We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Abisola Shof. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Abisola below.

Abisola, appreciate you joining us today. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?

Thanks for having us! When our first client approached us, we were over the moon excited to start monetizing our content! Our first client was Love and Trivia, a small business that creates relationship card games. They offered us their conversation starter cards and $400 to create 2 Instagram Reels. This was a big deal for us for a small business to pay us that amount of money just for our videos. It was confirmation for us of the earning potential if we remained consistent with our content and grew our audience. Looking back now, our vision of the possibilities in the content space was quite limited.

Of course as you’d imagine, there were challenges, rookie mistakes (such as including our son in the content when the game was designed for 18+), and lots of lessons learned with our very first contract. We signed the contract in November 2021 but did not complete the deliverables until March 2022, a solid 5 months later! By then, we had almost tripled our follower count and even delivered Ads for three other clients in-between.

As we repeatedly recorded the videos and made multiple revisions, it quickly dawned on us that completing brand campaigns required a different mindset than recording our everyday videos. Once the campaign was completed, we held an After Action Review to reflect on our experience and identify opportunities to improve. The one important lesson we learned was that 50% of the work is done upfront by aligning on the script and concept with the brand.

Our advice to Creators is to start with small brands, you will make mistakes that are much easier to learn from with small brands, and harder to forgive with bigger brands. Second, learn from your mistakes and establish a process sooner than later. Now, we don’t start shooting an ad until we have received a creative brief, drafted a script, and obtained brand approval on the script. We also establish posting date requirements and usage rights for our content early on with the brand, all of which we missed doing with our first contract.

Abisola, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

About us: We are Abisola & Seyi Shof, social media content creators and event hosts. We are a fun-loving couple making marriage exciting by sharing our adventures, experiences, and laughter across social media.

Our journey with content creation started a little over 4 years ago when Abisola was home on maternity leave with our daughter. During this period, Abisola started journaling her thoughts on her phone while our newborn napped. At the end of her maternity leave, she showed her journals to Seyi and he looked at her like “you’re definitely going to start a blog with that, right?

Well, little did we know that would be the beginning of our content journey.

A year or so after Abisola started the blog, we thought, why not start a podcast together? So we did one, telling the stories of Africans in the US who had achieved success in business and entrepreneurship to inspire others.

Then the pandemic hit and like everyone else we did an obligatory TikTok dance, and to our surprise people loved it and we just kept it going ever since. We also started a YouTube channel so we could share more long form content with vlogs about our lives, and deeper conversations on relationship topics.

Services we provide:

We create short-form videos and long-form (YouTube) videos to entertain our followers, and inspire them to build fun and loving marriages. We also host fun in-person events to provide opportunities for people to connect, and to curate unique romantic experiences for couples.

In addition, we just launched a couples’ game series on our YouTube channel to further entertain our audiences, and engage other couples in our community beyond social media. Our vision is to see this grow into an activity that couples aspire for.

Furthermore, we help brands tell their story through sponsored posts in a way that is relatable to our audience, and in a way that helps our audience discover these brands and what they offer to them.

We also provide social media strategy and management services for businesses, helping them tell their stories, connect with their followers, build an engaged community around their products and services, and reach new audiences.

Problems we solve:

We have all heard that 55% of divorces are due to “couples growing apart”. And indeed, many couples have reached out to us that they find it hard to create time for romance and fun given the stress of work and family life. Others have expressed that even when they do make time, they lack ideas to keep the spark alive in their marriages.

We want to ensure that for these couples, their happily ever after never comes to an end. And so, we share content on social media, to show our followers how they can have fun and deepen their connection through everyday activities, in a way that builds closeness and re-inserts a sense of playfulness into their marriages.

What sets us apart:

Social media is great, but nothing beats in-person interactions. Adding events to our content has helped us to connect deeper with our audience which in turn boosts our online engagement.

In addition, we simply enjoy being authentically us, Nigerian Amercans who value love, friendships, family, and are intentional about time, money, and experiences within the context of these relationships. Our content contains a mix of our original and adopted cultures, giving each side a taste of something new.

But lastly, we connect deeply with our audiences. We understand the feeling that most married folks have; the feeling that there is never time to relax or create a moment of calm for themselves. We get it, we both work high-pressured corporate jobs, are running businesses on the side, and are parents to young kids of preschool and elementary school ages. We try to attend every kiddie birthday party and take our kids to after-school activities, while at the same time try to maintain a healthy social life, so there truly is no time.

We show how we keep our love alive in the midst of it all by infusing a sense of humor into our content, that takes the stress of being young parents and makes it relatable for our audiences.

What you are most proud of:

Without a doubt, our biggest achievement has been the considerable number of people that have emailed, DM’ed, or called us to share how we have made a huge impact on their relationships. We have had older couples telling us that they discovered new ways to rekindle playfulness and romance despite being married for 25 years. And for singles, many have shared how our approach to marriage has led them to re-evaluate what to look for in a partner and in marriage, especially as not everyone grew up in an ideal loving family. Several have even traveled over 2 hours to attend our events, and to schedule coffee meetups with us. And interestingly, through our events, we have connected singles who have gone on to start a relationship.

What we want our followers and potential clients to know about us and our brand:

For people that watch our videos, we try to be 1% better each day than the day prior. Though it may look like we laugh and play on social media, we take your attention very seriously, and we strive to ensure that each viewer of our video feels like a minute of their lives was well spent.

For our followers experiencing a slump in their love life, don’t give up on your relationship. The spark in every relationship can be re-ignited as long as both parties are willing to do the work. If you believe your love is worth fighting for, then fight so you can enjoy the best friendship of your life.

For brands who are looking to partner with us, we’d love to collaborate and tell your story to our audience as long as our values align.

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

In the social media world, everyone craves virality so they can “blow up”. But the two things that worked better for us than virality are consistency and continuously improving our art. Both go hand in hand. I chuckle when I watch the early videos we made. They were such low visual quality, and we knew that, but we kept focusing on one small thing to improve with each video we published. We made a Reel/TikTok video everyday for the longest period. The more we made them, the more we learned about video quality, editing, styling, staging aesthetics, lighting, storytelling… so much that would have been overwhelming to figure out if we had waited to first know it all before starting. To anyone reading this who is waiting for perfection to start that next thing, our advice is just start. Start where you are and learn fast by watching what the good creators are doing, by watching tutorials, and by practicing your craft and fine-tuning as you go on. Don’t get discouraged by the views or engagement, they are vanity metrics. I promise you that the people who need your content are watching and taking mental notes, they just may not tell you about it. Perfection is the enemy of done; better to start and improve, than to wait till the opportunity passes.

We have produced over 600 short form videos in the span of two years, each one building on lessons learned from the previous ones. We constantly watch tutorials on YouTube and analyze what others do to see what we can learn from them. The learning never ends! All of this plus the favor of God is what we would attribute our success to.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

When we started, we wished we had a community of creators to talk to, ask questions, collaborate with, and rely on. Content creation can be such a lonely journey, and many creators experience burn out. But knowing someone who understands and can relate with you goes a long way. And that’s why we recently created a group supporting other content creators, helping them hone their craft based on our learnings, celebrating their successes, and learning from them as well.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://theshofs.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshofs/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheShofs
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theshofs

Image Credits
Red suit image credit: FTK Konnect