A121. Could That Celebration of Life Be an Entrepreneurial Opportunity? The Business Hiding in How We Remember
There is a moment at every celebration of life service that nobody plans for. The tributes have been read. A colleague has told a story the family had never heard. A neighbour mentions a kindness done quietly, years ago, that nobody in the room knew about.
For about ninety seconds, the person being remembered becomes more complete than they ever were in life; and then the service ends, the plates are cleared, and all of it goes home in people's heads and quietly evaporates.
That gap is where an unusual business idea lives. Not a morbid one, and not a cynical one, but a genuinely interesting one; what if those stories were captured, shaped, and shared with the people who need them?
This is the idea Jack Lookman puts forward in the Curated Business Idea series, in conversation with host Juwon Ogungbe. It is a business proposal, and like most good proposals it is really a question about values wearing a spreadsheet.
Here is what the idea actually is, how the model works, and the uncomfortable problem at its centre that any honest entrepreneur has to face before they start.
The idea, in one sentence
Turn celebration of life ceremonies into inspirational content like in multiple formats, multiple languages and multiple platforms, and then monetise that content.
That is the whole pitch. Everything else is execution. But the reason it is worth taking seriously is not the content. It is where the content comes from.
Why these stories are scarce, and scarcity is the business
Most inspirational content on the internet is abundant to the point of worthlessness. Quotes, threads, morning routines, lessons from billionaires. You can find a thousand versions of the same advice before lunch, which is precisely why none of it changes anybody's behaviour.
The stories told at a celebration of life are different in one crucial way because they are usually confined to the room. In the Nigerian and wider Christian tradition that Jack points to, a family gathers after a death not to dwell on the loss but to celebrate the life, and in doing so they say things about the person that were never public. What they did. How they gave, either in cash or in kind. What they endured. Who they quietly helped.
That material does not exist anywhere else. It is not searchable, it is not indexed, and it is not available to the teenager scrolling at midnight looking for a reason to keep going.
Jack's argument is disarmingly simple: a young person facing difficulty who reads a book or a website containing stories of ordinary people who lived well, might be moved to live better. Adults too, who are reading about peers or elders who have passed, can provoke the thought that there is more to do with the time remaining.
Scarcity plus genuine usefulness is the combination every content business is chasing. This idea has both, which is rare.
What the model looks like in practice
Jack lays out a structure that will be familiar to anyone who has built a content business, and applied to an unfamiliar subject.
Formats are text, audio and video. Platforms are paperbacks, ebooks, audiobooks, blogs and social media. The recommended route is to start with text and repurpose outward like text to audio, text to video, or to start on one platform such as a blog or an ebook and redistribute across others.
This is the standard repurposing ladder, and it matters more here than just the usual, because the raw material is emotionally heavy. You do not want to be improvising format and tone at the same time.
Language strategy is where the model gets interesting. Start in English, then the language of your actual market, then expand. The advice is not to guess: check where your audience already comes from.
If your blog statistics show most readers who are arriving from France, consider a French edition. Let the data choose the translation budget, rather than your ambitions.
Niche selection follows the same discipline. Jack segments by the age of the person that is being remembered, like older people, younger people, adults, diaspora families, or by any other demographic grouping.
And he suggests the model can be lifted entirely onto adjacent categories. His example is university graduates, who already flood LinkedIn with detailed accounts of what they went through, what they learned, and who they became. Same structure, different material, different audience.
That last point is the most commercially useful sentence in the whole episode. The mechanics here are not about death. They are about capturing a specific person's journey and shaping it for someone who needs it.
Grief is one market for that. Graduation is another. Retirement is a third. Anyone who has just finished something difficult and can articulate it, is a potential subject.
The permission problem, which is the heart of it
Here is where the idea stops being a content strategy and becomes a genuine business question, and it is the part the host presses hardest on.
The obvious first move is collaboration with the family. Jack says this may be necessary, and that if the model requires the family's consent, written permission should certainly be obtained, with terms agreed and a profit-sharing formula settled with all parties involved.
He also stresses transparency as a business principle, not just a legal one; like if you tell a family what you will deliver, deliver it, because transparency is what builds the trust the whole model depends on.
Then he offers the alternative. Rather than seeking consent, you could take a different route - content you have seen online, reworked into a fictional form.
In that case, he suggests, you may not need the family's permission, because what you have produced is a literary work inspired by that life or journey rather than a reproduction of it. He calls fiction the preferred option for avoiding complications, disputes and potential legal problems.
This is careful thinking, and it is also the place where a reader should slow down. The distinction between reporting a life and writing fiction that is inspired by a life is real, but it is not a magic wand.
A thinly fictionalised portrait of a recognisable person can still cause harm, and can still attract a complaint, particularly where living relatives are identifiable or where the person was publicly known.
Anyone building this business should treat the fiction route as a risk-reduction strategy to be checked with a lawyer, not a loophole to be relied upon.
Jack makes a related and more subtle point about anonymity. Even when working with a family's consent, anonymising the subject may be the right call. Families may not want it known that they are earning from the content, a completely reasonable position that a business owner should anticipate rather than resist.
And if the person was a controversial figure, they would most likely prefer not to be identified at all. Both observations suggest the same design decision: build the format so that anonymisation is easy, because some of your best stories will require it.
The money
The monetisation plan is a list rather than a strategy, which is honest for an early-stage idea: product sales, upsells, affiliate marketing, sponsors, advertising, and links. Marketing is digital plus word of mouth, and the research and development is the ordinary work of studying market, competitors and product.
Two of those deserve more weight than the rest. Product sales are the backbone, because books and ebooks are the natural container for a life story and they carry a price that reflects effort.
Sponsors are the most underrated, because a collection of inspirational life stories has an obvious institutional buyer like memorial services, insurers, community organisations, faith groups; who would rather be associated with it than advertise alongside it.
Affiliate and advertising revenue, by contrast, will be thin unless the audience is large. Early on, they are a distraction from the thing that actually earns: a well-made book, or a blog with a genuine readership, that is sold directly.
What it takes to start
Almost nothing, which is why the idea is credible. Jack's requirements are a digital device, an internet connection, a power source, and the skills to run the business: IT, communication, interpersonal and entrepreneurial.
No office. Start from home, expand later if it thrives. No team at the start - begin alone, build as you progress. Register properly and be compliant, and consider operating as a sole trader initially, either as your own project or as part of an existing business. Treat it as a side hustle first, and convert it into a full-time business only if it becomes profitable.
That sequence is the most sensible thing in the episode, and it is the opposite of how business ideas are usually sold online. Side hustle first, team later, premises never unless forced. It costs almost nothing to test and almost everything to over-build.
The threats, named honestly
Jack names two risks: conflict, and sometimes greed - because where money is involved, disputes and greed follow. He is right, and the reason is structural rather than personal.
The moment a family story becomes a product, everyone involved is in a relationship that did not exist before: the family, the subject's friends, the business, and any collaborator who introduced the story.
Three protections are worth building in from day one. Put the profit-sharing formula in writing before any content is published, not after it earns. Agree in advance who has final editorial control, because the first disagreement will be about tone, not money.
And keep a record of what was consented to what was included, what was excluded, and when the family approved it. Most disputes in this space will be disputes about a conversation nobody wrote down.
The question worth asking before you start
The idea has one tension that no business plan resolves. It takes material generated by grief and converts it into a product. Jack's answer is that the project focuses deliberately on the positive, like taking the good from a celebration of life and publishing it to a wider world.
That is a fair answer, and it is also a choice about what gets left out, because a celebration of life is by design a partial account. As the host observes, a family only ever sees one side of a person, the way you see one face of a statue until you walk around it.
A business built on inspirational partial accounts is not dishonest. It is a genre, and genres have conventions. But anyone running it should be clear-eyed that they are curating, not documenting - and that the people whose lives are being curated have relatives who will read the result.
One more thing worth saying plainly: this idea will not suit everybody, and the people it will not suit are the ones who see an audience before they see a person.
If your first instinct on hearing a family story is to ask how it converts, you will produce content that reads exactly that way, and readers can tell. The entrepreneurs who make this work are the ones who would collect the stories for free, and happen to have found a way to be paid for it.
The thirty-day test
If the idea appeals, do not write a business plan first. Do this instead. Collect three stories, with permission and in writing. Produce one of them properly - a short book chapter, or a single long blog post.
Publish it in one language, on one platform. Then watch three numbers: how many people finish reading it, how many share it unprompted, and whether anybody asks where they can find more.
That last number is the whole business. Affection for an idea is cheap. A stranger asking for a second story is a market.
The thing that makes it worth doing
Most business ideas solve a small inconvenience for a customer who barely notices. This one is different. It addresses something that happens at every funeral and is almost never captured like the ninety seconds when a room full of people assembles a more complete picture of a person than any single one of them held alone.
Whether that should become a product is a question each entrepreneur has to answer for themselves. But the raw material is real, scarce and worth preserving.
If you can build something that preserves it honestly, pays the people whose lives it contains, and puts it in front of somebody who needed to read it, you will have built something better than most businesses; and considerably more useful than most content.
