People often ask me how I juggle being a stand-up comedian, a celebrity chef, and a tech entrepreneur without losing my mind. The secret isn’t multitasking; it’s the Ecosystem. I don’t just tell jokes to hear people laugh—I tell jokes to map out markets. My business strategy follows a very specific three-phase evolution: Curate, Collaborate, and Create. This is how I’ve turned punchlines into a diversified portfolio of brands.
Phase 1: Curation
In this phase, I am a dedicated student of the subject. I spend my time measuring the total addressable market and figuring out exactly where the value chain is most efficient. You will see me setting up Facebook pages, deploying massive amounts of content, and obsessing over the analytics gathered. In the world of comedy, this is the “open mic” phase or writing jokes through social media status updates. This process achieves a number of results: it grows an audience, allows me to filter between casual fans and true customers, and ensures that brands begin to take note of the movement.
The revenue streams that come from this phase are usually consultancies, but some interesting earnings happen along the way. For example, I never expected that comedy would lead to me being paid to write opening lines for CEOs at their major functions. Interestingly, it was rarely the CEOs who called me; it was usually the interns or school leavers who had seen me perform for free at their schools or universities years prior. This is a vital lesson in the ecosystem because those early talks and free gigs eventually turned into the gatekeepers responsible for my corporate and university bookings.
Phase 2: Collaboration
The collaboration phase is the high-capital phase of my journey. Because I often do not have the liquid capital to invest heavily in a brand-new project, I find strategic collaborations to test out my theories while getting paid at the same time. In my comedy career, this resulted in me traveling to different countries to see how the markets would react to my other projects. I would often request that my hosts let me stay longer in a city so I could immerse myself in the local culture and learn about travel, cooking, tourism, stock markets, and media landscapes. I used the microphone as a passport to gain the high-level intelligence needed for my future ventures.
Phase 3: Creation
The final stage, which usually comes much later down the line, is the creation of my own standalone products. Due to the intense research and development conducted during the curation and collaborative phases, I can finally do my own thing with a high degree of certainty. This is actually a very rare phase in the ecosystem. In my comedy career, I built my name by performing at other people’s comedy nights and working with established promoters, growing my brand using their existing media networks. You hardly ever saw me go to Australia or the USA to produce a “Carl Joshua Ncube” show independently, even though I performed in those countries extensively. I learned early on that doing your own show is often a poor financial move, as the overhead costs would frequently hammer the profit until it was less than my standard performance fee.
When getting into business, it is vital to understand the specific stage you are at or to fragment your biggest idea into manageable smaller business units that can stand alone as their own brand while feeding into the “Big Idea.” Most people fail because they don’t realize that an idea is not a concept note, which is not a proof of concept, which is not a product feature, which is not a business model, which is not a brand, which is not a product, which is not a company, which is not a platform, which is not a cause, and it certainly is not an ecosystem.
You must understand that each of these is a distinct stage demanding its own unique execution, goal setting, and measurement. In my case, I categorize my projects strictly to manage expectations and resources: some are product features that I license, like my signature recipes; others are companies like Rural BnB; some are products like YUMI; and others are simply proofs of concept, such as Go Warriors Fans. Respect the stage, and the ecosystem will respect you.
