Bad Blood Between Nigeria’s Creator Economy Rivals Spills Onto The Streets
For three days in March, Lagos’ Landmark Event Centre was meant to be the epicentre of Africa’s creator economy. Mainstack, the sleek upstart positioning itself as the “operating system” for digital entrepreneurs, had poured resources into curating Moment 2026, an inaugural conference featuring panels, workshops, and a premium experience for over 4,000 attendees.
Instead, the conference delivered one of the messiest public feuds the Nigerian tech scene has seen this year.
Days before the event, attendees noticed something odd. Large, eye-catching billboards dotted the venue, carrying motivational taglines like “Create with intention” and “Create what sells,” each prominently featuring the logo of Selar, Mainstack’s biggest rival.
Selar CEO Douglas Kendyson later explained they’d disclosed the competitive nature to venue operators, who approved the placements after vetting. It was supposed to score points as classic guerrilla marketing, inserting Selar’s brand into a competitor’s spotlight without saying a word.
But Mainstack saw red and lodged complaints. Then the billboards came down. What could have ended as a cheeky anecdote instead exploded on X when former Selar Chief Marketing Officer Milton Tutu was unveiled as Mainstack’s new CMO right there at the event.
Tutu had spent four years at Selar, helping scale it from modest numbers to a continental force. When he announced his exit in October 2025 via a heartfelt Medium post titled “Leaving Selar, Not the Mission,” the departure appeared amicable. Then came Kendyson’s thread.
“He was fired,” Kendyson claimed on X, adding that concerns over Tutu’s team management and leadership style were a factor, in what was a bombshell response to a wave of near-identical posts he labelled a “cheap coordinated PR attack.” Screenshots showed multiple users tweeting variations of switching over to Mainstack with Tutu.
Kendyson added he’d given his blessings about Tutu’s new position when Mainstack called in December 2025, making the “scripted” campaign feel like a betrayal.
But Tutu, in a Medium response posted Monday, pushed back. “I’ve also heard claims that I was fired from Selar. While multiple factors influenced my exit, the final and only official documentation that marked my exit from the company is my resignation letter, which was acknowledged by the leadership team,” he wrote.
Selar, founded in 2016 by a former Paystack and Flutterwave engineer, has positioned itself as the reliable infrastructure of African creator monetisation. With over 2 million users and more than USD 26 M in payouts to creators, it remains the market incumbent. In 2025 alone, Selar says it paid out over NGN 18 B (USD 12.86 M) to nearly 400,000 creators.
Mainstack, founded in 2022 by Ayobami Oyaleke and Olamide Akinola, takes a different approach. It markets itself as an all-in-one aesthetic-heavy platform combining link-in-bio tools, booking calendars, and global payments; a lifestyle product for the modern digital entrepreneur.
Both are chasing a prize that’s only getting bigger. Africa’s creator economy is projected to grow from roughly USD 5 B in 2025 to nearly USD 30 B by 2032.
Reactions on X captured the divide. One user, Queens, cut through: “This is competition. Like Burger King v McDonald’s, Coke v Pepsi style. It’s done all over the world. It’s not some ‘friendly Kumbaya, let’s all get along’ vibe”.
Others were less charitable. Meanwhile, some industry observers urged de-escalation, noting Tutu had never spoken ill of Selar publicly.
For attendees, the drama likely overshadowed some sessions. But it also firmed up the reality that African creator economy is maturing, and with maturity comes competition. Talent poaching, event hijacking, and social media mudslinging become weapons when differentiation is tough. Whether it fuels better products or just more tweets remains to be seen.
