Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Anayo Awuzie. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Anayo, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Any thoughts about whether to ask friends and family to support your business. What’s okay in your view?

I’m 100% on board with asking my family and friends to support my business. I believe the people that have watched you over the years, know you best, and have seen you grind to create something you believe in will always be your biggest and earliest supporters. With Carefree, a lot of my friends and family are actually part of our target audience so it was a no-brainer to tell them about it and ask them to support. Now, one thing a lot of new business owners get upset about is when they start a new business and their family/friends don’t buy their products. But support can come in so many ways. They may not be your target audience and so asking them to go all in on being your cheerleader for your new product or business is really just a vanity act as opposed to a genuine way of showing support. But they can share with people who they know are in your target audience and help support that way.

When I first launched Carefree, I had some of my closest friends whom I knew could write or had interesting stories write some of our very first articles. They were excited to express that side of themselves and were eager to share their stories when they were published. With their support, I was able to get the publication off the ground with their work.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Anayo and I’m the founder of Carefree Media. Carefree is a media company that produces Carefree Magazine and the From Me 2 U podcast, where we publish stories from Black women around the globe on life, love, adventure, and everything in between.

I started my career in journalism, working for a Black-owned fashion site as an editorial assistant after studying Communications and Journalism in college. On the surface, we were writing cool stories about Black designers, celebrities, and brands who were upcoming and well-established, however if you looked deeper, we were a content farm that was farming engagement for clicks. I hated that we weren’t able to tell authentic stories, and when I left, the idea for Carefree started brewing. This was 2015.

When the pandemic hit, I had a bunch of free time on my hands and found myself meditating a lot. Each morning, I did a 20 minute meditation on abundance with Deepak Chopra and by the last day I was resolved in launching this publication dedicated to telling authentic stories on Black women’s lived experiences. I launched Carefree Magazine two months later.

Carefree Magazine is a weekly storyletter delivered to our subscribers weekly. It is dedicated to addressing the lack of diverse, everyday stories that reflect the real experiences of Black women. Our mission is to create a space where Black millennial and Gen-Z readers can find themselves in the narratives, much like they did with shows like *Moesha*, *Insecure*, and *Girlfriends*. These readers, who grew up with media that resonated with their lives, are now searching for stories that mirror their everyday experiences—stories that make them feel seen and connected. We are a slow storytelling experience, as we only publish one essay from one new author every week, a departure from the ways of the 24-hour news cycle, infinite social content stream, and information overload. We want our readers to sit with these stories and resonate with them.

I’m most proud of Carefree having been able to give dozens of writers their very first bylines. We’ve published writers from around the globe including the U.S., U.K., Nigeria, Kenya, Spain, and more.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Since Carefree is for and by Black women, launching on social had to be exactly that: for and by Black women. As I mentioned earlier, most of my friends are in my target audience or know people in my target audience, so I started my page on Instagram at the time by sharing it with the people I knew. Make sure to choose ONE platform to start with that you know you can be consistent on, at the time IG was my most used social platform personally so it made sense for me to start there and find my first followers in my own network.

From there, I ran three giveaways on the page where I gave away products from Black female-owned brands, which is a callback to the ethos of Carefree. I’m sharing stories from Black women so I want to support Black women. Everything has to ladder up to the mission of your company, so the giveaways were a good way to show people what we were about and 1) drive awareness for the brand because people needed to tag friends in the comments and share on their stories, as well as 2) drive subscribers for the newsletter because they also needed to subscribe to Carefree in order to be entered into the giveaway. This got us our first 500 subscribers.

While I use Instagram a lot less these days for the brand, we have moved over to TikTok and testing bringing our stories to life through short-form video. We’re also trying Threads since people are already reading, so it may be easier to get them to read longer posts.

One piece of advice is that while social is necessary to show people your brand exists and for discovery, it’s not always going to be the best place for driving action like getting subscribers or sales. It took me awhile to learn that my subscribers come from other newsletters recommending mine. Social plays a much smaller role so I stopped investing as much in it. It’s still important, but make sure it’s going to drive the results you’re looking for before putting too much effort into it.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn the myth that “if you build it they will come.” Gone are the days of doing the audience research, finding a gap, and building something you KNOW has a market and people will just flock to it. You HAVE to do marketing. You HAVE to put yourself and your business out there constantly. This lesson took way longer for me to learn than I would like to admit.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://carefreemag.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/carefreemag
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/carefreemag

Image Credits

N/A