iROKOPartners, brainchild of this British -Nigerian national, is believed to be worth $30 million at the moment.

Jason Njoku, 31, launched out into the business world very early in life. Njoku, who describes himself as the hardest working man you ever met, belligerent, dynamic, and focused, grew up in a working class area in South East London and went to a comprehensive school. He was the fi rst person in his family to ever attend a university. He graduated with a degree in Chemistry from the University of Manchester in 2005.

His ambition was to become self reliant and in search of fulfi lment, he tried his hands on not a few businesses which include among others blog network, publishing, a T-shirt company and web design venture. But he failed to make impact in all these and the reason for these failures is simple- he lacked the necessary experience as an aspiring entrepreneur to run a viable business and on the other hand, he failed to hit the target. Njoku shared his own personal story about failure, mistakes and success. “I spent good three years making every mistake there was to make about how to run a business”, he said. “I ran out of friends who would lend me money. I was forced to stop”.

At a point, he was forced to move in with his mum, an action which he described as humiliating. Incidentally, that decision to go back home to share a fl at with his mother turned his life around. He noticed a paradigm shift in her mother’s TV viewing habits from western movies especially Eastenders (a long-running popular UK soap opera) to watching Nigerian movies (Nollywood films). Njoku, an internet geek would then offer to help her mother source for Nollywood movies on the internet and other sources but realised the fi lms were in short supply. Interestingly, 

Njoku’s passion for the internet, coupled with the discovery he made that Nollywood was not properly distributed among the Diaspora, ultimately led to the birth of iROKOtv in 2010.

Njoku’s immediate response to the opportunity that threw itself at him in the process of helping his mother get a nice time at home was to cash in on the opportunity. His idea was to create a service company which will stream Nollywood movies online, so they are accessible to anyone with an Internet line, anywhere in the world. That was the beginning of iROKOPartners, now a multimillion dollar global business which took off from Njoku’s bedroom.

Couple of months after the project started, Njoku then realised that operating from a bedroom would not take him anywhere, and he decided to give it all it takes. “Yes, I could watch a bunch of Nollywood movies on DVDs at home, no problem. But to actually purchase the movies and have knowledge of the industry, which is quite fragmented, I had to totally immerse myself in the arena”, he confessed.

Njoku however took the ultimate decision about the new business in 2010 when he decided to leave his mother in England to return to Lagos to pursue his dream. Though he was criticised at the time, the move eventually proved to be the smartest he ever made.

On arrival in Nigeria, he made up his mind to drop the toga of having studied in the United Kingdom to mix freely with operators in the Nigerian fi lm industry so as to make quick progress.

“Nollywood moves at lightning speed and business are conducted fairly informally, so being thousands of miles away at the end of a phone line was never going to work. I had to be in Alaba Market, where the business of Nollywood is conducted. I had to be on movie sets, I had to be building relationships—so I got on a plane and moved to Lagos,” he confesses.

The success which Jason Njoku had envisaged that made him quit the shores of England for Nigeria has not been elusive as the simple dream of making available Nollywood fi lms available online for Nigerians in the Diaspora has grown beyond his imagination in just two years. This is because, the company which was established in September 2010 with its headquarter in Lagos, Nigeria, now has a branch in London, United Kingdom.

Today, iROKO Partners, besides movie streaming, now offers a range of online products including web named iROKOtv focused on Nollywood Film productions, and ‘IROKING’, a Nigerian music streaming platform. Other web brands fl oated by Njoku and his partners at iROKOPartners include iROKtv, NollywoodLove and YorubaLove which operate on the You- Tube video platform.

iROKOPartners, according to reliable sources, is the largest licensor and leading distributor of Nollywood movies (both English and Yoruba) online.

A smart entrepreneur, Jason Njoku, going by experience realised that for him to go very far with this new business concept, he would need people who believe in his idea to fl y, so he readily accommodated a friend, Bastian Gother, who, according to him, having realised the hidden potential lurking in the dream at the very early stage of the business, offered to invest in the business. He invested his life savings, of about $100,000 into the company and 

from there, the business took off. They were able to buy fi lms and IT equipment as well as invest in the infrastructure needed.

However, the major fi nancier of the business has been a US-based hedge fund, Tiger Global, which invested a whopping $8 million in the dream of Njoku. This was what he told Forbes.com about how he was able to get the attention of Tiger Global to boost his business. “Strangely enough, I never wrote a business plan. I never had to pitch to any VCs. I wasn’t even fundraising. After our story was told by Sarah Lacy (formerly of Techcrunch), FORBES, CNBC Africa, Variety and CNN we were inundated with funding inquiries and offers. All inbound. Tiger Global Management, a $9 billion NYC based venture and private equity fund, led the round; they believed [in] our vision. A very simple vision: bringing Nigerian entertainment online. I have always been of the opinion if you build something totally awesome. Investors will fi nd you.”

Of course, the impact of the investment of Tiger Global in iROKOPartners, according to Njoku has been tremendous as the company has grown into a full-fl edged business with over 110 staff in offi ces across three continents – Africa, Europe, and North America. “It’s grown into a fully-fl edged company very quickly,” adds Njoku, “thanks to the hard work of a brilliant team and also thanks to external funding we received from the US-based Hedge fund, Tiger Global. Much of the $8 million we secured has been ploughed into building the company, purchasing content (movies and music), hiring new staff to focus heavily on business development and setting up international offi ces in London and New York.

With his eyes set on a remarkable future, Jason says he is exploring the possibility of moving into the TV and cable channel arena in the US, which is currently his biggest market. “We’re also looking at other African entertainment markets, seeing whether or not they would benefi t from the same sort of interactive, simple and internationally popular platform we’ve provided Nollywood with.

Though the future is still some distance ahead, the present has been very rosy for Jason Njoku and his partners, as the business has dealt fairly well with them. The immediate evidence of prosperity from the business is his recognition as one of Africa’s 10 youngest million-dollar entrepreneurs as published by Forbes Magazine recently. Being a private company, he would not declare the worth of iROKOPartners but he gave insight into the company’s fi nancial strength by simply reeling out available fi gures. “As a private company, we can’t really disclose revenue at the moment, but I can share some impressive data: We reached 560,000 registered users in less than seven months. We have viewers in 178 different countries. Eighty-one percent of our registered users return weekly. We have streamed more than 10 million hours worth of fi lm. Forty-fi ve percent of our traffi c comes from the UK and U.S. We have had more than 13 million visits from over 2.5 million unique visitors”, he disclosed.

Meanwhile, the major source of revenue for the business at the moment as disclosed by Njoku, is corporate advertisement. But a new line of income has been created which bothers on getting viewers to subscribe for latest movies for only fi ve dollars per month. “Nollywood fi lms plus online distribution equals big money”, Njoku enthused.

The story of Njoku remains a classic case of several unsung, highly enterprising and stupendously rich Nigerian budding entrepreneurs.