Case Study: 2025 → Present

Yorùbá
Deck

I conceived, built, and operate a Yorùbá language learning platform end to end. Product, technology, content, growth, and a remote team in Nigeria. Solo founder.

200+Monthly visitors

1App live on App Store

2Apps in development

Yorùbá Deck app showing the word bá…wí with morphological structure

I couldn't find a tool that treated Yorùbá with the depth it deserves. So I built one: the database, the app, the content pipeline, and the audience.Timilehin Adenekan, Creator of Yorùbá Deck

01: The Problem

A living language
with no digital infrastructure.

Diacritics are meaning

Yorùbá is tonal. A misplaced mark changes a word entirely. No existing tool handled this with integrity. I engineered custom logic to honour diacritic accuracy at every touchpoint.

No modern vocabulary resource

There was no audio-first Yorùbá dictionary with consistent pronunciation. I built one from scratch: database architecture, recording sessions, and a team in Nigeria to produce the content.

No community to grow into

Without an existing audience, I had to build one. I chose TikTok as the primary growth channel, leveraging the dictionary database as raw material for a social content pipeline.

Pre-launch products need pre-launch audiences

Rather than launch into silence, I built a waitlist strategy to capture and nurture learners before the main product launch, treating email subscribers as early adopters to validate demand.

02: The Growth Loop

From database to audience
to waitlist.

Every piece of content comes from the dictionary database. Content drives social traffic. Social traffic hits a tracked website. The website captures emails. Those subscribers become the launch audience. It is a closed loop, and every stage is instrumented.

Source

Yorùbá dictionary database

Words, audio, tonal marks. Custom PostgreSQL schema built and populated by the Nigeria team.

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Distribute

TikTok & social content

Database powers Word of the Day, proverbs, and vocabulary content. AI pipeline schedules and publishes.

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Capture

yorubadeck.com

Mobile-first landing page with event tracking on every interaction: audio plays, app downloads, shares.

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Convert

Waitlist sign-up

A/B tested form design drove a strong conversion uplift within 2 weeks. Email addresses captured for nurture.

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Nurture

Email audience

Subscribers are nurtured pre-launch. Intent validated before product investment scales.

03: Content & Social

TikTok as a growth engine,
not just a presence.

I built a content operation around the dictionary database, using it as raw material for a consistent TikTok presence. The Nigeria-based team produces culturally authentic, linguistically accurate content at scale, whilst an agentic AI pipeline handles QA, scheduling, and multi-platform publishing.

TikTok@yorubadeck

Primary growth channel. Word of the Day, proverbs, pronunciation guides. Each piece of content drives traffic back to the website and the waitlist.

Multi-platform pipeline

The same content is repurposed and distributed across platforms using an AI workflow built on OpenClaw, reducing production overhead whilst maintaining quality standards.

NigeriaProduction team base

AIPowered QA pipeline

04: The Team

Remote, international,
built from scratch.

I recruited and manage a Nigeria-based production team to ensure the content is both linguistically accurate and culturally grounded. Managing a remote international team, across different time zones, production rhythms, and quality standards, is a distinct operational skill I built from the ground up.

Founder & Product Lead

Timilehin Adenekan

Product strategy, platform engineering, growth, analytics, and overall vision. Every product decision goes through one person, which means radical accountability for outcomes.

Content Creator, Nigeria

Video & social production

Produces culturally authentic TikTok content from the dictionary database. Managed remotely with a clear brief and quality framework built by the founder.

Language Specialist, Nigeria

Linguistic quality assurance

Validates tonal accuracy, diacritic correctness, and pronunciation across the dictionary and all published content. The integrity of the product depends on this role.

05: Analytics & Instrumentation

Nothing ships
without tracking.

I implemented a dual-layer analytics system: GA4 with a custom event taxonomy, and Supabase-first analytics for product-specific behaviour. Every meaningful user action on yorubadeck.com fires a tracked event.

Audio

Word of the Day listens

Every audio play tracked. Tells me which words generate most engagement and which content formats hold attention.

Sharing

Audio shares

Share events reveal viral potential: which words and proverbs people are motivated to pass on.

Downloads

App download clicks

Tracks intent to install the iOS app. Funnel visibility from web traffic to App Store.

Conversion

Waitlist sign-ups

The core conversion metric. A/B tested form variants with uplifts tracked in real time across Supabase and GA4.

Engagement

Homepage interactions

SPA pageviews, scroll depth, feature interaction. Supabase first-party analytics reduce reliance on third-party tracking.

Retention

Return visit patterns

Tracks which content types bring users back. Feeds directly into content prioritisation for the Nigeria team.

Every product decision, from what content to produce to what features to build to what copy to test, is grounded in real user behaviour data, not assumption.

06: Technology

Built end-to-end.
No agency. No co-founder.

Platform

Web app & Word Master game

Full-stack application with real-time sync, custom Yorùbá keyboard, and a vocabulary game with diacritic-accurate game logic.

Next.js 14ReactTypeScriptTailwind

Mobile

iOS keyboard app (live) + iOS & Android apps in development

Custom system keyboard live on the Apple App Store, enabling diacritic-accurate Yorùbá typing on any iPhone. A second iOS app and an Android app are currently in development.

iOSApp StoreAndroid

Database

Yorùbá dictionary DB

Custom schema for the dictionary, audio recordings, game data, and user analytics. Powers both the product and the content pipeline.

PostgreSQLSupabaseSQL

AI & Automation

Agentic content pipeline

AI-powered workflow for QA, scheduling, and multi-platform publishing. Built on OpenClaw and Claude API.

OpenClawClaude APIAgentic AI

Auth & Security

Identity & access

NextAuth.js v5, Google OAuth, JWT tokens, encrypted sessions. Enterprise-grade for a consumer product.

NextAuth v5OAuthJWT

DevOps

CI/CD & testing

GitHub Actions + Vercel deployment. Jest, Playwright, and axe-core for unit, E2E, and accessibility testing.

GitHub ActionsVercelPlaywright

iOS Keyboard App

Live on the App Store.
Built for typing Yorùbá.

The Yorùbá Deck keyboard app guides users through setup, supports custom themes and settings, and includes a full character set with tonal marks and predictive text.

1 / 7Tap image to enlarge

07: Results

Measured. Not claimed.

200+Monthly visitors

Consistent organic baseline driven by social content and mobile-first SEO.

1 liveApp on App Store

Yorùbá Deck Keyboard live on iOS. One iOS app and one Android app currently in development.

08: What This Proves

Skills that transfer
to any organisation.

Product Management

Full lifecycle ownership with data-led iteration

Roadmap, backlog, launch, post-release optimisation.

Growth & Marketing

Built a top-of-funnel from zero

TikTok strategy, content as a product feature, waitlist CRO, event tracking. I am growing an audience and allowing the waitlist to be well populated before launching the product.

AI & Automation

Agentic workflows in production

I built and operate AI pipelines using Claude and OpenClaw that run a real content business.

Team Leadership

Remote international team management

Recruited, onboarded, and manage a Nigeria-based team across time zones. Set quality standards, managed briefs, and maintained output at scale.

Analytics

End-to-end instrumentation and insight

Google Analytics 4, website events captured in Supabase, A/B testing. I know where users come from, what they do, and what makes them stay.

Applied Learning Design

Pedagogy built for an underserved language

I designed the learning system, not just the software. Gamification, audio-first content, spaced repetition for a tonal language with no existing digital curriculum.

Want to talk?

Available for product, platform, and EdTech roles, particularly where culture, technology, and learning intersect.

Visit Yorùbá Deck TikTok @yorubadeck LinkedIn Email me

YorùbáDeck

A living languagewith no digital infrastructure.