Hi Mike! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?

I’m Mike, 28 years old based in Atlanta GA. I was born and raised in Lagos Nigeria, moved to the US when I was 12 years old and I fell in love with the computer from an early age. I started simple coding in High school and that would later lead to my career now as a web developer/ internet entrepreneur.

WURA started as a pet project, and for 2 years it really was that. My family and I loved to watch our native African/Nollywood movies and we generally had access to those movies on YouTube, except they were all over the place. You had to search and dig through the dirt to find a good quality movie. WURA was a way for me to curate a playlist of titles so to speak. It was an on-demand video platform we one came and built their own playlist of high-quality titles that were readily available. It wasn’t until I had some cash in the bank though that I started thinking about the project more like a business. My other businesses took off and I had the capital to turn it into a legitimate business. And that I did, hired a team of 10 with myself included. And we put together a nice platform to watch movies on your pc and mobile devices. For a monthly fee of $3.99, a user had access to hundreds of new titles (movies and TV shows) both in English and other local dialects.

My main task was to oversee everything. I was the owner but I was also part of a team of 9 other incredible people.

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What motivated you to start WURA?

When I started WURA in 2013, I was actually just recovering from a failed startup the year before. My background is in web development but I consider myself more as a project manager as I rarely get hands-on anymore with my projects. Between 2008 and 2012 I was in the flash gaming business and I ran a successful network of gaming websites, up until early 2012. Several events happened that year that shut down about 80% of my business. First was Google Panda update or Penguin, whichever it was, I lost my Search engine rankings and that alone completely decapitated my business. Also, by this time smartphones had already taken over the market so many gamers that would typically come on the site to play games now go to their mobile phones. And in my efforts to transition to mobile games and join the trend, I essentially lost about $21,000 to a sham game developer on Elance (be very careful when using freelancers for big projects).

Long story short, by the time the year was over, I went from making $75k a year to barely making ends meet. I shut down the servers, sold my car, cleaned out my apartment, and moved back in with my parents. As an entrepreneur, your best insurance policy is mom and dad because when things go south (and they will at some point) you at least have a place to lay your head and try to recoup.

And so, it was a few months after living on my parent 's couch that the idea of WURA came about. When you live on the couch, you tend to consume a lot of TV and online videos. At least that was the case for me. When I kept watching these movies on YouTube, that’s when the idea came to me. Also, it helped that I saw another person (IROKO TV) running with the same Idea. Later that year Iroko went on to raise $8 million. And I thought for sure there is a big opportunity here.

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How did you build it?

Again, when I first started, it was more of a side project because of my current situation at the time. I had to work a fulltime consulting job. But while I could, I initially set up a WordPress website and I remember using the WordPress theme ‘detube’. I made a list of features I wanted to add to the site to make it more usable and easier for users to find titles or build their own playlist. I played around with it by myself for a few months, and then towards the end of the year (2013), I was able to find a buyer to liquidate what was left of my gaming business. I got about $49,000 from that sale, and with the additional income from my day job, I felt I had enough to get serious about WURA.

So, I did, and the first person I hired was a PHP programmer/coder, and we started adding that list of features to the site. Then I began reaching out to Nollywood producers and movie makers to acquire titles for a licensing fee

Some of the major obstacles I faced were dealing with the West African business ecosystem, also having to transact with people thousands of miles away came with its own challenges. Sometimes hard drives would get lost in shipment or sometimes I get the hard drives and it has the wrong content in it. And this wasn’t something you can just drive to the store and return. It would cost $100-$150 to ship hard drives back and forth. And internet connection there, is not strong enough to send very large files through the cloud. So, to reduce risks, I had producers send me hard drives first that contained several movies. Then from there, we chose 3-5 titles that we really wanted. Over time, that saved a lot of money and headache

At the time I was building WURA, I also had a successful entertainment blog that brought in enough revenue for me to continue funding the project. I went on to hire a team of 9 people, designers, writers, editor etc. and my programmer was also brought in full time. Hired a mobile developer as well. So, I had a legitimate business. Had the people, invested thousands in acquiring new titles. All was left was launching and executing with the right marketing plan. Or so I thought.