Serge Efap

Serge is Co-Founder and CEO of Kulture Hub, a community platform designed to provide opportunities for the next generation of creators through content and real-life experiences. 

He is also CEO of Ambrose, a growth marketing agency. Prior to starting his own ventures, Serge was a founding member of Elite Daily.

His daily routine

I'm usually up by 6 a.m. EST to workout, either at home workouts or a run outside. My workday kicks off around 7:15 a.m. with a massive cup of coffee and a meeting with my executive assistant Jasmine, to level-set for the day.  I’ll read the news and check emails until our team kickoff meeting at 9:30 a.m. Every other day, I’ll have  brief  meetings with Jasmine, she is the right side of my brain. Absolutely amazing, it’s so great to work with her.

Finding his peak flow state

I like to get planning done in the mornings, busy work throughout the day, and creative work around 7pm when things start to slow down. After 7pm is where we’re spending time discussing a project that’s in development or brainstorming for new opportunities.

His unwinding rituals

I'll jump on Xbox or just chat with friends, watch TV, and step away from the computer for a bit. Weekends are much more relaxed as I try not to work Saturday afternoons. I do like to wake up super early and either workout or put a couple hours of work in on things I am not able to make time for during the week.

Information consumption

I value the time I spend with people and the conversations we have, because you're able to learn in a different way. It's different hearing something being explained and broken down by someone as opposed to, let's say, reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about it—and that definitely resonates with me.

I do enjoy reading founder bios to see how they were able to overcome certain problems, how they tackled things, their approaches, and angles. From a leadership perspective that is the source I like to rely on for information. I also stay in tune with the market for technology, specifically seeing how trends develop, what shapes them, and what moves the market itself.

Way-finding from Elite Daily to Ambrose, then Kulture Hub

After my very first startup experience at Elite Daily, I felt that there was no way I personally could go corporate or work for someone else––so we launched a marketing agency. It was a way for me to get back to a dollar, once I left my job. Ambrose is a digital marketing agency we started in 2016 that focuses on three areas: helping brands create content, develop technology, and drive traffic. 

Ambrose has been a success because of the hands-on experience from building Elite Daily, which we were able to grow from zero readership per month to 74 million unique visitors per month. We were the fastest growing millennial brand out there, hedging up against BuzzFeed. This gave me the confidence to launch Ambrose. 

At Ambrose, we had that opportunity to work with absolutely amazing people, Showtime, Mayweather vs. McGregor out in Vegas, and a bunch of cool things. After about a year, that was when we had our “there's more to life” moment, and we launched Kulture Hub.

So since then, we've shifted Ambrose to be the internal agency for the Kulture Hub business. Brands who may reach out to us for content creation, we’re able to facilitate that right through Ambrose. We have access to hundreds of photographers, videographers, graphic designers, copywriters, you name it––because that is the community of creatives that we've built on our Discord I’ve mentioned before. 

If we're looking at just Gen Z as a whole, I believe ~47% - 53% of that generation are freelancers. When you start off as a young freelancer, you are creative but you may not necessarily have good regeneration in terms of taking on new business. Ambrose definitely helped a number of young creatives with that, which is our goal—to be able to leverage Ambrose as an internal agency and/or distribution hub of creative work that funnels through Kulture Hub and its community. 

The beginnings of Kulture Hub

We launched Kulture Hub in 2017, there were three of us at the time, because we felt as if there were no publications out there that spoke to us in the sense of interesting stories about people, what to know and learn about, humor, thought pieces, education and culture. 
We wanted to create a platform that spoke to the creative community. We didn't know exactly what we wanted to do immediately, so we did what we knew best, which was writing and creating content. We created content that catered to a mindset.

“There’s more to life”

Our slogan is, “There's more to life” because we felt that many people hit this moment, this inflection point, where you think to yourself that there’s got to be more to it than what I’m doing right now. That was really the impetus for starting Kulture Hub.

Kulture Hub x OKR

Our executive team meeting for Kulture Hub focuses on how we are pacing towards the overall vision of the brand. I’m a big fan of OKR exercises (objective key results), where we put together tangible goals that are measured numerically. Whether its a revenue goal or a staffing goal, but something measurable which we look at in three month increments.

On curating content that resonates

We started creating stories that resonated super well with us, and from there we saw how it helps shape our viewership. 

I remember one piece that we put out had to do with how a college student made their passive income by flipping cars. When we published that story, we were messaged by maybe five people asking to be connected to the person we featured in our story, because they were interested and inspired in doing something like this. We saw the need for actionable content, outside of just reading and consuming; content that allows you to push forward and take action. So that was where we shifted our content strategy. We started to:

(1)  align with causes and matters that are super important to us

(2) highlight creatives and telling their stories, that may otherwise not get told by other publications; and,

(3) serve as a platform for the creative community to amplify voice

Building an In Real Life (IRL) community

When you're writing and talking about all of these stories, you want to start taking action and do bigger things. The next phase of Kulture Hub was driven by the fact that we understood what we were able to do in terms of creating content and building an audience. Now, what does this audience look like in real life? We started to host some events (pre-COVID) with elements that were super important to us. 

For example, we hosted an art exhibit, which had an amazing turnout of 450 people. The event highlighted nine artists who were featured on Kulture Hub and part of our overall community. Artists were able to showcase their work while bringing people together to fundraise for the ASAP Foundation. 

Seeing how the event materialized in the physical, after we had been doing this digitally, was a big kicker for us because it pushed us to think there's got to be more here. We know who our audience is online, we know who they are in real life, we know some of the problems and the issues they're having. So, how do we help them now? 

What do we do as a brand that's scalable and allows us to build stronger connections with people in our community? We decided to launch a Discord of about 250 people which quickly became a hub for our digital community to connect.

Imagine it like a big slack group of creatives. Members share their work and get feedback, we talk about regular topics, we share content and talk about different cultures and so on. 

We’re constantly seeking new avenues to deepen the style in which our community gathers and connects.

The chip on his shoulder

Don’t bask in your losses, and don't over celebrate your wins. You keep pushing forward, day in and day out. Making mistakes allows you to know to not repeat them the next time around. 

The style in which he curates personal growth

Travel, take the time to learn, tap into new areas, and new cultures, I'd say becoming more worldly, in a sense, right? And just knowing and understanding how things happen around different countries or different cultures.

Life happens differently depending on where in the world you are–– things are of different importance. So growing more cognizant of that and being able to use that to better understand people. 

On curating culture

I’ve learned that every single person has their own unique perspective on what culture is and what curating culture means to them because of how they grew up. I believe it ties back into what people’s habits have been historically, dependent on of course, where you live, what you do and who you know. 

For me, let's say we fill a room with 500 people, right? I'm looking at 500 different points of culture in that room. It encompasses who someone is, what they've been through and how that's shaped what they want and who they've become.

Each person should be able to speak to their individual culture and what it means to them. For me,  my personal culture is everything to me. The way my parents raised me, how I learned about my history, different family members, who were stateside or back in Africa, going to college... All of these elements have shaped the person that I’ve become and my culture.

More specifically in curating, having my workview and lifeview compliment one another allows me to curate culture every day in my life. We take a lot of pride in being the platform that fosters new and authentic connections.