Whipik is building a “Youtube for Writers"

You’re seated in the backseat of an Uber, stuck in the standstill city traffic that shows no sign of easing anytime soon. And just as you get bored of scrolling through your social media timeline, your best-friend sends a link to your phone. You open it, click the link, and start reading a short story on Whipik.

In 20 minutes, you’ve gone through 4 short stories and are oblivious to the traffic that has started to ease. A hundred miles away is a writer who has just been notified of thousands of their story of reads on the app, and payment for this feat.

This is Whipik

Whipik is a social storytelling platform where readers enjoy short, easy-to-consume stories that fit their busy lifestyles. And for writers, Whipik is home for their stories, share their work, build community, and earn from their content.

Video and music content creators have various digital platforms that help them grow an audience, build a brand and increase their income. Writers do not have the platforms to do these for them.

Therefore, Whipik is doing for writers what YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify have done for video and music creators. Dubbed the future of storytelling, Whipik is helping writers capture their slice of the $104 billion Creator economy.

Whipik Stories are Immersive

Whipik stands out with its unique storytelling style designed to immerse the everyday reader. It takes advantage of the fact that everyone sends messages by WhatsApp or Telegram, and so the platform has mirrored its storytelling style to give writers the tools to tell stories in the form of conversation between people.

This style gives readers a first-person perspective as each story unfolds with all the drama, leaving the reader feeling like they are reading the hottest WhatsApp gist on their best friend’s phone. Of course, for the writers who prefer prose, they can still tell stories in the traditional prose-style.

Whipik CEO, Seyi Sofolahan says, “we Africans are very expressive. Each conversation with friends is a story, and we explore every means possible to dramatise the emotions in our stories. For example, we don’t just send ‘lol’ to friends, we use memes to convey the emotion to our audience.

We use exclamatory words like ‘o’, ‘nau’, or ‘jo’ to stress the emotion in our dialogue. We combine pidgin and slangs while conversing, and of course our hands flail around as we do all this. Traditional prose fails to allow us tell stories our own way, but with Whipik, African storytellers now have the power to transcend the limitations of text to bring their stories alive in ways that wow readers”.

Whipik Helps African Writers Grow Their Earnings

But the most important problem Whipik is solving for African writers is that of monetization. With existing platforms, African writers simply do not earn a lot. Medium doesn’t pay writers from Africa, even though, Substack narrowly supports a few writers through grants, and the many other writing apps don’t have paying Africans on their radar.

The only other option African writers have as the primary way to monetize their content is to publish books and convince readers to purchase them. But as the data shows, given the plethora of free, short form content out there, not a lot of people are willing to spend their limited disposable income buying books or paying monthly subscriptions to a book app, which means African writers earn very little for the considerable effort they invest in their creativity.

But Whipik is changing all this. It is building the “Youtube for Writers”, so that as more people consume stories, writers’ earnings grow. Writers can now consistently produce short form content that can be read in 5-7 minutes, and that fit the preferences of today’s social media culture.

Whipik will:

Promote stories to readers so the best content gets discovered;
Give writers social tools to interact with readers, grow their followers, and engage their community; Give writers multiple ways to grow their income without requiring readers to pay for each story they read.

According to Whipik’s CEO, the beauty of this approach is that writers get to tell more stories since each story is short. Readers get to complete each story they read, and both can easily share stories with their social networks, ultimately helping writers grow their views and increasing how much they can make on the platform.

Towards the Future

Whipik understands that short bite-sized content consumption has become the order of the day (we are looking at you TikTok), and is focused on helping writers succeed by empowering them to create content that readers want to consume in an interesting manner. As the Creator economy looks set to fully take off thanks to more tools existing to serve creators’ needs, all writers, starting with those in Africa, are set to be a part of this ascension thanks to Whipik. We look forward to a future where writers can earn globally from their stories without the many hassles that come with being African.

Have you read your first Whipik story? Check out Whipik’s website to read and enjoy your first short story written by African writers here

You can download the app here on AppStore or Play Store link: