Born 17th July, 1982, Oluwaseun Osewa is a Nigerian internet entrepreneur and founder of the most visited indigenous website in Nigeria Nairaland.Nairaland was
launched in March 2005.
He was born and raised in Sango Ota Ogun State Nigeria.where he grew
up learning and knowing the technological part of life.
Seun enrolled as a student in the University Of Ile Ife to
study electrical engineering in 1998 but he did not finish.
He had attempted to start a web hosting business, but after
3 months he could only boast of one customer, so he ran out of capital and the
business died.
It would probably have succeeded if he had managed his
capital more wisely or raised more money as he got many hosting requests he
couldn’t satisfy later that year.
After that first failure, he was encouraged to get
certifications and a regular job, but he couldn’t go back to that kind of path
after tasting creative freedom, so he kept researching business ideas and
presenting them to friends and family, but no capital was forthcoming to carry
any of them out. He did this for less than 2 years.
(The last idea was a site for sending SMS messages. He
picked up Python to implement it.)
Eventually, he decided to start a web forum, because it was
the only idea that required no additional capital: he already had Internet
access and a $15 per month VPS graciously paid for by a family friend. He
created 3 forums in November 2003 (one for higher institution students, one for
IT discussions, and one to cover the emerging GSM industry; the Mobile Nigeria
Forum at MobileNigeria.com).
The Mobile Nigeria Forum took off, so he relaunched it in
February 2005 with the assistance of Mr. John Sagai Adams, who posted a link to
the forum on his mailing list and participated enthusiastically in those early
days. Other mobile enthusiasts like Mr. Yomi Adegboye pitched in to make the
site a success. In a month or so, the forum had about 300 members, but the
growth potential didn’t satisfy him.
He decided to start Nairaland when he noticed two odd things
about MobileNigeria:
(1) Despite its narrow focus, it was the only Nigerian
community that gave a voice to Nigerians at home. Most other Nigerian sites
were owned and dominated by Nigerians in the US or UK. They covered only issues
of interests to Nigerians abroad.
(2) The off topic section of the forum, covering topics
outside telecoms, like romance and jokes, was becoming more vibrant than the
Mobile Nigeria Forum itself, suggesting the need for a more general-purpose
Nigerian forum.
This gave him the confidence to take forums like Naijaryders
and Talknaija head on by starting a general purpose discussion forum with a
strong bias towards issues of interest to Nigerians at home. He felt that such
a site could attract enough traffic to make enough money from Google adverts.
That’s why he started the Nairaland Forum.
Seun’s initial plan was to be making upto 60k per month but
it turned out as time goes on Nairaland got much higher traffic than expected
making his income on Nairaland much more than expected.
As Nairaland grows seun had problems with spammers flooding
the forum so he started getting helps from moderators he selected.
Seun got help in updating the forum’s frontpage and keeping
it clean by moderators like Mukina a female mod who has been working with seun
since 2007 and others.
As time goes on seun kept enjoying his money gotten from
Google ads until year 2012 when Google removed his website because nairaland
has too many sexual topics. Which made seun start selling his own ads space on
nairaland just like other sites like facebook.com,linkedin.com and etc.
Seun is a very successful online entrepreneur and a very
private person and Nairaland is credited to being the biggest African forum
according to Forbes.
No comments:
Post a Comment