Who I learned from · 2015–now
Ope Odumakin
Ope built DailyRapFacts and brought me in to build its app. More than ten years later we still ship together: RHYMEBOOK, Rap Dictionary, Meld and Discognizer.
- Who
- Ope Odumakin
- Role
- Founder and CEO, DailyRapFacts
- To me
- My partner since I was eighteen: the brand builder to my engineer.
- When
- 2015–now
Who Ope is
Founder and CEO of DailyRapFacts, the independent hip-hop media and publishing company Ope started in the first year of high school, behind the Rap Dictionary, 100 Hip Hop Facts, Rap Trivia and RHYMEBOOK. Ope also co-founded Stufinder, a platform for finding and booking recording studios, and has been profiled by VoyageATL.
How we met
In January 2015 a friend tagged me under one of Ope’s tweets, and within a month we were planning a partnership. That first plan stalled. In September 2016 I built the DailyRapFacts iOS app for a stake in the brand, and when the Twitter account was suspended and every follower vanished, we rebuilt it from zero together in May 2018.
What I learned
That a brand is a promise you keep every day, not a logo. Ope runs the audience and the deals, I run the product, and that split has survived a suspension, a placement business labels bought from, and six apps. Ope also told me the hardest true thing anyone has said about my career: that I had the skill of a great engineer but not yet the drive of a CEO. I have been working on the second half ever since.