African creators can build a global audience from their first post, but getting that audience to pay them, reliably and across borders, is still hard. Payment infrastructure that works every time would fix it, the founders of Selar, Mainstack and Raenest said on a panel at Moonshot by TechCabal.
The panel focused on everyday creators, far from the top tier with millions of followers, and most of them earn little. The Nigerian Creator Economy Report 2025 found that 56.45% of Nigerian creators earn less than $100 a month from their work.
Ayobami Oyaleke, founder and CEO of Mainstack, which he described as a “commerce platform and financial back office for creators” operating in about 150 countries, said an audience is revenue waiting to be collected. “As much as you have the audience, there’s a revenue path for you,” he said.
The trouble is that most creators don’t know how to turn a following into income, or they hit a wall when they try to collect it. “Tools only give you the pipe,” Oyaleke said. “You’re still the one running the volume.” Mainstack’s approach is to treat every creator as global from the start so that a first $100 from a buyer abroad doesn’t get lost to payment failures.
Douglas Kendyson founded Selar in 2016 after fielding requests at Paystack from people who wanted to sell digital products online but faced ₦150,000 quotes for a website and unreliable payments. A decade later, Selar is bootstrapped and profitable and says it has paid out more than ₦18 billion ($12.9 million) to nearly 400,000 creators.
Kendyson was clear about what a platform should leave to creators: Selar does not find customers for them, which he called “a very tasking thing.” Its affiliate network, which lets marketers sell a creator’s product for a commission, now brings in more revenue than its subscriptions, he said.
Sodruldeen Mustapha, co-founder and CTO of Raenest, which helps African freelancers get paid from abroad, said the payment feature that matters most is control. Creators already export their talent, he argued, and their earnings should follow: collected from a client anywhere, in any currency, and under the creator’s control once they land.
The three founders agreed on the core problem. A creator in Lagos can have followers in Europe and the United States from day one, but the money struggles to make the same trip.
Kendyson, when asked what the next generation of creators needs, reached for nothing new. A decade in, he said, a new payment gateway seems to appear every week, “yet payments are still very fractured for a lot of us.” The infrastructure that fixes it, he said, “doesn’t even have to be particularly unique. It just has to work.”
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I am the CEO of 9JAGISTLAND.My name is Adedeji Timothy and my co-owner is Oyekola Damilare.This blog is born out of our passion to educating to people in all aspect of internet life.We are enthusiastic about writing posts and articles online.
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