We recently connected with Abisola & Seyi Shof and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Abisola & Seyi, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
Finding our purpose has not been a static decision, but instead we’ve found it to be more of a journey to solving each piece of the puzzle. You don’t necessarily need to know what the full puzzle looks like, but with each piece you put together, it all starts to make sense in the long run. For us, every single experience that God has blessed us with, though it may seem unrelated to what we are doing now, has been vital to either building the necessary skills, perspective, connections, or exposure we needed.
For context, Seyi obtained an MBA from Johns Hopkins University in 2018, and at the time, the goal was for that to get him to the next level in his IT Product Management career. However, now we joke around about how instrumental that experience was for him helping with our brand and content strategy.
Abisola started her content journey with a personal blog when she was on maternity leave five years ago. Since she was already in the content space, the next logical step was to launch a podcast since podcasts were trending in 2019. Through the podcast, The Shofs learned vital skills like editing to optimize engagement, storytelling, presentation, and much more than can be quantified.
There’s much more to the pieces of our puzzles – Abisola’s health consulting job that helped her develop confidence and negotiating skills needed for engaging with the brands that we work with; Seyi’s storytelling app startup that gave him first hand experience in writing compelling stories, hiring and growing a team, and just the overall years of experience that have contributed to us building our stage presence to host events in churches and for various other organizations.
In all, the pieces have come together nicely to us becoming content creators and event hosts. Still, the journey of our purpose continues, as we believe that the puzzle we have solved so far will be a small piece of a bigger puzzle to come. So keep “doing” and keep making progress, it’s all a part of your story.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
We are Abisola & Seyi Shof, lifestyle content creators, event hosts, and social media content strategists. We are a fun-loving couple making marriage exciting by sharing our adventures across social media. We also host engaging social and professional events with churches and other organizations to help couples have fun, and to educate our community. You can find us at @theshofs on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
With every piece of content we post, we try to show how relationships can be fun and beautiful. As everyone knows, Instagram is full of picture-perfect #couplegoal vacations and experiences, but rarely the mundane parts of daily life. What we do is to infuse fun and excitement into these so-called “mundane daily experiences”, so that people in relationships or those who aspire for one get to see how every moment can be truly special and enjoyable. All of this is driven by our mission, which is to inspire couples to build healthy and happy marriages.
Second, we host fun in-person events to provide opportunities for people to connect, and we curate unique experiences for couples. A few months ago, we hosted a Sip & Paint event in Silver Spring, MD with about 50 attendees. It was thoroughly entertaining with lots of mingling, relationship conversations, friendships formed, and a great time dancing. In addition to hosting our events, we also host events for other organizations such as churches, corporate, and social intimate events.
Our vision is to see everyone that consumes our content or attends our events build a long-lasting and loving relationship. We know from industry research that when couples enjoy experiences together, they are more likely to stay in love and build fulfilling relationships and marriages, and so through our platform, we give people the tools to have fun with their significant others, now or in the future.
We’ve got other exciting things coming in the pipeline – a hyper-fun board game for couples, a Valentine’s Day event in the Washington, DC area, and a book coming soon!
If you had to pick two qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
In the social media world, everyone craves virality so they can “blow up fast”. But the two things that worked better for us than virality are consistency and continuously improving our art. Both go hand in hand. I chuckle when I watch the early videos we made. They were such low visual quality, and we knew that, but we kept focusing on one small thing to improve with each video we published. We made a Reel/TikTok video everyday for the longest period. The more we made them, the more we learned about video quality, editing, styling, staging aesthetics, lighting… so much that would have been overwhelming to figure out if we had waited to first know it all before starting. To anyone reading this who is waiting for perfection to start that next thing, our advice is just start. Once you’re in, be committed to improving your work every day. Don’t get discouraged by the views or engagement, they are vanity metrics. I promise you that the people who need your content are watching and taking mental notes, they just may not tell you about it.
We have produced over 700 short form videos in the span of almost three years, each one building on lessons learned from the previous ones. We constantly watch tutorials on YouTube and analyze what others do to see what we can learn from them. The learning never ends!
Where do you get your work ethic from?
One of our favorite Bible verses is Collosians 3:23, which says “Work willingly at whatever you do, as though you were working for the Lord rather than for people.” This is our motto that we carry into everything we do. So whether we are working on a gifted brand collaboration or on a $10,000 brand collaboration, we fully apply ourselves and are committed to putting out the best that we can possibly do, and this makes our work all the more fulfilling. This makes all the difference in our business relationships and brand partnerships.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.theshofs.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theshofs/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theshofs/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/theshofs
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theshofs
