Meet the Queer Creative Who Bet on Himself and Hit His First Million
- Tracy-Allen Ezechukwu
- Jul 8
- 6 min read
Kunle is a product marketer, agency founder, and musician who’s navigating Lagos on his own terms. For this episode of Not Another Success Story, he talks about growing up in a family with deep cultural roots, the cost of choosing himself anyway, and what it actually felt like to hit his first million with no support.
What do you do for a living, and how would you explain it to your grandmother in one sentence?
I help businesses make money and save money. That's the simplest it can get. My grandmother would still probably not understand because she's from a different world entirely. Hahaha.
She dealt in fish and took it to countries like Gabon. The funny thing is that she speaks French and her local language really well, but she struggles with English. So if I say I work in product marketing to her, I've already lost her.
But yeah, I handle the operations of business and support them with the marketing efforts they need to put the product out there.
That’s interesting. What did you think you'd be when you were 10, and how far off did you land?
Honestly, I didn't have anything in mind. I remember my dad asking me once when I was eight and I said I wanted to be a policeman. I'm so glad that never happened. But, over the years, it kept changing. In fact, up until when I was 22, I still wasn't sure.
I was just brilliant and everybody had opinions. "Oh, you should do art. You'd be great at this." The only constant through all of those years was music. If everything else failed, I thought “at least I'd be doing music”. And I mean, I still do music on the side, so I'm not too far off. The policeman part, very far off and very grateful.
What is something you're genuinely proud of that you've probably never been able to brag about?
The weight of choosing my peace. People don't get it. What I'm proud of is the growth and the rebellion I went through, especially because of the background I come from. My family has cultural history. Royalty on both sides. And with that comes a very specific wall of expectation about who you're supposed to be and who you're supposed to be with. I was the smart one, so it only made matters worse. Everyone decided what I was going to do before I had the chance to figure it out myself.
Growing up I was very timid. But I got to a point where I started asking what can I do with my life that'll also make me genuinely happy? Because everything they were suggesting, I could do it. I just didn't want to. So I started making decisions without telling them. I'd do things and they'd find out after and I would damn the consequences. What that meant, practically, was that I was cutting off access to their money. There was so much I could've had easily if I'd just done things their way. Rebelling meant I was on my own.
So, I turned to writing. Content writing, ghostwriting, marketing, any type of writing because if I was going to blatantly rebel, I needed to take care of myself. I graduated second class upper and called my dad. He said it wouldn't have mattered if it was first class. This wasn't the course I should have been doing. When I want to become serious with my life, I should come back and we'd sort it out. After that call, I switched off my phone. When I turned it back on, come and see missed calls, messages everywhere. He blocked me for a month or two. And I just said, I'm going to do my own thing.
I started my agency two years ago. Got an investor and hit our first million in profits in four months. I had my first headline concert last year. Even though my nuclear family didn't make it, friends came, people invited people, and I sold a good amount of tickets. I was sad, but I was also like “I did this. I actually did this”. I can't go into those rooms and explain what any of it cost me. But I know.
What would you say were the heaviest prices your identity cost you?
A lot of friendships. And a really bad episode with my family. My dad caught me with gay p**n and it was such a nasty fight. And because my family is religious, a lot of things came to the surface and we had to sit with it. Or at least I did. I don't think they were ready for those conversations. They treated it like an episode that came and went. But for me, it cracked something open.
After that, I detached and told myself these people don't matter in the grand scheme of things. Everything I was doing with my identity after that was, honestly, partly to spite them. How could this be your response? How could you call me those names when I'd barely even started exploring?
So it cost me years with my family. Years of bitterness and friction and resentment on both sides.
And friendships… There were people I really liked, not sexually, just liked, I'm very expressive and with most of my friends being guys, it came across as something it wasn't. I'd make excuses for them, move on, live in my own world. Then later I'd hear that someone had pulled away because of what they assumed about me. I was in my skinny jeans era, figuring out what I liked and not everybody was comfortable with that.
But what it gave me, and I mean this, is the audacity I have now. There are still parts of me that look for validation, but everybody knows that if Kunle says he's going to do something, he's going to do it. Even if it's a bad idea. Even if it's rubbish. Just because I said I would, I will. In a country this homophobic, that kind of freedom is not small. It came at a price. But I have it.
There's an assumption that queerness is always about sex and who you're sleeping with. But being straight comes with a whole implied life: family, community, belonging. Queerness deserves that same neutral fullness.
Yes. Exactly that.
Hmm. So, what does success look like for you right now?
More money!!!! I'm tired of Nigerian marketing rates. I want a foreign gig with bigger opportunities and a different scale. That's one thing.
The other is a relationship. I had a really good one. We knew each other for about two years, were together for a short time, but the distance made it impossible. I want that kind of thing again because the Lagos scene — and I say this as someone who is part of it — is a lot. Drugs, parties, moving around. None of that is inherently bad, but it's not sustainable. It cannot be all there is to queer people.
I think about this a lot. We need to come to a place where our identities are anchored in solid relationships (romantic, friendship, whatever form they take), real ones. Ones that elevate you and not just take. We can party, explore, and experiment. But we need to be building something. Infrastructure.
That's what EmpowerQ is doing, actually. Building infrastructure. And what I'm trying to do with my agency and my music is the same thing — build something that lasts, create jobs, and support the people around me.
My friends are still hustling. A lot of us are. And wherever I see an opening, I try to pull someone through with me. That's what I need money for. I need money for the music I want to make, the people I want to pay properly, and the things I want to build.
Do I think I made the right decision? Some mornings I wake up and I genuinely don't know. The hard road is still hard. But I'm happy I built it myself. For now, that's enough.
*All names have been changed and the story has been shared with consent.
Success looks different when the world wasn't built with queer people in mind. Not Another Success Story is EmpowerQ's interview series documenting the real, unpolished career journeys of queer professionals in Nigeria.
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