Shereen Abdulla on building a career as a content creator and a lifestyle of her dreams

Shereen Abdulla, producer and founder of Sparks Studios, shares her story of pivoting into content creation and building a business based on a passion to a specific lifestyle.

Sheen is the founder of Spark Studios, a creative brand agency based in the Middle East. The company specializes in creating content marketing for finance, business, and tech companies, with a focus on resonating with the Arab Middle Eastern population. Sheen's background, which includes local experience, international education, and a passion for media, helped her establish Spark Studios in 2020. The company started as a podcasting experiment and has since expanded into video, audio, and editorial content creation.

What was the impetus of your moving into content creation?

My journey began when I found myself stuck at home in 2020. By that moment, I had spent 12 years in the professional industry, always bound to a physical office. It was time to make a change and build a career that allowed me to have the kind of lifestyle that I wanted to. I took the time to evaluate my values and realized that my friends and family were scattered all over the world. I wanted to build a career that allowed me to not be bound by geography or an office. I found inspiration in Tim Ferris's book, "The 4-Hour Work Week," and decided to run an experiment. I taught herself how to produce and distribute podcasts and started my first podcast show.

What were the challenges and opportunities you've experienced in the beginning of this path?

I had to first overcome this fear of having to worry about what people said about me, someone who didn't come from a media background, all of a sudden entering the media space. I had a little bit of imposter syndrome. However, I knew what I was doing and I simply put my first piece of content out there.

I was lucky to already have a platform and an audience thanks to my prior career trajectory. I used to work for a FinTech accelerator and a lot of the founders in the space and in the Middle East already knew who I was. I found an audience soon after publishing that first piece of content and marketing it on LinkedIn.

A founder of a FinTech startup reached out to me looking to build a podcast for his own platform. I realized that I could monetize the new skills I learned and do it for other brands looking to do branded content.

Soon enough, competitors of that founder sought what I was doing and reached out to me. And that's when I had an a-ha moment that I could actually build a business out of this. I found a product-market fit and had enough interest in the market. That gave me the confidence to launch Spark Studios, and clients soon started coming to me with requests to expand into video, audio, and editorial content creation.

How do you make sure you stay true to your values and in line with your goals?

One of the biggest lessons learned building Spark Studios is that you need to always go back to your why. I always prompt my customers, 'Why exactly are we working on this piece of content? What are your goals and KPIs?'

As a founder, I need to ask myself the same question time and again: Why? Why am I taking this new client or this piece of work? Why am I pushing Sparks Studios along a particular trajectory?

What helped you to make a leap of faith into self-employment?

It is a scary step to make. For me, it was tricky to walk away from a long corporate career with a stable income. I took on part-time work that I could fit in around my normal working hours to build a portfolio. When it was time to leave my job, I had a solid line-up of clients.

A lot of people are under the impression that I am lucky to work on my passion. However, my passion is cooking and working out. If it was really up to me, I'd be an athlete. My primary motivation was to build a particular lifestyle, which was having control of the type of work I did, having being able to control my schedule, being able to travel and work without being bound to an office. It was the passion for that particular lifestyle that drove me to build Spark Studios.

What is your advice to women searching for creative and financial independence?

Forget that you're a female to begin with. Seek the opportunities and earn them irrespective of your gender. In my experience, when someone actually reaches out to me and says, 'Hey, we wanna give you a seat at the table because you're a woman', I respond, 'I want to be given that seat in spite of the fact that I'm a woman. I want it to be because I'm credible and that I've earned it and have the right credentials to be on that chair.'