A119. The African Proverbs Business Nobody Has Built Yet; And How It Could Work
In Lagos, a politician learns Yoruba proverbs to prove he belongs. In London, a parent searches for a proverb to explain patience to a child who only speaks English. In a university library in Nairobi, a researcher wants to know how a particular community talks about grief, and finds three books, none of them indexed.
Those are three different people, three different countries, three different reasons. They are all looking for the same thing: a proverb they half-remember, in a language that isn't catalogued anywhere useful.
That gap is the entire premise of a business idea Jack Lookman lays out in a recent episode of Jack's Curated Business Ideas, interviewed by host Juwon Ogungbe. His proposal is deceptively simple, which is to build a comprehensive database of African proverbs and sayings, and it gets more interesting the longer you look at it.
Everyone Sells 500 Proverbs. Nobody Sells the Continent
Walk into any African bookshop and you will find the same product: a slim volume promising "500 popular African proverbs." Sometimes 700. Lookman acknowledges this directly because those products exist, and they sell.
But they are almost always curated in the same way: a handful of well-known proverbs, translated loosely, presented without context. Nobody tells you which country it came from, which language, what the situation actually calls for, or whether the translation has lost something in the crossing.
What's missing is the unglamorous part: infrastructure. A comprehensive, vetted, searchable body of material that treats the continent's oral wisdom as an archive rather than a souvenir.
And the scale is genuinely enormous. As the conversation points out, Nigeria alone speaks hundreds of languages; the Democratic Republic of Congo dozens more; Sudan, Kenya, Tanzania dozens each. Every one of those languages carries its own proverbs, its own humour, its own way of describing a difficult marriage or a foolish business partner.
That is not a gap in the market. That's a canyon.
The Idea, Stripped Down
Here is the proposition in plain terms; you collect African proverbs from across the continent into one place, give each one a consistent, useful structure, and sell access to it in several formats.
Not a single book. A product line, like paperback volumes, ebooks, a searchable website, a membership site, a podcast, a coaching arm. The proverb is the raw material. The formats are where the money is.
That distinction matters. Most people who love this idea would immediately think "book." Lookman thinks "asset."
You Don't Need to Be an Expert; You Need a Network
This is the part that stops most people before they start. I'm not a linguist. I don't speak twelve languages. Who am I to do this?
Lookman's answer is direct: you don't need to be the expert, you need to know how to reach them. There are professors of Yoruba, lecturers in Zulu studies, language teachers in secondary schools, and graduates who studied a language and then went into banking.
There are also, crucially, the speakers themselves. He mentions a YouTube channel where participants are only permitted to speak Yoruba, with no borrowed words, no English fallbacks, and which forces fluency into the open. Some of those contributors never finished formal education. Their Yoruba is impeccable.
Then there is the internet itself, which has quietly collapsed the logistical distance. Lookman's own Yoruba proverb project was produced with a co-author he has still never met in person. The whole collaboration happened remotely.
His own approach to the larger project, interestingly, is to delegate the whole operational burden: appoint a project manager, or put the work out to tender and let interested parties explain how they'd source it. That's a founder's move, not an academic's.
The Real Job Is Sourcing; And It's Harder Than It Sounds
The host pushes here, and it's the most valuable pressure in the conversation. If this is going to be credibly African, and not just Yoruba proverbs with a continental label, then where does the material actually come from?
Lookman's tapping points:
|
Source |
What it gives you |
|
University professors and lecturers |
Authority, depth, scholarly trust |
|
Secondary school language teachers |
Volume, practical usage |
|
Language graduates working elsewhere |
Underused expertise |
|
Social media and TV language programmes |
Living, spoken usage |
|
Existing published books |
A base to build on and improve |
|
The general public |
Corrections, additions, real-world testing |
The general public isn't just a source, rather it's quality control. Publish, invite scrutiny, and the crowd will find your errors. Lookman builds that into the model deliberately, alongside random professional vetting.
The Template Is the Product
Every entry follows the same fields like the proverb, its meaning, its translation, its place of origin, its language, and ideally an image.
If that seems fussy, consider what it enables. A consistent schema means that the collection can be searched by keyword, filtered by country, sorted by language, and grouped thematically. It also means it can be licensed, adapted, and rebuilt in other formats without re-editing.
For the digital version, he suggests a search function, like type "dog" and get every proverb that touches on dogs, plus a "popular reads" section, which doubles as a marketing device. People arrive for the famous ones and stay for the rest.
Compartmentalisation, he says, should key on language and country first. Search handles everything else.
Seven Revenue Streams, Not One
This is where the idea stops looking like a hobby. Lookman lists the monetisation paths without drama:
- Product sales across multiple platforms
- Affiliate marketing on related language and travel products
- Upsells — links inside the ebook, placed either every few pages or saved for the back matter
- Advertising and sponsorship
- Public speaking engagements
- Mentoring and coaching
- Merchandise — cautiously
On merchandise, he's more careful than most. He resists slapping proverbs on generic t-shirts, arguing that if you're promoting something African, the product should look African. Adire cloth, Ghanaian Adinkra symbols, Kente patterns, like those that carry meaning. A plain white tee shirt with a translated proverb does not.
His compromise for something like a mug: pick a popular proverb, print the original language, add the translation underneath, and include your website. Useful, respectful, and it markets itself.
Volumes, Not One Enormous Book
A thousand proverbs in a single paperback is unwieldy. Lookman publishes in volumes like one, two, three, and then releases a collected edition once there's an audience for it. It spreads the production cost, creates repeat buyers, and gives you a natural reason to keep talking about the project.
Digital formats then solve the update problem. A book needs a new edition; an ebook can be refreshed; a website or blog is simply edited. He also mentions drip-feeding proverbs through a membership site, like one or two a day, and for readers who want the material in small doses rather than a wall of text.
Marketing It Where the Audience Already Gathers
Beyond the obvious digital marketing and word of mouth, there's a calendar advantage Lookman flags which is the Black History Month. In the UK it falls in October; in the US, February. Either month gives a culturally rooted product a ready-made reason to be discussed.
He also suggests what he calls in-built marketing: put the links inside the product itself, and recruit others who sell to similar audiences to mention you in theirs. Passive distribution, baked into the artefact.
The Unglamorous Bits That Decide Whether It Works
Strip away the romance and this is an operations problem. Lookman doesn't skip it.
Budget with a safety margin. If you estimate the project costs £10,000, budget £15,000. Unplanned expenses are not a possibility, they're a certainty.
Write the business plan. Not for investor, but for yourself, so you can navigate and optimise rather than improvise.
Do the research first. Market, competitor, and product research, in that order.
Check the legal ground. Intellectual property, permissions, and rights around published material. Diligence now, or complications later.
Know the value chain. Entrepreneur, project manager, linguists, publishers, marketers, teachers. Each is a role you either fill, hire, or partner with.
Decide on registration. Standalone business or a division of an existing one, like someone has to make that call.
And on the corporate responsibility question, whether proceeds should return to African countries, his answer is refreshingly pragmatic. Yes, eventually, through charity partnerships or free courses. But first: build it, make it work, make money. Impact follows solvency, not the other way round.
The Honest Risk
The one thing the host says that Lookman doesn't fully rebut is the obvious one: this is a very big job.
Hundreds of languages, uneven documentation, translation disputes, and a continent where "African" as a category is more marketing convenience than lived reality. Getting it genuinely representative is the work of years, not months.
Which is precisely why nobody has done it well. The barrier isn't creative. It's stamina.
What This Idea Really Teaches
The proverb database isn't interesting because proverbs are charming. It's interesting because it's a masterclass in spotting a category that has been served superficially for decades and asking what a serious version would look like.
Every niche has a "500 popular" version of itself, like a thin, cheap, incomplete product that everyone settles for because nobody has bothered to build the real thing.
Lookman's contribution is method, not magic: find the thin product, define the schema that would make the complete one possible, source the experts rather than becoming one, and then sell it in seven formats instead of just one.
The wisdom was always there. It just never had a filing cabinet.
Ps. Artificial intelligence was leveraged in creating the text.
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