Name: Naomi Owusu
Company: Tickaroo
Position: Co-Founder and CEO
Website: https://www.tickaroo.com/
About Naomi Owusu
Naomi founded Tickaroo in 2011 as a tool for local sports teams to cover their games in real-time with fun and stable liveblogging software. When a news outlet asked if Tickaroo’s high-performance live content app could be repurposed to create live blogs, Naomi recognised the opportunity to solve a burning problem – to deliver real-time news and sports data and content that is highly engaging for audiences – and seized it.
In 2015 she pivoted the business and software to meet the needs of news publishers and media houses, expanding Tickaroo’s expertise and impact on the journalism industry. And that is where Naomi’s mission sits today: to democratise real-time reporting, empowering newsrooms to engage audiences through authentic, digestible, multimedia-rich storytelling and dialogue. The software now helps more than 250 newsrooms worldwide to thrive in the fast-paced world of digital content delivery.
With a vision beyond simply building useful software, Naomi has always acted with the greater good in mind. In an era marked by declining trust in traditional media, Naomi’s goal is to help reignite audience engagement and foster credible reporting, transforming how information is delivered and consumed by enabling authenticity, interactivity and accessibility. Seamlessly integrating with publishing platforms and content management systems, the easy-to-use software gives journalists and live reporters the power to deliver high-impact, audience-driven content in real-time. This enables publishers to build audience trust, ensuring their status as reliable sources of information, creating lasting value and new opportunities for revenue and growth. For client Suddeutsche Zeitung, 70% of their most read articles in 2023 were live blogs, while FAZ achieved more than 8x longer retention rates with live blogs than with their traditional articles. Tickaroo customers average over 1 million hours media time monthly.
Coming from a background in organisational development and psychology and with experience helping major corporations in the sports and news industries navigate digital transformation, Naomi has a passion for empowering individuals and enterprises to reach new heights in digital media production.
Under Naomi’s leadership, the company is committed to helping ensure equal representation of journalists from a range of economic, cultural and age demographics across newsrooms to further promote diversity in reporting and consumer trust. Tickaroo also seeks to support and encourage new talents from diverse backgrounds through university partnerships.
Naomi describes her entrepreneurial journey as a path paved with countless decisions, obstacles, and sleepless nights. As a woman who built her business in a saturated market where the evaluation of startups is often subject to bias associated with gender and race, Naomi’s resilience sets an inspiring example for female tech entrepreneurs. Her journey underscores the importance of passion and persistence, building a support network, celebrating successes but embracing and learning from failure, strategic decision-making, agility, and staying ahead of the curve.
