A108. THE MAKING OF YORUBA PROJECT - Jack’s Curated Business Idea - Empowering And Inspiring Generations - Jack Lookman - Rita Nnamani

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THE MAKING OF YORUBA PROJECT

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Not every business starts with a plan. Some start with a habit nobody thinks twice about, like someone quietly forwarding proverbs on WhatsApp because they enjoy the language. That is exactly how Jack Lookman built one of the more unusual publishing businesses to come out of Nigeria's content scene, and it holds a lesson worth paying attention to: you do not need to be an expert in something to build a business around it.

It Started with Forwarded Messages

Years ago, a young man with a background in finance and accounting, not linguistics, developed a habit of writing out Yoruba proverbs. For each one, he added the literal translation and the deeper meaning behind it, usually four or five lines, then posted them casually on WhatsApp. He was not doing it for money. He picked up much of what he knew from spending time with elderly acquaintances, listening to their stories and sayings, and he simply enjoyed capturing their thoughts.

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The proverbs spread quickly on WhatsApp: person to person, group to group, screenshot to screenshot, until they had drifted so far from the source that most people sharing them had no idea who had written them in the first place. That is how Jack Lookman eventually stumbled onto the content, through a classmate who had reposted it to a class group chat. Curious, he traced the messages backward through several people until he finally found the man behind them.

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From Casual Hobby to Business Partnership

After a few conversations, it became clear the original writer had never thought of monetising any of it. He was simply passionate about the language and had a habit of preserving what he learned from older associates. Jack Lookman saw something different: an untapped body of cultural content that people clearly wanted, given how far it had already spread on its own.

He proposed a simple deal. The writer would keep sending over his proverbs, and the two of them would work together to turn the content into something sellable, splitting any profit that came from it. The writer agreed, and the collection process began. Historical posts, roughly a hundred of them, were forwarded over WhatsApp and compiled by hand, since the platform limits how many messages you can forward at once. From there, the material was edited and formatted for publishing.

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The first title went up on Amazon under a Yoruba name: Oro Ishiti- Indelible Yoruba Words  that roughly translates to "words of wisdom" or "words that make you reflect." The series became, by a wide margin, Jack Lookman's best-selling books to date.

Scaling the Content Without Being the Expert

What happened next says a lot about how content businesses actually grow. Instead of stopping at one book, the collection kept expanding: from around 100 proverbs to 352, then 405, then 450, with each new volume simply adding to what came before, rather than starting over. Some proverbs came directly from the original writer's memory of elders. Others came from unexpected places, a thought that surfaced in the shower, during prayer, or while commuting, which would get typed out or voice-recorded on the spot and sent along to be checked, corrected, and properly translated.

Alongside the books, the content was serialised as short videos across TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. Each clip followed the same format: the Yoruba proverb, the English reading, then the literal meaning, laid out so viewers could follow along on screen while listening. Because neither the reading nor the pronunciation was something Jack Lookman felt confident doing himself, he hired outside voice talent for that part of the work.

This is worth sitting with for a second. Jack Lookman was not fluent in Yoruba. He has described his own reading as passable at best and his writing as weak. His grasp of the language came mostly from childhood exposure and, oddly enough, from listening to Yoruba musicians, growing up. Yet he built a publishing business around a language he did not fully speak, because his actual skill was somewhere else entirely: spotting a gap, organising scattered content into something coherent, and pushing it out to an audience.

Buying Out the Rights

At some point, the original writer's enthusiasm cooled. He had never set out to run a business, and the day-to-day grind of content creation was not something he was chasing. Rather than let the project stall, Jack Lookman made him an offer: a lump sum, paid in instalments, in exchange for the intellectual property rights. The writer would still be credited as author, with his details included in the books so readers or potential collaborators could reach him directly, but ownership of the growing catalogue would shift.

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That arrangement is what let the project keep expanding. As new volumes were added, additional payments were negotiated for the extra writing work, handled the same informal way as before, over WhatsApp, proverb by proverb.

There is an honest admission buried in how this played out. Most people assume that if you are the one physically writing the content, you deserve the lion's share of any profit. But when you actually break down where the time, money, and risk go, that assumption does not hold up as well as it sounds. Jack Lookman took on every financial risk, paid for editing, hired voice talent, ran the marketing, and kept the project moving long after the original spark had faded. Writing the words was one piece of a much larger puzzle.

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Turning Culture into a Product People Actually Buy

The books are sold as paperbacks and eBooks on Amazon and a handful of other retailers, with a companion blog hosting much of the content for free, alongside links to buy the full collection and watch the video versions. The idea behind giving so much away for free was deliberate. It builds trust, drives traffic, and gives people a reason to come back, all while funnelling interested readers toward a purchase.

There are a few clear monetisation paths worth noting for anyone thinking about doing something similar with cultural or heritage content:

• Direct sales. Paperbacks and eBooks through major retailers remain the most straightforward source of income.

• Licensed audio. The read-aloud versions used across social media can eventually be packaged and sold as standalone audio products.

• Consulting and teaching. Once you have built visible authority around a niche, whether or not you are the technical expert, people will pay to learn from you directly.

• Affiliate content on the blog. A blog that already attracts an engaged audience is a natural place to add affiliate links and display ads.

• Courses and tutoring. Structured lessons, whether live or recorded, turn scattered cultural knowledge into something people can systematically learn.

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What Comes Next

Jack Lookman's future plans for the project include expanding into oriki, the traditional Yoruba praise chants that trace a person's lineage and family history, along with content on Yoruba names, their meanings, and the culture, food, and music tied to them. There is also interest in eventually building automated quizzes from the existing proverb collection, so readers can test what they have learned rather than just consuming it passively.

The Real Lesson Here

The most useful takeaway from Jack Lookman's story is not really about Yoruba proverbs at all. It is about paying attention to what is already circulating around you and being willing to act on it, even in an area where you personally have no formal expertise.

The habit that made this possible was disciplined idea capture. Whenever something worth pursuing crossed his mind, no matter how small or half-formed, Jack Lookman wrote it down immediately rather than trusting himself to remember it later. He would revisit the note, add to it over time, and only move on it once there was enough substance to work with. Most people let good ideas slip by, simply because they never wrote them down in the first place.

You do not need to be fluent, credentialed, or an insider in a field to build something valuable from it. What you need is the ability to recognise when something people already love, is being underused, and enough follow-through to turn it into a product they are willing to pay for.

Jack Lookman’s Websites And Books 

Jack’s Redundancy Empowerment 

Jack’s Curated Business Ideas 

Suggested Products And Services 

Useful Links 

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A106. EVACUATION PARACHUTE FOR HIGH RISE BUILDINGS - Jack’s Curated Business Idea - Empowering And Inspiring Generations - Carew

EVACUATION PARACHUTE FOR HIGH RISE BUILDINGS

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Take a second and actually think about that question. Not in a vague, disaster-movie way, in a real one. You're on the 16th floor. The lift is out because you're never supposed to use it during a fire. The stairwell is either packed or already filling with smoke. Somewhere below you, firefighters are working their way up, but they haven't reached your floor yet, and there's no guarantee they will in time.

That's an uncomfortable thing to sit with, and it's exactly the gap this business idea is trying to close: a personal escape device for high-rise residents, something like a wearable parachute or controlled-descent system, designed to get someone from a high floor to the ground safely when every other option has already failed.

Why This Matters More Than It Used to

High-rise living isn't a niche lifestyle anymore. Cities from Dubai to London keep building upward because land is expensive and building up is the only way to fit more people into the same footprint. That trend isn't slowing down, which means more people than ever are living and working dozens of floors above solid ground.

Most of the time that's completely fine. Buildings are designed with sprinklers, fire-resistant materials, heat detectors, and clear safety protocols, and those systems generally do their job. But "generally" isn't the same as "always," and history has already shown what happens when it doesn't. The Grenfell Tower fire in London, caused by an electrical fault that allowed flames to spread rapidly through the building's exterior, resulted in devastating loss of life, much of it among people trapped on upper floors with no way down. On September 11, some people trapped above the fire in the World Trade Centre made the desperate choice to jump rather than face the flames, a detail that still makes for difficult reading decades later.

Those aren't everyday scenarios, and they shouldn't be treated as if they happen constantly. But they're proof that existing fire safety measures, as good as they are, can still leave a gap between "the building has excellent safety systems" and "every single resident makes it out alive." This idea exists specifically to sit inside that gap.

What the Product Would Actually Be

The concept isn't a replacement for existing fire safety infrastructure. It's a backup layer that sits alongside sprinklers, extinguishers, and heat detectors; there for the specific moment, when someone can't reach the ground floor through normal means.

Picture a compact, genuinely user-friendly personal descent device kept in a high-rise apartment or office, something a resident could grab, attach, and use to lower themselves safely from a window when the stairwell simply isn't an option. It wouldn't need to be a full skydiving parachute. It just needs to solve one specific problem: getting a person from a high floor to solid ground without relying on the building's compromised exits.

The emphasis on being genuinely easy to use, matters more than almost anything else here. In an actual fire, people are frightened, disoriented, and moving fast. A device that requires calm, careful instructions to operate correctly is a device that won't get used properly when it's actually needed. This has to work under panic, not just under a calm demonstration in a showroom.

Why Vulnerable People Matter So Much Here

There's a detail worth sitting with. Ordinary daily life already creates moments of real vulnerability that have nothing to do with fire safety codes. A pan of hot oil catching flame on a stovetop is a genuinely common kitchen accident, and the instinctive reaction, especially for a child or anyone who hasn't been taught otherwise, is often to pour water on it. Water poured into burning oil doesn't put the fire out. It causes the oil to violently expand and throw flaming droplets outward, turning a contained stovetop fire into something far more dangerous almost instantly.

That's the kind of moment that can turn a normal evening into an emergency in seconds, and it's a reminder of just how quickly vulnerability shows up in daily life, long before anyone's thinking about high-rise safety protocols. For elderly residents, people with mobility limitations, or families with young children living many floors up, a fast-moving fire on a lower floor could cut off the stairwell before anyone even fully understands what's happening. A personal escape device gives those specific groups an option that doesn't depend on being physically able to run down sixteen flights of stairs through smoke.

Getting This from Idea to Reality

This isn't something you sketch on a napkin and start selling next month. Getting a product like this right, requires a genuine team, not a solo effort. You'd need a product designer to work out the physical mechanics of the device itself, an engineer to make sure it actually performs reliably under real-world stress, and a fire safety expert to validate that it works within the broader context of building evacuation procedures rather than creating new hazards of its own.

Testing has to be rigorous, and there's no cutting corners here. A device like this only gets one real-world use per emergency, and if it fails at that moment, the consequences are about as serious as consequences get. That level of stake demands proper certification, adherence to established safety standards, and probably a defined shelf life for each unit, five years, three years, whatever the engineering determines is realistic, so nobody is relying on equipment that's quietly degraded past the point of being trustworthy.

Who Would Actually Buy This

The customer base here is broader than it might first seem. Individual residents living in high-rise buildings could buy one directly for their own peace of mind, the same way people buy home fire extinguishers or smoke detectors without ever expecting to need them.

Landlords and property management companies are a natural market too, particularly for buildings housing older residents or families, where the liability case for having additional safety measures on hand, is easy to make. Government bodies and housing authorities could factor devices like this into building codes or public housing safety standards, especially in cities pushing hard toward more high-rise development. Fire brigades and emergency services themselves might also be interested, either as advisors during development or as an eventual distribution channel.

Is This Actually Commercially Viable?

Nobody can say for certain without real product development and market testing behind it. There's a genuine tension in a product like this: it needs to be affordable enough that ordinary residents will actually buy one, but resilient enough in its engineering that it's trustworthy in a genuinely life-or-death moment. Getting that balance right is the entire commercial challenge.

There's also the question of legal exposure. Selling a safety device that people are trusting with their lives means the design, testing, and certification standards need to be airtight. Cutting corners to hit a lower price point isn't just a business risk here, it's a real risk to human life, and any serious attempt at this idea needs to treat that as the non-negotiable starting point rather than an afterthought bolted on at the end.

The Bigger Picture

What makes this idea worth taking seriously isn't the drama of fire and evacuation. It's the recognition that safety infrastructure, no matter how good, still has gaps, and those gaps show up hardest for the people least able to handle them: children, the elderly, anyone with limited mobility, anyone simply unlucky enough to be on the wrong floor at the wrong moment.

Building a product around that gap won't be simple, and it absolutely shouldn't be rushed. But for the right team of designers, engineers, and fire safety experts willing to do the testing properly, this is the kind of idea that could genuinely save lives, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a business plan.

Jack’s Redundancy Empowerment 

Jack’s Curated Business Ideas 

Jack Lookman’s Books 

Suggested Products And Services 

Useful Links 

Jack Lookman’s Websites 

We also monetise through promoting 3rd party products and services via Affiliate Marketing Links. This is accomplished without additional cost to you.