#48. Building an on-demand platform for African content, Bastian Gotter, Co-founder at Iroko TV

Building The Future Podcast

Bastian Gotter is the co-founder of Iroko TV, one of the earliest, most successful and largest video on demand platform for Nigerian movies. Bastian founded the business alongside with his university flat-mate, Jason Njoku, who is the CEO of the company, and a later guest in this show. This is not Bastian and Jason Njoku’s first project together. In mid-2010, Bastian invested in several businesses that Jason was running in Manchester, England, many of which failed. But they stuck together as partners and Bastian invested in Iroko TV after Jason started it, and he then moved to Lagos and joined as a full-time co-founder. This episode is the first of 2-part conversation I had with Bastian in Cape Town, as part of the mini-series on African video on demand platform In the second part of this episode you’ll learn: The current challenges IrokoTV is facing How Nigeria is becoming close to the west in their content consumption Bastian thinks the answer to business growth is sub saharan Africa “Always”. Why does he seem to think so? Why he thinks you cannot make a lot of money in the sub-saharan African VoD market The importance of timing when launching a new business. How Spark was created on the back of Iroko and how they invested in companies like hotels.ng, tolet.com.ng, drinks.ng and paystack. Why and how irokoTv raised money every year Why he left IrokoTv. (He still sits on the board and is a shareholder) What he is doing now. And more