#CreatorStories showcases the honest personal experiences of digital creators who monetize their knowledge of a skill and sell it on Selar. We share these stories every week to inspire you to create and sell a product out of your wealth of knowledge and be a part of the digital creator economy.

This week, we turn the lights on Blessing Abeng, a branding and communications expert who wanted to become a doctor but later realized that it wasn’t a career path she wanted for her life. She started with writing business plans for people and subsequently moved to study branding before launching a full-time career in branding and communications. 

Everyone would like to get to know Blessing Abeng.

Can we meet Blessing Abeng?

Hi, my name is Blessing Abeng. I’m a branding and communications professional, and I express this in different ways.

For me, being a branding and communications professional means that I help people find what is unique about them, build on it and tell it as a story or communicate it to the people who are their stakeholders. It could be their audience, team members, investors, or whoever.

I’ve done branding and communications in several capacities including as the co-founder and CMO of Disha, a tech company that was acquired by Flutterwave, and then currently as the co-founder and Director of Communications of Ingressive for Good, which is a nonprofit that is dedicated to increasing the earning power of African youths.

But when I’m not being all professional, I’m just a chilled person who likes enjoyment.

What was your career journey like before becoming a branding and communications expert?

Okay, so I think the real origin story would have to come from the part where I always wanted to be a doctor. I started my life thinking that I was going to be a doctor just because I witnessed a doctor saving my father’s life, and in my child’s mind back then, I just sort of felt, oh my God, if this guy could change my father’s life, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

And I would go around telling everyone that. That’s the story my father told me (laughs). So I would go around telling everyone that when I grow up, I want to be a doctor. And it was just like a normal trajectory; I was working hard to become a doctor. 

I fell in love with Grey’s Anatomy. I was reading Ben Carson books. The idea of becoming a doctor sort of enthralled me. While I was in secondary school, I had to choose between science and arts.

But based on arguments that my heads of department of both science and arts had in my principal’s office, I ended up being the only student who did art courses as a science student and thrived in both. I also then decided to still be a doctor. I chose a paramedical course – biochemistry, with my father, and I went to Covenant University. 

While I was there, I studied and did the best that I could. At least, I think that’s what I did (my coursemates may disagree). And then, by my third year, we had to do internships. In the last six months of the internship program, I did both phytochemistry and virology. It was a good experience, of course.

But I left the internship knowing that this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I also just started exploring, wondering if there were other ways to improve lives and save lives beyond just being a medical doctor. 

That was how I joined a club in school. In the club, we were tasked with writing business plans. I did it; I loved it, learned more about it, and started earning money from it. People would pay me to write their business plans, and they loved my marketing part of the business plan, so it was really cool. My friend spoke to me one day and said, “Blessing, this thing you’re doing is very similar to branding because you combine business with creative ideas, right? It’s like logic and magic coming together. Do you want to consider it?” 

I did my research and loved what branding was about. Branding was pretty new at the time. It wasn’t pop culture yet; it wasn’t really popular. It existed, but it wasn’t popular. And so I liked the idea of it not being trendy. I liked the idea of what it meant and what it stood for. And I began to see that saving lives didn’t mean physically just giving somebody a drug or doing an operation. I was all out on becoming a neurosurgeon. I wanted to be the person who works on your brain so that you can be well, literally (lol). 

And I realized that’s not the only way. There are many ways to save lives. And I also realized that there is dignity in labor. Every single thing that every single person is doing in one way or another contributes to someone else’s life.  So by providing a specific service, you are helping somebody else solve a pain they’ve been struggling with.

By being a business owner, you are providing sources of income for numerous people so that they can provide for their families and then do the things they always want to do and live their dreams. So all of these things were things that I had in my head, and I ended up doing branding in school for a year, and then it was just a whole journey from there.

I worked in various organizations, agencies, national brands, multinational brands, Dark and Lovely, Heritage bank, etc., across different industries. And that just set up that career path for me.

How did you get started with the creator economy and tech?

That’s such a great question. Hmmm (laughs), I think it was in 2019. The thing is, I’ve always been paid for my services. I even wrote a book in school. While in university, I wrote a book on time management because I used to be shitty at managing my time. So I just wrote a book randomly. And my father was instrumental in helping me see that any knowledge you have, you can package it and make money. He always made me read financial books. So I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad really early on in life – in the early 2000s. 

I had the consciousness that once you have value to give, you can make money from it. But I didn’t set up my life thinking I would be a creator who would make money from creating until sometime in 2019. I didn’t really feel confident that I could monetize my knowledge.

I knew my branding and communications stuff very well. I had done it for big brands, and it’s really ironic to say this, and I laugh at myself every time I recount the story. I didn’t feel confident in what I knew enough about branding and communications, even if I had done it for big brands. I kept attending more courses as though I was looking for validation, but no amount of learning would ever be enough to give you confidence in your knowledge.

You have to decide for yourself to be confident while still committing to lifelong learning. Back then, I just kept thinking, “oh, somebody out there knows more than me, or people already know this about branding”, just talking myself down. 

So one day, I paid for a class by an acquaintance, and when I got there, I was baffled by the kind of questions people were asking. They were just so mundane. At that moment, I asked myself, “do people really not know this thing?” It was so shocking to me; they really didn’t know.

Sometimes, when the trainer answered some questions, I would think to myself, “yes, this is a good answer, but these are extra things you could have said on top of that to sort of break it down so people can understand it better”. I think that experience was really revealing. It helped me mentally reflect and validate that I knew a lot about branding and had the results and experience to back them up. So, I told myself,  “okay, it’s time for you to start your entry-level course.”

I acted immediately, put up my course announcement, and guess what? Only one person paid. It was surprising (lol). It was even more surprising because C-level executives of top companies who had worked with me had posted about it and reshared my post. They had said, “Take this course; this woman knows her stuff”.  People that had been my clients talking me up, saying she knows her stuff, pay for this course. 

After everything, I, of course, delivered my best to the one person who paid. But I just went back and tried to think deeper about why exactly people didn’t pay for my course. I realized that I did get a lot of profile visits, many people visited my profile, but there weren’t many posts on my page or anything on my profile to show that I knew anything about branding and communications. On my Instagram page, you will see me enjoying life and chopping the life I already said I like to enjoy.

You’d see me traveling to Zanzibar, eating great meals in exciting restaurants. But you won’t see anything about my professional experience. You wouldn’t see that I know anything about branding or communications. I’m sure they just thought, this woman likes to enjoy life. She doesn’t do anything else. And that isn’t very reassuring to people who want to pay money to learn something. So I decided to change that by teaching people what I knew for the 30 days and seeing how it went. 

For 30 days straight, I taught one thing about branding and communications. Then, when I was done, people reached out to me, saying, “Blessing, this is too much. Blessing, pause, Blessing, wait.” Then the moment I dropped the course, it sold out in less than 24 hours. So that was really the entry. That was how I started launching more courses, ebooks, and stuff like that, sharing my knowledge more and leveraging social media as a channel for education.

Would you say providing value upfront was your major sales strategy to selling out your courses and your other digital products?

I think, in some ways, yes, but it only worked because I had a great foundation in terms of my experience. There are so many factors, and it can get difficult to isolate and say providing value first was the thing that opened the doors because first, I had the knowledge and the experience.

Then I took that knowledge and experience and shared it in a way that was captivating and easy to digest. To share value, you must first build capacity and then share it. During the lockdown, I talked a lot about sharing. Don’t just do the work; show/share the work. 

You assume that people are going to do it or they will steal your idea; it’s not entirely true. They can try to take the concept, but the execution of it is where the magic is. Many people are too lazy to execute or don’t even want the stress of execution, and they’ll pay you because now you have shown them that you can do it.

They’ll think to themselves, this doctor who has told me how to prevent an illness, told me what to do, and shared their experience of how they helped others with a particular illness is definitely the doctor I want. People are more likely to trust that doctor because that doctor has shown interest in them and their lives.

The doctor has demonstrated an understanding of their history before giving them feedback. They are more likely to trust that doctor than a random doctor with no track record. People are lazy; they don’t want to do too much work to learn more about you. They just want signals and clear indications that this person knows their stuff.

 Also, people speak on my behalf by just sharing and talking about the things I’ve done, how I’ve changed their lives, and how one thing I shared or said helped them go to the next phase of their lives or progress in their business. They like how I’m able to break things down into bite-sized knowledge. So I don’t try to make complex concepts sound difficult. I would never teach branding and make it sound extraordinarily hard. I talk about branding like we’re having a conversation with relatable examples, making it easier for people to digest and understand.

Most people running businesses are not branding professors; they are normal human beings. So they need to be spoken to about concepts like normal human beings. So all these different things played a role, including collaboration. You build credibility every time anyone who is your target audience is interacting with you; they’re forming an opinion or perception about you.

So even the kind of people you’re partnering with matters, the sort of people you’re collaborating with matters because there’s going to be a transfer of trust from one person to the other. So if you attach or associate yourself with people equally of value, you would also get that extra increase in their trust in you. And it was just offering value, gaining, building, and maintaining the trust of my audience/community.

Would you say you leveraged the power of community to make sales as a digital creator?

Yes, I definitely leverage the community. In fact, what sharing value did for me, was that it rallied people around me, and I didn’t expect that. I’m an accidental community builder. I didn’t go into this hoping to build a huge community. If anything, I’m one of those people who prefer smaller communities.

The closer my people are, the better for me. I’d rather have 100 people I know by name and personally interact with. So it was new terrain for me, new for me as an individual, but this was something I was used to, based on my work with other brands. I had built communities for other brands, which were successful, but I never thought of doing mine. So it was a unique, humbling, and special experience. It was shocking to see that I got like 5k followers in just a few weeks. It was such rapid growth. 

Even right now, I’m working hard to reduce the speed I’m growing because the community feels different with every new level. The community I had when I had 5k followers is pretty different from 10k, and it’s different from 20k, and I’m halfway scared of what 100K would look like. So because I was missing my small community, I created a mailing list, and I have been keeping it small, below 10K, on purpose, which is why I’ve not been doing the things that I know will bring more people in large numbers. I respond to every email, and it’s so special. But the community for sure, really, really works. 

Three things that the community would do for you. The community will help you with visibility because these people are genuinely interested, and they genuinely share your works with others. It will also help you with credibility because they’re sharing their experiences, stories, testimonials, and the fact that they trust you would make someone else trust you, right? And then the third thing the community would do for you is to serve as a reference point for research because people would consistently keep telling you the new problems they’re experiencing in different ways. 

And if you’re genuinely listening and you really pay attention and care, you will always come up with newer ways to find solutions to the problems that they’re facing. So, yes, for sure, community helps. I even think we’re in the community economy right now, and people should pay attention to it.

We know that you were the co-founder of Disha before it was acquired by Flutterwave. What was working on that project “Disha” like? 

Disha was such a fantastic product. It started as a link in a bio tool because we wanted to do something better than the existing alternative, and most people just had buttons on their link in bio as opposed to, like, media. There were no options. You couldn’t add media; you couldn’t do videos.

There’s so much you would want to do to make your link in bio more interesting, but you couldn’t. And when we first did a link in bio, we realized that our community used it very differently. They weren’t using it just as a link in bio; they were using it as portfolios, resumes, websites, and just so many other things that were more interesting than what we had planned for it to be.

And so that was a big lesson on listening because by just doing and letting your community play with it, it was interesting to see what it does. So at the end of the day, we ended up building a platform that helped people build one page site in a matter of minutes. 

And as creators ourselves, we knew that creators prioritize creating for everybody else but often forget to create for themselves. So when it comes to creating for ourselves, I don’t know if we just don’t put ourselves there because of our service nature, but we’re less likely to put ourselves first.

So you would find it difficult to see creators investing their time in building websites for themselves. They would rather use that time for something else to generate funds or help somebody else’s life be better. You notice a lot of photographers, for example, don’t have a lot of photographs of themselves because they’re busy taking pictures of other people. The same thing applies to writers. Many writers don’t have pieces they’ve written about themselves; they’re always writing for other people, just things like that. 

And so the main point of Disha was to create a host of tools that creators needed but didn’t have time to make. We made tools that were really easy to access and use with convenience. And eventually, it was acquired by a unicorn in Africa. And that’s a big deal because now that unicorn can build it and make it into something even bigger and better for more creators.

What does branding mean to you?

The only way I define branding to anybody who has taken my course or interacted with me on social media or anywhere else is that – Branding is who you are every time your target audience interacts with you. And that just gives a different perspective.

Because when people think about branding, they think about a logo, font color, product, etc. But all those things don’t exist in isolation. So think of yourself as a human being now. You’re not just one thing. You’re not just a lady. You’re not just a staff; you’re not just one thing. Somebody’s sister, somebody’s daughter, you’re a lot of things in one body. But the uniqueness of how all those things come together is what makes you special and different from every other woman out there. 

So that’s the number one part of branding, the identity part, but also the consistency part. And then the third part is when your target audience is interacting with you at every point where they would meet you online or offline. Whatever experience they have with you, anywhere they would experience you; they’re making a mental note of who you are. They are forming an opinion about you that either deepens or erodes their trust in you. 

And just like a normal human interaction, when you meet somebody from far, the way you’ve met Beyonce on TV is something you build on when you see her in a music video and then build on when you see her in an interview and then build on when you see on social media. Just consistently, you’re forming an opinion about her and how you would like to interact with her, about how you feel when you’re interacting with her. All of those things are how I see branding. So, in summary, branding is who you are at every point where your target audience interacts with you.

Have you had an eureka moment in your career so far? When was that and how did it happen?

My God!  I’ve had so many though I don’t know which one to share. Just knowing that you’re contributing is such a satisfying feeling. Things are better when you think of life as an experiment and not a theory. When you do experiments, you’re hoping to discover something. When you experiment with something you’re trying to discover, you’re not hoping to be right; you’re hoping to discover. 

This mentality allows you to make mistakes and be less hard on yourself when you’re not getting the results that you were hoping for. A couple of things have been mistakes. I mean, Guinness was a burnt drink, but they decided to package it like that. But it is what it is right now. 

So just by experimenting, trying things, and seeing how people react when you try those things, it opens your world up to bigger and better possibilities, preparing you for success. Failure now stops being something you hate. Your reaction would be different, probably even fascination: “oh wow, okay, it wasn’t what I expected it to be but a thing of wonder”. Failure now becomes a thing of wonder. That’s how I’d put it.

Aside from showing us what being a brand and comms expert is like, what else do you do?

I love to meet people and have new experiences, which is where the baby girl for life experience (laughs) falls under. I really love to have new experiences, and that comes in different shapes and forms. I like meeting new people and talking to them about their own realities. One day, it hit me that we all are on the same earth, but all live very different lives.

There’s a whole different movie happening in everybody’s lives, and that’s so different. So your reality is not my reality. How I am seeing things is not how you are seeing them. So it’s just interesting to speak to other people and hear their perspectives, not necessarily to argue or be right or wrong. Just like really truly listening and just being immersed in their own reality. So that has been such an amazing thing for me. 

Another thing that I’ve been doing a lot this year (I think I shared it on my Instagram) is investing in experiences. I took my investment portfolio and said, I’m going to invest half into my normal financial asset portfolio.

But I’m also going to have an “experience portfolio” where I’ll just invest in having experiences that are super, super random, that probably do not make sense to anybody else, but I want to do it. So I’ll go right ahead and do it. One of those experiences was going through a London dungeon and just being told a story in a way that I was immersed in and part of the experience. 

I will be bungee jumping next month as well. Just trying new things. I’m probably going to fly a plane before the end of the year too. I’ve already booked my experience. Just different things; doing random different things that I never thought I could or would do. It is definitely scary, but now I’m just excited to do it. I remind myself – You were not born afraid.

Can you tell us about Ingressive for Good? That’s the first thing on your Twitter bio so it must be really important to you. 

Ingressive for Good is an ed-tech non-profit that aims to help Africans increase their earning power by empowering them with tech skills. On our birthday, a couple of our team members wrote about their experiences working with us and memorable moments in their lives. And they shared how they felt amazing when random people from different countries would run up to them and hug them. They’ll say, “you’re from Ingressive for Good, right? Or You had the XYZ of Ingressive for good, right? I know you”.

 And things that you never expected just because those people’s lives have been impacted in one way or the other by being part of being Ingressive. For a good community. We started with zero in 2020—zero everything; Zero money, zero people, zero trained people, zero everything. And right now, today, we’re three years old. We have 200,000 people in our community. We’ve trained over 100,000 people. We’ve provided different types of scholarships. We’ve collaborated with Coursera, DataCamp, Facebook, MasterClass, and many global companies. 

Google’s Alphabet donated over $250K to Ingressive for Good because they believe in our vision and mission. So much is happening, and it’s inspiring to watch. It’s just really amazing. When we started, we knew it would be big, but we didn’t know how big. And now, seeing the real people that it’s impacted, it’s just so touching.

What advice would you give to digital creators in Africa that can help them boost their sales?

I think the major thing would be to stop underestimating what you know and stop overestimating what everybody knows. For example, during the lockdown, I saw a video of a woman who boiled an egg, she was teaching people on YouTube how to boil an egg, and she had over 10 million views. And I just kept thinking about it – do people really not know how to cook an egg? 

What made me even Google that video? It was because of Salem King. He was burning eggs a lot during the lockdown, and I Googled how to cook an egg because of him. I don’t think I ever told him (but Salem, if you are reading this, don’t worry, I’ll let this go this year). So, I stumbled on that video with over 10 million views, meaning that there were 10 million people like Salem who didn’t know how to cook eggs right. They would probably burn it, undercook it, or something would be wrong. 

Cooking an egg is supposed to be basic, but it’s not that simple because getting the perfectly boiled egg is almost magic. It is almost magical to know how to cook it and remove the shell, so the body remains intact. So don’t assume that the thing that you have to say is something everybody knows already. It is not true; some people don’t know. 

There are people in the world that are totally clueless about it. There are brilliant people, even PhD holders in their rights, who have done amazing things in another field but are clueless about the basic things. I remember watching a movie about a very wealthy man, an inventor or something, who didn’t know how to use a microwave because that’s not something he had focused on. 

So you can be the enabler, helping somebody else learn something new. You can be the stepping stone that somebody needs to be able to get to the next phase of their life. So stop underestimating what you know and overestimating what other people know. If there’s something you know, share it, teach it, value it, and leverage it as a stepping stone to becoming part of the creator economy. You are enough.

Create value, and sell it. If you don’t want to sell it, give it for free, whatever you want to do. However, ensure that you are doing the work and sharing. That thing you know that you know, even things that you’re not very sure you know; just try, test your knowledge, and share it. Share your journey, share your process. Do the work, show the work.

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