (social listening) because I know that’s where my inspiration lies.”

This distinction matters more than it might seem. While the inventive mind and the innovative mind both produce creative work, but they have entirely different operational requirements. The inventive mind needs space, silence, and reduction of input — conditions that let the original signal come through without interference. The innovative mind needs the opposite: more texture, more material, more cultural data to process. If you are an innovative mind trying to operate like an inventive one, you will wait a long time and conclude, incorrectly, that you have nothing to say.

Taiwo built an entire career — talent management, cultural curation, Polygon, all of it — on being an extraordinarily well-informed processor of what he has consumed. And his greatest accomplishment, he says, is not a deal or a project; it is the ability to inspire someone to believe that these things are possible. "If you can be inspired by what somebody else does, that's major."

What He’s Not Ready For Yet

As we wrap up, I ask, ‘what is one creative dream or pursuit you haven’t fully allowed yourself to pursue yet? What’s stopping you?’

His response: “I want to own a school.”

Not a weekend academy or a creative bootcamp. A full, licensed university with a massive campus where the curriculum is creativity, where you can study design, photography, copywriting, content creation, and digital marketing as a serious degree, not an extra-curricular. The things that Nigerian universities classify as supplementary, the things that Taiwo left school because they wouldn’t teach him, would be the whole point.

He references Fred Swaniker’s school for teenagers in Rwanda and South Africa. “When I saw that campus, my immediate thought was: I want my mind to be able to even conceive this.” He cites Tyler Perry Studios — the sheer scale of what one person’s imagination produced, the way something that enormous had to be held in someone’s mind before it could exist in the world. He wants his mind to reach that capacity before he attempts the school, because he knows that if he tries to build it now, the scale of what he builds will be limited by what he can currently imagine.

“I feel like if I try to execute now, it will still be small, no matter how big it looks, because I haven’t expanded my mind yet.”

But he is not in a hurry. He says he might begin thinking seriously about it at forty, build toward it at fifty or sixty. There will be proof of concepts along the way. Polygon, perhaps, is one already.

Legacy. Legacy. Legacy

Taiwo’s definition of success has changed considerably from the one million naira he once named on a show — the figure that, as a designer, would have meant someone took his work seriously enough to pay for it at that level. Now the definition is different. He wants a retirement fund. A trust fund for his children. A beach house in Accra — “not too far, but not in Nigeria” — where he can shut off and return when he wants. His mother, grandmother, nieces and family sorted. A good time while alive — he likes the good things of life, and does not pretend otherwise.

Ultimately, he wants to be remembered as a family man who loved the world and left things in it that last because, for him, legacy lives in things. Buildings. Institutions. Projects that don’t have the capacity to make choices that betray what you built them to be.

“I want to be remembered as being a family man who loves the world, who put some things in the world that will stay for a long period after he is gone.”

Each week, The Creator’s Backend goes inside the mind of one creative — their mindset, fears, frameworks, journey and the things they figured out the hard way.

New issues drop every Friday!

I have got some exciting news!

After years of interviewing creatives across industries, one thing became clear to me: we spend a lot of time talking about the work, and almost none understanding how it’s actually made.

We celebrate the finished product. We share the output. But the thinking, the doubt, the systems, the quiet decisions that shape the work — those parts rarely make it into the conversation.

And yet, that’s where everything happens.

That’s what led to The Creator’s Backend, a new weekly interview series launching tomorrow.

This column focuses on the process behind the work. Not just what people have built, but how they think, how they decide, how they move from idea to execution, and what happens in between.

The Creator’s Backend is not about documenting success. It’s about understanding how creative minds work, and it will be published every Friday. The first issue goes live tomorrow.

If you care about building, creating, or understanding how things come to life, you’ll want to follow this closely.

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